It’s not whopping big news that having friends is good for your health, but it’s nice to have scientific support for flying off with your girlfriends once a year.

Last week we went to San Diego where the three of us first met, not as surfer girls, but as young married career women, reporters on the same evening newspaper. We are no longer married to those same husbands and our careers have morphed widely, although we all still know how to write a headline and a lead sentence. The newspaper merged with the morning paper. The building itself, which was downtown, is gone. A mall is in its place. The newspaper moved out to the shopping center. Everything’s changed except for our annual need to get together, this time on a beach in San Diego.

Two live in California and one in Indiana, but we prefer meeting at a neutral location like Savannah, Chicago, Key West or Phoenix. When my husband and I moved to Germany, my two friends flew over so we could have our getaway in Strasbourg and Heidelberg.

Our vacation routine is the same. We get up and hit the streets in pajama tops and sweatpants, seeking coffee and newspapers. This time we scored papers at a liquor store up the beach, next door to a coffee house with a patient barista. One of us is known for her complicated espresso orders.

We don’t play tennis or golf. Well, two don’t, but we try to exercise. This time, there were walks on the sand and bicycles on the boardwalk. The fittest of the three brought her exercise bands. For activities, we eat, we shop and search out art museums, sometimes a play. This time we cruised beach towns to hunt up our old addresses in one time funky places showing off new wine bars and garden art stores.

We agree on Kevin Spacey and the need for dogs.

Driving is always amusing. Two prefer to be in the driver’s seat, which leaves the other controlling personality to bark directional changes and the third to sit gratefully in the back.

At night we usually watch movies, lament the state of newspapers, tell other sad stories and have cocktails. One wine, one scotch, one brandy.

We’ve been friends for 40 years, although one still tells people she’s only 48 and that would mean we met in grade school. To be honest, she does have the youngest face, which we can attest is her own.

In many ways we don’t match and if we lived next door to each other we might not have remained as close as we have miles apart. We have vastly different lifestyles, sometimes heatedly different politics and opposite tastes in everything from pre-roasted grocery store chicken to why Meryl Streep did “Mama Mia.” Only one uses “Facebook.” Only one reads with a Kindle. Two wear pepto pink and canary yellow. One prefers black.

We agree on Kevin Spacey and the need for dogs.

A recent health story in the New York Times said that having friends prolongs life, boosts brain health and aids in recovery from illness. Friends make us feel protected. They give us confidence. They keep our stress levels down.

In our case I think we know so much basic history about each other – parents, ex-husbands, kids, health scares and idiosyncrasies, that we cushion each other like family. We have enjoyed different levels of professional, marital and financial success but we’ve never competed. If one said “help,” the other two would be there tomorrow. Oh sure, we’ll tell one that she snores and one that she’s bossy and one that she’s told the same story twice already.

Still, if friends do keep you healthy we’re pretty good insurance for each other.

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