When I consider the demise of Alabama’s three major newspapers, I remember a story that’s now legendary among my relatives.

About 35 years ago, certain family members were at the funeral of an elderly man. When the presiding minister segued from prayers and Scripture readings to personal remembrances of the deceased, various friends and relatives made their way to the lectern to say kind things about the dearly departed. Very kind things. So kind, in fact, that after several people had spoken, my mother-in-law elbowed her son (my husband) and whispered, “I think we’re at the wrong funeral. They can’t be talking about” so-and-so.

Fast-forward to today and the news that Alabama recently bid farewell to the newspapers in Mobile, Birmingham and Huntsville. Thirteen years after the owners reduced publication of them to three days a week (from seven), they pulled the plug and said they will focus on their news website, al.com (to which I contribute a weekly opinion column).

If it were unique, this would have been a stunning development. Fifty years ago, who could have imagined that three medium-sized cities would have no daily newspapers? Indeed, just 30 years ago, many cities like these still had not one but two daily papers.

Times change, though, and most people understand that the majority of Americans now get their news from the internet. There’s a slew of statistics that take a deep dive into the demographics behind the switch, but here’s one stat from the U.S. Census Bureau that really stands out: Between 2002 and 2020, newspaper publishers’ revenue dropped by 52 percent.

Even I — a person whose idea of purgatory is a 24/7 high school algebra class — can do the math on that.

Somewhere in all that financial turmoil, newspaper owners began to see the handwriting on the wall, some faster than others. Their coping strategies ranged from reducing the number of publication days to closing bureaus, slashing staffs, selling their presses, rebranding and refocusing their news efforts — almost anything that might work, including killing publications entirely.

Why should you care? News is news, isn’t it, regardless of where it appears? Why should I care? After all, I haven’t worked at a newspaper since the Mobile paper eliminated my job — along with dozens of others — in 2012.

Broadly, I believe we all should be concerned about the demise of newspapers because they have played such a prominent role in developing and protecting our democracy. Time and again, large and small papers across the country have exposed corruption, explained complicated events, helped educate children, and amused and entertained their readers. And now the internet is crushing them.

Personally, I care because I made my living in newspapers, beginning at the Palestine Herald-Press in east Texas when I was 21 years old and right out of college. At my next job, in Louisiana, I met my future husband. That job was followed by a stint at a weekly newspaper in south Alabama and, finally, by 28 years at the newspaper in Mobile. Over those years, I made friends and enemies, had successes and failures, and overall enjoyed my job.

It has been intriguing to observe reactions to the closure of the three Alabama papers. Some readers’ and former employees’ grief is very deep. Mine is less acute, seeing as how I’d been away from the Mobile paper for a decade.

In 2012, I told myself that I was leaving at just the right time — that I was burning out (I was), that when the time came I’d be free to help care for grandchildren (I am), that I was weary of overseeing the paper’s ultra-conservative editorial stance (I was), and that I wanted to try something different (which turned out to be five years in public relations).

These days I also tell myself that newspapers aren’t and never were perfect, much less the only platform that can effectively deliver news; and I recall that throughout history, change has been and always will be a constant. I tell myself that something else — websites, podcasts, social media or maybe a platform that hasn’t been developed yet — will fill the void.

I also smile as former colleagues reminisce about their days at the Alabama newspapers, almost as though all those years and all our stories and editorials were uniformly wonderful. They weren’t, of course, but we had many great times and produced many great papers.

In a church 35 years ago, when my mother-in-law and her son heard what a stellar person the deceased was, they jokingly wondered whether they were at the right funeral.

Now that I’m saying goodbye to not just a group of newspapers but also to an entire era, a very small part of me jokingly wonders the same thing. But the larger and wiser part of me knows the truth, and the truth is this: that the death of print journalism is a terrible and painful thing to watch, and that even though something or some things surely will replace newspapers, it’s important that we never forget their profound role in shaping us and the world in which we live.

And that’s no joke.

Frances Coleman is a former editorial page editor of the Mobile Press-Register. Email her at [email protected] and “like” her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/prfrances.