There was an ad in the newspaper for a garden nursery that said in big letters “LOCAL” and in smaller letters the name of the business. There was nothing about it being time to get your carrot seeds. Instead, it pointed out, the nursery is run by local people, the plants come from neighborhood growers and the business has been around for more than 100 years.

The ad, a direct plea for support, could be for almost any local business in any neighborhood. And that could be newspapers, too.

Obituaries are being written every day for newspapers even though many publications still breathe. So sad, say sympathetic readers, as if it’s already over. The unsympathetic shrug and say, who cares. They’ll just get their news on the internet.

The occasional journalist mourns the demise of the business. Columnist Leonard Pitts, whose own Miami Herald is struggling, wrote about how happy crooks would be if newspapers disappeared and there was no one to expose sleazy politicians, unethical businesses and, in his paper’s case, save two innocent men from death row.

But newspapers themselves do little to tout themselves. They report staff cuts and where to locate the horoscope in the new condensed sections. They cite economic downturns the rise of the internet and Craigslist. They’re kind of like Eeyore, sighing “Pathetic, that’s what it is.”

And it is pathetic. Newspapers have been shouting on street corners for years that they know everything and here they are whimpering and about to give up. They need to break out the old block headline type and make their case. Extra, extra, read all about it. We’re still alive and believe it or not, you really need your newspaper.

Newspapers could take out their own ads to say “Read LOCAL.” Remind their readers what they might never know without their local newspaper. Like, which hospital is losing nurses? Which bank is in trouble? What’s the going price for houses in their subdivision?

We’re still alive, and you really need your newspaper.

I’ve been a newspaper reporter forever and still freelance so I have a vested interest in newspapers continuing to be a viable employer. But I’m also a loyal consumer. We subscribe to five newspapers.

My former newspaper could brag about its stories on pedophile priests, broken savings and loans and corrupt church leaders, the kind of stuff that Leonard Pitts was talking about. Those are the spectacular prize winning stories that happen in journalism but there is dazzling everyday efforts, too.

Newspaper photographers create amazing art on a daily basis, be it a portrait of a mourning family, a heavenly plate of fettuccine, a spring vineyard sprinkled with mustard. Qualilty you’d expect in a photo gallery is routinely part of a newspaper.

Then there are the wordsmiths. The blog world proves that just about anyone can write but few can turn a choppy report into eloquent prose like a newspaper copy editor.

And look at the peripheral information you pick up in your paper. Sure, you can ask the computer to deliver the latest on your baseball team and what’s at the movies, but it won’t tell you what you haven’t asked for. The amount and variety of information on a computer screen will never be equal to the daily sampling of life wrapped in a newspaper.

I made this argument to a friend. She agreed that newspapers offer information you never knew you needed. But when it’s not there, she asked, who will notice?

Pathetic, that’s what it would be.

PHOTO BY Judith Gardner

Corlene Van Sluizer knows why she is unable to attach to a place. It comes from her father, a Dutch Jew who in his late 20s fled Amsterdam to escape Nazi persecution but lost much of his family to the Holocaust. Van Sluizer, a poet and former therapist in Santa Rosa, says her father, Hans Van Sluizer, after coming to America and marrying, kept their family constantly on the move. “I think he always felt like a displaced person,” says Van Sluizer, who became a wanderer herself, living in Europe, Mexico and different American cities.

Giselle Perry’s father Walter A. Simon was also a Holocaust survivor who couldn’t settle down for long. “He could never stay still. It was never the right job or the right town,” according to his daughter who lives in Rohnert Park. Her father and his parents were able to escape Frankfurt for London and then New York. But, Perry says, “They too suffered because they had no choice but to get out of Germany. It didn’t matter that they were German. They had no rights.”

He always felt like a displaced person.

Rene Powell lives in the East Bay and is a student at Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union. She also has a legacy from her father. In 1938 there was money for Powell’s father, Gerald, age 12, and his 14-year-old brother Helmut to leave Berlin but not enough for their parents to accompany them. Gerald Powell was a British soldier when he returned to his Berlin home after the war to look for his mom and dad. They were gone but the neighbors gave him a box his parents had left behind for their sons. In it were letters including one which began: “If you read this, then we are dead.”

