<table> </table> People keep asking me what&#8217;s next now that King Carl Peterson has been stripped of his throne.</p><p>The answer is simple. You don&#8217;t understand this column if you believe the hunt for Peterson drove the content here. King Carl was a handy foil, not the focus.</p><p>His demise, however, has caused me to reflect about the industry I love.</p><p>Somewhere along my sophomore year of college, being a big-city newspaper columnist became my singular, professional obsession, replacing my childhood fantasy of playing in the National Football League.</p><p>My teammates would trace the career change to the spot on the bench my already-ample butt warmed along the sideline my re-redshirt year. They&#8217;re probably right. The humiliation of that second season sparked an intellectual awakening and evolution. It caused me to define myself beyond football.</p><p>I needed an identity. Journalist/columnist/entertainer/provocateur fit my personality rather nicely. They were the titles/characteristics that made my writing hero, Mike Royko, the best newspaper columnist of all time.</p><p>Perhaps it&#8217;s an embarrassing admission revealing the immaturity of my personal life, but I must admit I&#8217;ve known no greater passion than my infatuation with being a relevant newspaper columnist. It consumes me.</p><p>And now I&#8217;m scared.</p><p>The conventional wisdom is that newspapers are dying. We&#8217;re slashing employees, young people allegedly ignore us and what we report and say somehow matters less. A major newspaper in New York recently eliminated the sports columnist position. The two newspapers in Detroit announced last week they&#8217;re soon only going to offer home delivery three days a week.</p><p>We&#8217;re all hurting in this economy. The pain we feel at <em>The Star </em>when our valued colleagues are let go is no different from the pain you feel when a friend or loved one is laid off at Sprint, Hallmark or Ford.</p><p>But I want you to consider something when you think about the future of newspapers:</p><p>You can&#8217;t have a democracy without us. If newspapers are dying, so is our system of government.</p><p>That is not written as a plea to buy our product. It&#8217;s written as a plea for you to understand you have a stake in the newspaper industry. It&#8217;s written as a plea for you to value and seek good, reliable, challenging and thought-provoking information.</p><p>If you do those things, newspapers will survive the troubled economy and rebound with a product that makes sense in the instant-information age. Our democracy depends on it.</p><p>That probably sounds ridiculously self-important coming from a sportswriter. The conceit does not diminish the truthfulness.</p><p>Let me explain with a short story.</p><p>On the same day that Chiefs owner Clark Hunt relieved Peterson of his responsibilities as president/CEO/general manager, my alma mater, Ball State, officially announced that its football coach, Brady Hoke, had accepted a job at San Diego State.</p><p>Y&#8217;all know I love Ball State. I was insanely distracted on Monday when Peterson was chopped.</p><p>My mother, who lives in Indianapolis, called me to gossip about the news. She&#8217;d heard on her television evening newscast that Hoke left Ball State because the Aztecs offered $300,000 more than BSU. She repeated this bit of information to me, and I chuckled in a twist of amusement and disbelief.</p><p>Since late September, I had worked feverishly trying to get the Ball State administration, Indiana print and broadcast media and the school&#8217;s boosters to grasp that Hoke would have no choice but to leave if the school failed to invest in his assistant-coaching staff and coaching facilities.