Have you heard that all the banks are going out of business?

All the car dealers, too?

And Realtors?

All nonsense, of course, but it’s the sort of panicked prediction that always accompanies a downturn in the economy.

The same thing goes for the rumor that newspapers are about to magically disappear.

For the sake of our 75,000 loyal readers and hundreds of advertising partners, allow me to nip that one in the bud right now.

We’ve been delivering news and advertising to Mainers for more than 160 years, and we plan to continue doing so, either in print or electronically, for at least that long into the future.

The newspaper rumor picked up momentum last week when the NBC Evening News ran a special report titled “The Death of Newspapers,” this from a network news show that has lost half its audience since 1980. A better special report might have been “The Death of TV News.” Nationally in 2007, for the second year in a row, local news ratings for evening news and late-night news were down.

Be that as it may, the report contained a major flaw. It took the worst-case examples of newspapers in trouble and extrapolated them to an entire industry.

Every newspaper’s situation is different, depending upon size, region and even community.

Just because the IndyMac Bank failed in California doesn’t mean every bank in the United States is threatened. Fortunately, the overwhelming majority of banks were run more prudently and will weather this crisis.

The same goes for newspapers. It is worth considering that there have been no such newspaper failures anywhere in the United States, and few if any newspapers have lost half of their audience, like TV news.

That’s not to say that newspapers – like bankers, car dealers and Realtors – don’t have challenges. We are all adapting to technological change, and we are all facing what now appears to be a sharp downtown in the economy.

But, as in any business, conditions vary from newspaper to newspaper, and from community to community. Generally, metro newspapers in the country’s largest cities seem to have been hit harder than newspapers in smaller towns, like those in Western Maine.

That’s mainly because there is no one else covering the news of our smaller communities, the sort of “hyper localism” that larger newspapers are now starting to embrace.

But the real difference among newspapers seems to be debt. Some newspapers have changed hands in recent years, often leaving their buyers with large debt loads. Faced with a sagging economy and technological shifts in the industry, these are the newspapers drastically trimming operations to make their debt payments.

The Sun Journal has been locally owned and operated for four generations, and we do not face the same intense debt pressure.

Like any business, though, the Sun Journal must and will adjust to the economic climate by trimming expenses and finding new sources of revenue. We are doing both.

But where there are challenges, there are also opportunities.

This year, we will continue to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars companywide, as we do every year, in additional equipment to make this a better newspaper.

So far this year, we have spent nearly $40,000 on new cameras for our photographers and for professional video equipment and work stations for our Web site. This fall, we will introduce a new computer system in our newsroom, which will include about 40 new computer work stations.

We have a Web site that is growing by leaps and bounds, with unique visitors up 40 percent year to year. When our print and Web audience is combined, our readership may be larger than any time in our history.

Ten years ago, we had 15 local news reporters at the Sun Journal, we now have 16, and that doesn’t include more than 40 other sports reporters, photographers, editors and designers.

And we’ve grown from owning two newspapers just a couple of years ago to eight newspapers today, under our corporate umbrella of the Sun Media Group.

Again, every business goes through periods of adaptation, of growing and, occasionally, of retrenchment. We’ve been surviving those business cycles for more than a century and a half, and we will continue to do so.

When you hear rumors and generalities about the “The Death of Newspapers,” I only ask that you consider the source. Usually, it’s coming from our competitors, most of whom are under similar or even more intense pressure.

We have been the main source of news in our communities for many generations and, rest assured, we plan to continue far into the future.