Today marks the last day that The Mid-Ocean News will be published, at least for the foreseeable future.

A good deal has been written, some accurate and some less so, about the causes of its demise, and this is not the place or the time to go into that.

Suffice to say, the current recession, the most severe since the Great Depression, coupled with changes in the news market brought about by the advent of the Internet took their toll on the 98-year-old newspaper. These problems are not exclusive to Bermuda, but are affecting the newspaper industry in much of the world.

The editor of another newspaper in the US which recently went out of business said that newspapers don't close, they die. And without glorifying this business too much, newspapers are indeed living and evolving things, whose personality should literally breathe through its pages to the reader.

But the purpose today, to steal from Shakespeare's Marc Antony, is not to bury The Mid-Ocean News, but to praise it.

No matter how many times it was stated, many people refused to believe that The Mid-Ocean and The Royal Gazette were autonomous newspapers, despite their shared ownership.

But that was the truth, and over the years, the editorial staffs of the two newspapers competed hard for stories and news.

Despite its smaller staff and the disadvantage of only coming out once a week, the Mid-Ocean News earned more than its fair share of scoops, including the Bermuda Housing Corporation scandal which rocked the Island in the early 2000s.

No Editor likes to feel that his staff is having to follow a story, but that was certainly the case then.

Over the years, the Mid-Ocean employed a string of first class editors and journalists who were adept at digging up stories that were missed or ignored by the daily media, who tend to get tied up in the daily round of press conferences, court cases, parliamentary coverage and the like.

In that sense, both the Mid-Ocean and the Bermuda Sun have always had to go their own ways to find slightly more offbeat news, often with a strong human interest angle. In doing so, uncomfortable truths about the state of Bermuda can often be revealed.

One thing that perhaps set the Mid-Ocean apart was its sheer fearlessness. There were times when it may have gone too far, but too many journalists today, in the world and in Bermuda, operate in fear of giving offence, or worse, see their jobs as cutting and pasting press releases from e-mails to stories, and consider that to be a day's work.

It may well be work, but it's not journalism. Journalism means asking the questions that others want to know the answers to but are afraid to ask.

It means seeking the truth, no matter how uncomfortable the truth may be.

And it means encouraging debate and discussion from different points of view, no matter whether the reporter or editor personally agrees with them.

The Mid-Ocean did all of that and more. But after today, it will be silent.

The reasons for that are understandable and pragmatic. But that does not mean that they have been taken happily. A singular voice in Bermuda is gone, a voice that was often provocative and did not see its role as courting popularity. Warts and all, it will be missed.