Yes, I know. You are frustrated. We are frustrated.

The Salt Lake Tribune is smaller than it used to be, in the size of its staff and the number of its pages.

Your town, your issue, your arts group, something that means a lot to you, isn’t covered as often or as well as you think it used to be. And, to judge from some of the very frustrated emails I receive — from people who know I don’t deliver the paper but don’t know where else to turn — the number of times it fails to show up in your driveway may be increasing.

But it could be worse.

We could all live in Denver.

Denver used to be a big-time newspaper town. It had two robustly competing publications, The Denver Post and The Rocky Mountain News. Like the two newspapers that serve Salt Lake City, they were in a joint operating agreement, taking advantage of a specific carve-out in federal antitrust law — The Newspaper Preservation Act — that allowed them to compete for readers with their own newsrooms and editorial pages but share things like advertising staff, delivery trucks and, most important, the printing press that powered it all.

But changes in technology and demographics, mostly the onrushing internet, blew up the business model for newspapers in general. The Rocky shut down in 2009. The Post soldiered on as its parent company, MediaNews Group, was battered by bankruptcy and its sale to the New York City hedge fund Alden Global Captial.

Yes, the same vulture capital outfit that controlled The Tribune for a while. Long enough to put us through rounds of layoffs and other declines that very nearly extinguished the place altogether.

A couple of years ago, we were bought out of that bondage by Paul Huntsman. Things are looking up. We don’t have quite so many empty desks. The website has been upgraded significantly and we’re figuring out how to shift from a world in which newspapers make their money by selling readers to advertisers — yes, kind of what Facebook thinks it invented — to a culture where we make money by selling news and information to readers.

The Post, meanwhile, is still in those chains. Its newsroom has shrunk and shrunk and shrunk some more. Denver is in real danger of going from a city with two good newspapers to a city with none. And you can’t run a democracy like that.

Apparently, there is no rich guy in Denver who gives a darn about the condition of the community.

Sunday, there went up an extraordinary cry for help.

As vultures circle, The Denver Post must be saved — Denver Post Editorial

Much of the Post’s Sunday opinion section, Perspective, was devoted to the subject.

Who will step up and save The Denver Post? — Greg Moore | For The Denver Post

When a hedge fund tries to kill the newspapers it owns, journalists must fight back — Ricardo Baca | For The Denver Post

Love us or hate us, you’ll miss us when we’re gone — Diane Carman | For The Denver Post

The managers of The Salt Lake Tribune never made any secret of the fact that we’d prefer another owner, preferably someone local who would care about the quality of the newspaper. But we didn’t go this far.

It was an extraordinary act that drew attention far and wide.

Denver Post Rebels Against Its Hedge-Fund Ownership — Sydney Ember | The New York Times

Which kind of proves the point. The company that owns The Denver Post doesn’t really give a jolly damn what The Denver Post says. It never has. These people just want to bleed it dry for as long as they can, then toss it aside.

In the editorial pages of the Denver Post, a rebellion against its ‘vulture capitalist’ owners — The Washington Post

New York Times top editor on journalism’s ‘biggest crisis’ — Jackie Wattles | Reliable Sources | CNN

But, as it turns out, the death of local news and the rise of Donald Trump may be tied together.

Trump thrives in areas that lack traditional news outlets — Shawn Musgrave and Matthew Nussbaum | Politico

George Pyle, The Tribune’s editorial page editor, was really disappointed when he didn’t get that job at The Denver Post in 2002. He’s gotten over it. gpyle@sltrib.com