For Utah journalists, this has been a week to take your breath away. Eighty-five of us lost our jobs in the sweeping changes at the Deseret News. In the small-town big city of Salt Lake, our tight-knit reporting community was left feeling wounded, sad and worried.

And excited — not the contradiction it seems. Out of change comes opportunity. The Salt Lake Tribune and the Deseret News have always been fierce competitors in news. While we are business partners at MediaOne, the newspaper agency that handles our joint interests in advertising, circulation and printing, we knock ourselves out trying to beat each other in news gathering and presentation.

We see the changes at the DNews as a challenge to do our jobs better than ever. The fewer we have in our pool, the more responsibility we have to do our jobs well. We believe democracy exists only with a well-informed citizenry.

The Tribune prides itself on independence. We see it as our strength. Do we have an agenda? You bet we do: It is to serve our communities with the most accurate, fair and balanced news reporting that we can accomplish.

News sources online, on the air and in print are increasingly serving up information with "perspective," and more people are turning to those sources. We can surely understand people's desire to reinforce their own views and beliefs. That gives us comfort, makes us feel right. And let's face it, some of us prefer to be told what to do or think. We see that as appropriate for institutions, sharing their views and filling a niche. But it is not the role we want to fill.

We believe in the kind of journalism good newspapers have traditionally done and in some cases continue to do; tell the truth to the best of our ability about things of importance to our readers and give citizens the unfiltered information they need to make decisions in their lives. Can we be entirely objective? Probably not — but it is what we strive to do.

And you won't always like it. Some of you will be angry with us — the messenger — because we will run news you won't like. What we cover may make you uncomfortable. It may make us uncomfortable, too, but that is the way of it when you act as watchdog for the public interest.

In the middle of this ongoing technological revolution there are lots of reasons to question what you do and why you do it — particularly if you are in a communications industry like we are. Information is everywhere: online, in print, on the air via your cell phone, iPad, computer, radio, TV, newspaper and magazine. More information than a single person can consume. Anybody can say anything and make it accessible to anyone.

We know what we are competing with. But we think what we have to offer the state of Utah is more important than ever — credible, high-quality news and information available online and in the old-fashioned newspaper — which is not dead yet and which will survive in some form long into the future. We are serving more readers than ever with our various editions.

Hey — radio was going to kill print, and then it was TV, and now it is the Web. We have had to manage through some difficult times, but we are doing better than just surviving. We are still strong. We have a strategy and business plan to take us forward, and, with our partners at MediaOne, we are happy to say we are seeing audience and revenue growth.

Like other news organizations, we have changed and will continue to change and develop. We value our readers and we will expand our interaction with them and likely welcome some citizen bloggers or contributors to our pages. We want to be a forum to which all Utahns can come to participate in public dialogue, exchange ideas and talk about the well-being of our community. Our pledge to you is that we will continue to strive to do good journalism that you can rely on.

Nancy Conway is the editor of The Salt Lake Tribune.