This morning I read what will undoubtedly be one of the last issues of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a daily paper that has been published here in the Great Northwest for nearly 150 years. Over the past few months, the paper has gotten smaller; the news more aggregated and less local; the great columnists have left.

We’ll still have the Seattle Times here, and I hope that the end of one paper will mean the surviving one — which always had a larger readership and is locally and family owned, rather than owned by a big corporation — gets a bump in readership and revenue that will allow for more journalism with local bylines and fewer stories taken from other sources. But I have my doubts. It, too, has had sections merged and staff laid off, like just about every other major daily paper in the country.

Last week, President Obama was at the graduation ceremony of a couple dozen police cadets in Ohio whose employment was due entirely to stimulus money. It got me thinking. How much does it cost to run a newspaper? How much are the 200 jobs at the P-I worth? Isn’t there any stimulus money for them? Those jobs — more than half of which are journalists — serve an important purpose in the community. They have, over the years, held the feet of politicians, the police, and even the Boy Scouts to the fire. They have been responsible for changing laws and attitudes. What’s that worth to the citizens of Seattle?

I suppose I could subscribe to the New York Times for international news, or do as my son does and read bbc.com. But where will good local journalism come from? The little weekly paper that covers Kirkland has more in it that is of use to me than the P-I has of late. I’ll read that. But it doesn’t begin tell me everything I need to know about local schools, road construction, pending legislation and area politics. And it certainly won’t have the investigative component (or the really great comics) that were the reason I chose the PI over the Times in the first place.

Citizen journalism and blogs are great. But there is a place for trained journalists in this world. I fear, though, that we haven’t sold that notion very well, and by the time others realize it, it will be too late.