Let me start out by saying that I'm a newspaper guy.

When I was young, it was me, orange juice and a paper in my hands. Then it became me, coffee, a cigarette and a paper in my hands. Then, we got rid of the cigarette, but we still had me, coffee and the paper in my hands. I also worked for a newspaper for a long time.

Everywhere you look now, you see the agonizing and increasingly speedy death of the daily newspaper as we know it. Everybody is going around screaming how it's not the content that is killing newspapers it's the delivery system.

There is some truth to that. Nobody needs a newspaper to tell them what the president said, or whether the Brewers won or who the Bucks drafted or what the hot acts are at Summerfest. The online communities, along with the 24-hour television channels, have taken care of that. Places like this one, OnMilwaukee.com, give readers up-to-date information in a way that is both understandable and informative, as well as content-driven.

But, it's not just delivery systems. It's also about content and about how exceedingly out of touch the newspapers can be. And I point to the only (and this is a crime for a supposedly big-time paper) sports columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Now, I think the role of a columnist is to challenge and be critical. I think a sports columnist has an obligation to be a little contrary and ornery. You should have your own standards and live up to them and not be swayed by the fickle winds of public opinion. Having said that, the screwed up view that columnist Michael Hunt has is a telling factor in the death knell of printed newspapers.

Last week, he wrote a column after the Bucks drafted two guards in the annual draft. Here's the first paragraph in his column.

"Hey, you. Yeah, you. The cynical Milwaukee Bucks fan over there. I mean, is there any other kind?"

This came from a columnist who is so overworked, he must never, ever talk to anybody who isn't affiliated with some sports team. He needs to get out a little bit.

Let me show you how much I think of somebody who would start a column like that or somebody who actually believed that the only kind of Bucks fan is a cynical fan.

I'd like to grab him by the scruff of his collar and drag him to a game some Thursday night in February and have him stand in the lobby with me. Watch the kid, holding his dad's hand, come through the turnstile, his eyes wide and his hair standing on end in excitement over seeing the guy whose jersey he's wearing.

I'd like him to meet the hundreds of people who have been holding season tickets for 10, 20 and 30 years, supporting this team with their dollars and with their hopes.

I'd like him to meet the thousands of people who save their dollars in order to get to a game once a year. The people who watch the Bucks on television and the people who watched some of the most thrilling athletic achievement I've ever seen during this year's NBA playoffs.

I'd like him to get off his butt and climb into the nose-bleed seats and see the husbands and mothers, brothers and sisters and boyfriends and girlfriends who sit there rapt, munching on peanuts and a soda, on their feet yelling at the referee or cheering a dunk they can barely see.

I'd like him to see those Bucks fans. Let's see just how cynical they are. I'd like to suggest that -- far from being cynical -- these thousands and thousands of people are full of hope.

Sure, it's been long time since the Bucks have been successful. But don't think their fans haven't suffered along with the team. It's not as if this organization isn't trying or is just going through the motions. Does Michael Hunt, for example, think that the Bucks are happy with their lack of success? That's ridiculous.

He says that the only type of a Bucks fan is a cynical Bucks fan. If you operate from that premise, everything else you write is suspect. This may be an inside baseball fact that very few people care about. But as the abundance of news outlets faces each of us we need to make informed decisions about what we read and watch and where we get our information.

Newspapers long ago lost the advantage of time. When the writers prove to be out of touch with the lives of their readers, then they are in real trouble. Once a writer starts thinking he knows all about his readers and the fans, then it's time for that writer to undergo a serious reality check. And it's another reason why the end of the newspaper as we know it seems so inevitable and imminent.