Being a slave to routine is both a comfort and a curse. On the positive side, there are few surprises in my life. The alarm goes off at 5:50 am, I open the door and pick up the paper at 6:00 am, and by 6:02 am (give or take a minute), the coffee is on: so begins my Swiss army day. Yet my mechanical adherence to "the plan" leaves me feeling dazed and confused when things do go awry, as with the recent disappearances of my morning paper.

Here is what I can tell you about the pilfered papers:

* The paper delivery man drops off my morning paper between 2:30 and 3:00am each morning (a late night paper to some of you, but a morning paper to me: I'm from Toronto)

* There have been no delivery problems since I moved to this apartment last fall

* I have had eight copies of my morning paper, and one copy of the Sunday paper, go missing from my doorstep - between the hours of 2:30am and 6:00am - since May 4th

* There is a new tenant in #408. His move-in date was April 28th and he keeps late hours

Tragedy brings us closer together, right? Well, this recent development has seen my affection for the morning paper extend to all those responsible for bringing it to me. I have made good friends with my paper's district manager, Carmen; we talk daily, and she even puts little smiley faces on my replacement papers. I know that Jeff is the one who delivers my paper, although I am never awake when he makes his rounds (one of these days, I'll leave him some milk and cookies). And my superintendent, Glen, has put up menacing letters around the building, threatening to impose a full and fitting punishment on the newspaper pirate (God Bless Glen!).

Admittedly, there is nothing but circumstantial evidence to lay at the doorstep of tenant #408. There is, however, ample evidence to suggest that I am a newspaper addict. Much in the same way as going without coffee at 6:02 am saddles me with a headache for the rest of the day, the absence of my morning paper leaves me feeling grumpy (grumpier than usual) and empty, without that glut of news to fill me up. New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. has said that "it's not the paper in newspaper that defines us, it's the news", but I think he's wrong. Nowadays, news is bought and sold in various media stores, in a way similar to hand cream and handkerchiefs. What defines a newspaper, in this era of market segmentation and product differentiation, is the mark left by its permanent record.

The authority of the physical product, in turn, fortifies a sense of community. Through their wide circulation, newspapers reach a population (such as Canada's) which is both disparate and dispersed. Just as I turn to read the cover story in my morning paper, so too does someone in Napanee, Ontario and Tignish, PEI; although we may read the story in three different ways, in doing so, we establish a sort of communion across space and time. Arguably, on the Internet there is an even greater likelihood of having 300,000 people read the same story at the same time. But who are these online newsreaders: are they permanent residents or accidental tourists? In the borderless world of the Internet, what binds these "readers" together? As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman observed recently, the Internet may be wiring us together technologically, but it has not done so socially, politically or culturally: "we are now seeing and hearing one another faster and better, but with no corresponding improvement in our ability to learn from, or understand, one another."

That sense of community, that common understanding, has grown out of a trust that newspapers have preserved and protected for many years. The New York Times slogan "All The News That's Fit to Print" has endured since 1851 not because it is catchy, but because it describes a promise which readers have reason to believe will be delivered. While we should not expect to wait 150 years to trust online news providers, the reality is that newspapers represent the backbone of web news. And despite the promise of the Internet - that one could run a news site for Ecuadorian peanut farmers from a fishing hut in Port aux Basques - the fact remains that news gathering is a local endeavor, and newspapers persist as the primary generators of news.

A sense of community. A source you can trust. If this sounds like a bad tagline for your supper-hour newscast, that's because Debbie and Don, Carla and Ken, and the rest of the bright-eyed bingo callers have taken to mouthing the newspaper credo without any newspaper credentials. News organizations in other media rely heavily on the illusion of authenticity to disguise what is a striking lack of substance: a "live on location" broadcast coats the most mundane story with the sheen of urgency, while a news website buries nuggets of truth beneath the dross of "reader responses" and "online polls". Meaning, context and analysis need not apply.

If newspapers are dead, then why is Tenant #408 stealing my cold, limp broadsheet? Surely he has a TV and a radio (over 97% of Canadians do), and access to the Internet (as 75% of his fellow Canadians do); if information is so readily available in other media, then why pick up a paper (or steal a paper, with the looming threat of litigation and a boot to the head)? Perhaps it's because he likes the grimy feel of ink-stained hands, or those wasted moments trying to fold the paper the wrong way. Or maybe, like me, his virtual world feels somewhat flighty without the weighted anchor of the printed page.

Forty years ago, Arthur Miller made the comment that a good newspaper is a nation talking to itself. God knows that there is a dearth of good newspapers out there, but I do hope that, forty years on, the good ones will still be here; that they will continue to provide that forum for national dialogue; and that, somewhere, someone will be paying for their own damn copy.

Matt O'Grady looks hard on the front steps.