I’ll take my ink-stained hands to the grave.

Newspaper professionals say young journalists such as myself will redefine journalism, that our technology-attuned minds will turn the old newspaper business model on its head and take our craft worldwide on the Web.

Many of us rookie reporters are having trouble adjusting to the Internet and online journalism, having only recently fallen in love – deeply, in love – with traditional print journalism.

And, yes, we love the newsprint ink on our hands.

But are those days of pencil-and-pad journalism over? Have we seen the end of reporting in the trenches, face down in a rice paddy in Bangladesh or other far-off and exotic places?

The number of American newspaper foreign correspondents dropped 30 percent between 2002 and 2006.

CBS, which once had 24 foreign bureaus, now has six. The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Baltimore Sun and The Boston Globe recently closed their last foreign bureaus.

Maybe you don’t care. As 85 percent of Americans told one pollster, perhaps you don’t care for foreign news.

But do you care what happens in Washington, as Obama’s administration begins dealing with our wars abroad and our economic problem at home?

In 2000, Cox Newspapers, publisher of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and other papers, had 30 reporters in Washington to cover the new Bush administration.

Come April, nine years later, the media giant will close its Washington Bureau.

Will local politicians fall prey to corruption if they don’t risk exposure in the morning paper?

Studies show the lower the circulation of daily newspapers in a state, the higher the possibility of political corruption, according to The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization.

But newspapers don’t just expose wrongdoing and keep politicians on their toes. They bring readers – and the community – together in a daily dialogue. They throw issues to the masses like bones to hungry dogs. The issues that stick are the ones they pursue and the questions they ask are the ones we would, too.

Newspapers give us identities in our communities. They make us think. They encourage us to learn. They urge us to question. They give us a voice. And they help our voices inspire action.

But with the rise of the Internet, our eyes have averted from the papers and we feign for bite-size snippets of knowledge taken from here, from there, from anywhere.

We pretend to think. Pretend to learn. Forget to question. And then give voice to our blogs, so seldom to be heard.

And journalists – veterans and panicked rookies alike – are running after you, our readers, begging you to come back to us, to fight for our survival.

Long live the print newspaper, I say. Long live the good fight, the one for democracy, accountability, knowledge and community. Long live the morning “kerplunk” on my driveway. And all hail the newspaper editors, falling to their knees in desperation, just trying to help us know.

For God’s sake, go out and buy a paper today.

- Hayley Peterson is the associate news editor for The Red & Black.