This is personal, dear reader. Your columnist loves newspapers and newspapering. Always have. Always will. Having dreamed as a child of someday becoming a newspaperman, having served my reportorial apprenticeship with newspapers and wire services — before wandering into first radio and then television — getting a regular, bylined newspaper column was an honor and a joy.

Now, more than 500 weekly columns later, the time has come to say goodbye to it. Reluctantly, and with no small amount of ambivalence, it has to be done. A full load, and then some, of investigative work and international reporting for television no longer leaves enough time to do that and continue to meet the column deadline with anything near the respect for the craft that it deserves.

So it’s farewell, at least for a while. My hope is that you will continue to — or come to — share my belief that quality newspapers are vital to our country, especially during this crucial time. They are a key factor in our nation’s system of checks and balances on power; they chronicle our shared experiences that keep us “one nation, under God, indivisible,” with unity of purpose as a constitutional republic committed to “liberty and justice for all.”

A free and independent — fiercely independent when necessary — press is the red, beating heart of freedom and democracy as we and our forebears have known it. Quality journalism of integrity, dedicated to the public interest, is an essential part of who and what we are as people and as a nation: a whole new thing in history, an epical experiment with the belief that a multiracial, multiethnic, multireligious country populated mostly by immigrants can survive and thrive with more freedom than any people has ever had in the history of humankind.

Yes, we now have many other sources for news. We are no longer confined to the newspapers-and-magazines model, and haven’t been for a long while. The “press” now includes radio, television and the Internet. At their best, their news efforts can be and often are valuable contributors to the traditional role as watchdogs, honest brokers of information and chroniclers of history — or at least a first draft of history.

But newspapers, the good ones, remain custodians of what Harvard professor Alex Jones calls “the iron core” of real, straight news reporting. Radio, television and the Internet rely heavily on the original reporting done by newspapers; the on-the-beat, make-telephone-calls, wear-out-shoe-leather, deep-digging reporting that is so essential to the mission of American journalism.

Perhaps that will change. There are a lot of people who believe the Internet will develop into a full replacement for newspapers in this vital role. Well, maybe, maybe not. But right now good newspapers form the iron core. Until and unless a complete successor develops, they are it. And the rest of journalism feeds off them.

This makes the rapid decline of newspapers we are experiencing all the more troubling. Increasing numbers of newspapers have been disappearing. Along with them, tens of thousands of dedicated, experienced reporters are out of jobs. The iron core is shrinking, alarmingly so. This is not simply a matter of concern to those of us in journalism; it should be of concern to every thinking American. This is about the country, and what kind of country we are to become.

What needs to be done and what can be done about this crisis in America journalism, especially regarding newspapers, are open questions. But they are questions that need to be answered, and quickly. “New think” and new business models are necessary to fill the increasing void while longer-term developments get spawned and nourished.

Although it’s hard to be optimistic in the midst of what’s happening now, your reporter is an optimist by nature and experience. We’re Americans. We’ll figure a way.

In the meantime, so long for a while.