We bid bon voyage to our fellow weekly newspaper, the Asheville Global Report, which put out its last print edition May 24 after more than eight award-winning years of publishing the news that the big corporate dailies saw fit not to print.

Every independent paper in America nowadays is all too familiar with the pressures that finally forced the never-say-die publication to cease printing on paper and move to publishing only on the Web (and on Free Speech TV).

The bottom line is, independent papers depend on independent businesses for advertising revenue ó and those locally owned businesses are being increasingly absorbed or shut out by big-box corporations that make their advertising decisions in far-off boardrooms, cutting exclusive deals with the other mega-corporations that nowadays control most of the nationís news reporting.

Thatís why itís a testament to Ashevilliansí determinedly independent spirit that the non-profit AGR ó founded in 1999 by local activists Bob Brown, Brendan Conley and Clare Hanrahan, and led since then primarily by Eamon Martin ó stayed in print and won numerous national awards while staffed entirely by volunteers.

Admittedly, it was often a depressing read, with headlines such as ìWidespread rape of indigenous women in the U.S.î (May 3) and ìBritish citizens to be scanned for FBI databaseî (Jan. 11). Most of its news items were culled from national and international news Web sites, and it was easy for critics to accuse AGR of an anti-establishment, even anti-U.S. bias.

However, we live in an age when ever fewer American news outlets are doing any critical or investigative reporting ó increasingly taking the easy way out by printing ìdueling quotesî from opposing spokespersons rather than trying to dig out the objective truth. Moreover, todayís trendy hyper-local focus tends nearly to exclude international and national news, resulting in a dumbing down of ever more insular American society.

The international reportage on todayís multinational crises that AGR reprinted exposed American readers to facts and opinions that our mainstream media tend to dismiss or ignore.

An independent voice is what Americaís founders intended for the Fourth Estate. And thatís why papers like AGR ó and, we might add, the Daily Planet ó will always be around in one form or another to keep ìdemocracyî from being just a patriotic sound byte.