On Feb. 20, 1998, journalists in Nashville, Tenn., delivered the epitaph of a 122-year-old newspaper.

The afternoon Nashville Banner died that day, and tucked inside the final edition, on Page A11, one reader mourned for the paper — and for himself.

"I've read every article," Tom Luken, a Nashville small-business owner, was quoted as saying, "and I don't know what I'm going to do without the Banner."

Nearly 10 years have passed, and Tom Luken says he still mourns for the Banner in a way that could foreshadow life in an Albuquerque with only one daily newspaper.

"When your paper closes, the place will have one side and that's all they're going to get. Those people don't realize that until it happens," Luken, who owns a tool-and-die supply business, said recently. "That's what I miss more than anything. Two viewpoints are very important."

As the E.W. Scripps Co. closes The Albuquerque Tribune today, voices echo across the Duke City and in other metropolitan areas that have lost one of their daily editorial voices.

The message is the same: It's not just the journalists who suffer from a paper's demise, it's the public who ends up the loser.

"Of course, you know you're going to have your weeklies and all of that kind of stuff. They are going to exist still," said Tam Gordon, who spent 13 years as a reporter at the Banner and is now a special assistant to Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen. "But it's like a death in the family, something that you're familiar with, you've grown accustomed to. You get mad at it sometimes, you love it sometimes, but it's still yours.

"And that's gone."

In Nashville, El Paso and Phoenix, where afternoon dailies have vanished in recent years, they talk of fewer reporters pushing the day's news agenda, of one less option for advertisers.

Robin Montoya, marketing director for the morning El Paso Times, said E.W. Scripps' closing of the afternoon El Paso Herald-Post in 1997 left advertisers without a low-cost advertising option in the daily market.

She said the Times' ad rates were double those of the Herald-Post.

"The big thing we noticed was there no longer was an alternative if you did not like (the Times') rate," Montoya said. "A small mom-and-pop (business) that could afford the Herald-Post, they all of a sudden didn't have a daily paper to turn to."

In a world without The Tribune, Albuquerque advertisers will face fewer choices, said Brian Fantl, general manager of Albuquerque Publishing Co., which handled advertising services for both The Trib and the Albuquerque Journal.

The company's rate structure offered four ways to distribute ads: in the Journal, in the Tribune, in both, or in just the Sunday Journal, Fantl said.

About half the company's advertisers used the more expensive combination rate. Those advertisers will now be reverted to the Journal rate — the only daily rate to remain.

But they lose the even cheaper option of advertising only in the Tribune.

"The difference is our product offering went down," Fantl said.

In some cases, such as in Dallas, the loss of a daily news competitor cleared the way for the remaining daily to become more ambitious.

"In Dallas, when the Dallas Times-Herald went away, that cleared the decks for the (Dallas) Morning News to become a very big, very ambitious paper, by some standards the best regional paper in the country," said Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst with the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla.

If history is any guide, it's not likely that another daily, home-delivered newspaper will arise to challenge the Journal or fill the gap created by The Tribune's demise.

It's happened only in rare cases: The Washington Times emerged in 1982, a year after the afternoon Washington Star closed. The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review arrived in Pennsylvania in 1992 amid a newspaper strike that temporarily ceased publication of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Pittsburgh Press. The Press, another Scripps paper, was later sold and closed.

When one paper goes away, competition remains in some cities in the form of weekly or free commuter daily papers, blogs and other media.

"You probably would surmise that the competitive edge will be gone from the market. You might think no (Albuquerque) Journal reporter will ever think they need to run for the phone again. It's not really true," said Tom Fenton, publisher of the weekly business newspaper El Paso Inc., and former editor and publisher of the El Paso Times.

"There's a lot of competition now in the market," Fenton added. "It's somewhat fragmented. You've got different flavors of broadcast; you've got cable; you've got the Internet now. There's probably a lot more voices out there."

But for many, those alternative media don't replace the allure of a daily newspaper, at least for traditional readers.

In Nashville, Luken said he still misses the Banner's more conservative editorial views. The remaining newspaper, The Tennessean, is too liberal for his liking.

And he misses the competitive edge when it comes to sports coverage of his beloved University of Tennessee.

"I'm a UT graduate. You don't get the same viewpoint you used to get when you had two people writing about it," Luken said. "Any controversy that comes up, you no longer get a viewpoint in an opposite direction. That's the worst thing about it."

In Albuquerque, some are already lamenting The Tribune's disappearance.

Paul Gessing, president of the Rio Grande Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Albuquerque, is often published on The Tribune's editorial page, which he considers more liberal.

"New Mexico is a very small state with a limited number of media outlets," Gessing said. "Even with our small size, we're able to produce more in the way of policy studies and op-eds than the media can typically handle.

"One less outlet for us will certainly hurt our ability to go out and reach the public and educate them on what we feel are very important ideas affecting New Mexico and the Albuquerque area."

Gessing said he writes each editorial with a different audience in mind. A piece he writes for the Albuquerque Journal will take a different tone than one for The Tribune or the Weekly Alibi, the city's alternative newsweekly.

"Having those different perspectives and trying to access them forces me to think about the issue from different perspectives," he said.

Each week for the last several months, a handful of faithful readers have plotted to save The Tribune from a table at Lindy's Diner in Downtown Albuquerque.

Their plan is to buy the paper and allow its employees to share ownership as part of a cooperative. They want to run The Tribune as a daily news Web site, modeled after VoiceofSanDiego.org in Southern California.

Their reasons for setting such a lofty goal are simple — they don't want to live in a one-newspaper town.

"I think The Tribune is a good paper," said Jack Pickering, a retired book editor and frequent letter writer to the newspaper. "I'd hate to see a second paper die even if it were a poor paper."

Calling themselves Friends of The Tribune, they represent about 20 supporters of the newspaper, governed by a nine-member board.

What brought them together was the fear of losing what they saw as an important editorial voice in the city.

But, there were other reasons to keep The Trib alive, they said.

Patti Gladstone is chairwoman of the Media Arts Collaborative Charter School, a statewide charter school scheduled to open in August that will teach journalism, film production and other media arts.

She had hoped The Tribune could be a venue for students to receive first-hand journalism training.

"One of the things we see for our students is being able to learn from the paper, from real journalists," she said. "Instead of being a dry classroom situation, we want hands-on experience."

Just like Luken and the Nashville Banner, these loyal Tribune readers say they will miss their afternoon newspaper.

"It's just the idea of having only the one daily voice," said J.W. Madison, a general and electrical contractor and rail transport activist. "Plus, The Tribune has been a quality product for a long time."