Out with the old, in with the new - it's that time to look back on the worst and the best of 2008.

The economy has seen to it that we've had our fill of the worst. So turn to the best and focus on family, friends and colleagues who've had positive influences these past 12 months and before. Some, who've passed away are well remembered and others continue to be welcomed into our daily lives.

As the calendar rolled over to 2009, for me it was a time of contemplation, wondering among other things about the future of the press. It's worrisome that fewer and fewer are reading newspapers, the lifeblood of a democracy.

When the U.S. Constitution established freedom of the press to ensure liberty and participatory government by a well informed citizenry, the printing press was the best means of communication. Now there's a wider range of media.

In the early days of my journalism career I was privileged to spend a few years writing for the Chicago Daily News when Chicago was home to four major metropolitan daily newspapers. The CDN was known as a writer's newspaper and early on I recognized I was in the newsroom with some of the best in the business.

The Daily News folded in 1978 but many staff members have stayed connected with annual reunions and monthly newsletters initially published by the late Margaret Whitesides, the revered city desk secretary who began work there in the early days along side the likes of Carl Sandburg and Ernest Hemingway.

The CDN newsletter's arrival in late 2008 brought word that two highly respected colleagues, Raymond Coffey and Charles Nicodemus, had died.

Ray, who Mike Royko had once said was the best reporter he ever knew, covered the civil rights movement in Mississippi, the Vietnam War for three years while slogging through swamps and jungles, which was followed by being carjacked by the Irish Republican Army during the Northern Ireland conflict.

Charlie's obituary reiterated that in his 44 years as a reporter he was "as admired by his co-workers as much as he was feared by shady public officials." While at the paper's Washington bureau, he exposed many problems at the Pentagon.

Among the many other notables at the Daily News at the time was Royko, just getting his column under way, the legendary sports editor Bill Carmichael and coming back to Chicago every two years, all the foreign correspondents, including Bill Stoneman from London and Smith Hempstone based in Africa.

The opinions are solely those of the writer. Contact her at janetcopywrite@sbcglobal.net.