February has been a heartbreaker of a month for people in Philadelphia who care about quality news, journalistic integrity and the future of our city’s daily papers.

To start, the newsrooms of the two jointly owned dailies — the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Daily News — will lose another 37 staff by the end of March to buyouts or layoffs, as announced last week. That will leave the Inquirer’s newsroom with 60 percent fewer staff members than it had in the late 1990s. And it shows. As a daily reader of the paper, I see how it's become a shell of its former self.