These three daughters, like their fathers, are survivors of genocide even though as Van Sluizer says, they can only imagine the horror of their parent’s experience - “the sense of powerlessness, the loss of community, suddenly becoming refugees, your family exploded apart.” Each of these women went back to Europe with their fathers but there were little or no records, often no grave markers or relatives left to provide memories.

This month they will find “one place to have some peace” as Rene Powell says when many survivors share stories and honor their lost families at a new memorial to genocide victims at Sonoma State University. The memorial is in the form of a glass tower mounted at the terminus of railroad tracks. The ties of the tracks are made of bricks inscribed with the names of genocide victims from the Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda and Armenia. There’s room, too, for victims of the ongoing crimes against humanity in Darfur.

Rene Powell said her father’s inability to know where and how his parents died left him with an “amputated spirit.” Her second generation grief has compelled her to study theology “to try to make sense out of the incomprehensible.” Giselle Perry, who promised her father to never forget her Jewish heritage, is a school counselor, working with migrant children who have their own stories of displacement.

Poet Corlene Van Sluizer went to live in Amsterdam in her 20s as a way to get to know her father, “to find these threads that place me somewhere.” Sometimes she watches movies like “Schindler’s List” to make a connection with her lost family. Her memorial brick is for her Uncle Max, her father’s brother, who stayed behind in Amsterdam with his wife and children. From as much as she’s been able to learn, Max and his family were rounded up and sent to Westerbrook, a transit camp in the Netherlands and a stopover for Auschwitz.

The Erna and Arthur Salm Holocaust and Genocide Memorial Grove will be dedicated at Sonoma State University March 29. More on the memorial is at: http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/37568/an-eternal-memorial-genocide-victims-remembered-by-sculpture-at-sonoma-stat/

Photo: Glass tower of SSU Genocide Memorial

I started watching Rachel Maddow during the presidential campaign after “The Nation” reported on a new, novel TV personality who was a Rhodes Scholar and an AIDS activist. She was also a much-welcomed political ally last fall and not nearly as noisy and smirking as some of her MSNBC colleagues.

However, I didn’t expect her to become a regular in our living room. More of an occasional after-dinner treat, like a bowl of mint chip. But now we indulge almost nightly. I still require the more green veggie type of news served up by the reliable Jim Lehrer and his troupe on PBS. I particularly like it when Judy Woodruff is there reporting on politics or filling in as anchor.

A really good night for me is to get Judy first and then Rachel. It’s not the same as having a woman elected president in your lifetime, but if you can remember those years of catfights over who will be the new pretty blonde head sharing the podium with a silver-haired newsman, it’s still thrilling to watch a woman get to the top of her field because of brains and talent. As President Obama noted, in creating his White House panel on women’s and girls’ issues, the fight for gender quality is not over. And while I’m not sure we can say that that this particular glass ceiling has been thoroughly cracked, at least it’s widened enough to allow us to look forward to more Judys and Rachels.

They don’t have to cross their legs in short skirts to fill the camera.

Of different styles, Judy’s the big sister in terms of gravitas, and Rachel’s the brazen newcomer. But I can see them going out to dinner, laughing it up and getting into what they really think of Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers.

Rachel often says she has the best job in the entire universe, and I bet Judy feels the same. “Very cool stuff,” Judy exclaimed one night after what I remember as a complicated debate on climate change. Rachel gets to pop off in a more colorful way, recently commenting on the “junior high whining” of a former president.

The other thing about these women is they don’t have to cross their legs and wear short skirts to fill up the camera. That doesn’t mean their looks aren’t part of their appeal. Rachel, often in Johnny Cash black, favors an unadorned tailored jacket over modest tank top. She’s called herself “not a typical news babe.”

But neither is Judy, even though she’s a former Georgia beauty queen. Judy looks like she put on whatever just came back from the dry cleaners and spent the last 30 minutes before show time going over GM’s annual report rather than getting a comb-out.

But we notice when she does. The other night my husband looked over and said, “Hey, Judy got a haircut.”