These are the days a journalist dreams of covering. I know I do.

I remember sitting in front of our box TV watching Eric Sevareid and Walter Cronkite, serious and seemingly so knowledgeable, discuss the events of my childhood.

I remember as a 9-year-old being gripped by the black and white video of James Meredith, the first black student at the University of Mississippi. I was in Canada, distant from the tensions that ripped across that campus. But it felt so close to home.

I remember the next summer, a painting in the park program under the shade of huge cedar trees, where I created my own record of Meredith's historic moment.

Even then, I dreamed of telling the story. Of having a voice.

So to be in our newsroom in recent days, despite the cloud of uncertainty that hangs over this paper, has been a dream fulfilled. To have the chance to help frame an event that will go down in the history books is one of the things I hoped for from this work.

It's not so much that I know people in future generations will look at the papers we produced. Although I know that's a certainty.

It's that for a brief moment a whole country seemed to stop, to focus on just one thing, to reflect. And when such rare events occur, my experience has taught me that many value their newspaper, that if we do our job right, we can build understanding.

That, to me, is a worthy cause.

It was expressed well when a new national newspaper burst onto the scene in the early 1980s with this motto as its touchstone: "USA Today hopes to serve as a forum for better understanding and unity to help make the USA truly one nation."

A noble vision for what's possible for a newspaper.

I would edit it slightly, by removing the "and unity," because those words seem unnecessary given the way the sentence ends.

Any good newspaper should be "a forum for better understanding." Only a few can "make the USA truly one nation." But all newspapers can bridge divides, remove barriers, help to make any community one community.

And in the case of the inauguration of Barack Obama, even a resolutely local newspaper like the Rocky Mountain News can "help make the USA truly one nation."

We approached the story recognizing that our Web site and our newspaper needed to treat it completely differently. The Web site is where we can deliver immediacy. That is where we can be in the present, whether by providing streaming video or putting you on the scene of the event with blog updates from our reporters and photographers. And it is an archive, a place where you can return when you wish to look back and understand an event with the perspective of time.

We know that hardly anyone will approach our newspaper without having already seen and heard the news of an event of the magnitude of the inauguration. The role of a newspaper is no longer to be the first with news. That's long gone for us.

But what a newspaper can do is provide a report that takes readers deeper into events and their meaning, that casts light on what happened and explains the pictures that moved past their eyes too quickly in the real time of television.

People who've witnessed an event often are even hungrier to re-experience it in the pages of a newspaper. Think of the demand for Denver Broncos coverage the morning after a win.

So we planned our print coverage to heighten the experience. That meant everything from providing a glimpse into the inauguration of every president and a note about what was happening in this region at the same time to a powerful rendition of the minutes Obama stood before the nation. It meant photographs presented as posters that could be kept for posterity, taped, I hope, to children's walls, just the way I tacked up pictures from magazines and newspapers as a boy.

As inspiring as the day was, I hoped it would spark in young people the same feelings I felt so long ago, the same dream I had. The dream to have a voice, to give shape to what I see.

Our new president painted a stark picture of the challenges we face as a nation. He also promised that he had faith we could meet them.

It's no secret that the journalists covering him face their own challenges.

But the editions our staff produced from Saturday through Wednesday strengthened my belief in the power of what we can do, the need for it for generations to come, and my belief that journalism's journey, too, will not end, despite the troubles it faces.

John Temple can be reached at editor@RockyMountainNews.com or by mail at 101 W. Colfax Ave., Suite 500, Denver, CO 80202.