This week is National Newspaper Week. Chances are that you — like 85 percent of Americans — read a newspaper at least once a week. But have you ever thought about what you could do to help your newspaper serve you better?

In any given city or town, it’s likely to be the newspaper staff that’s doing the most thorough job of finding out the things you want — and need — to see what’s happening with your tax dollars. Checking the police logs to let you know what crimes have been committed in your neighborhood. Digging around in files to make sure public officials are doing what they say they’re doing. And, at the same time, following the sports and features stories that capture your interest.

Have you ever pondered how much effect all that activity has on the rest of the media in your town? Try this some morning: Read your newspaper cover to cover before you turn on the radio or television news. Chances are, you’ll find that an awful lot of what you subsequently see and hear sounds remarkably familiar. Newspapers, in other words, are making a substantial difference in the lives of even that 15 percent who don’t read them regularly.

Happily enough, given their importance to communities across the country, newspapers show no signs of disappearing. Indeed, newspaper circulation in this country has increased 26 percent since 1960, according to the Newspaper Association of America. And consider this: On the Sunday last January when 86 million adults watched the Superbowl and 43 million adults saw the premier of "Survivor," a hefty 132 million read a newspaper, according to the Readership Institute at Northwestern University.

So, newspapers are there for you, and you rely on that. But you could help your paper be even more reliable. Wall Street is making sure that newspaper companies produce a good profit margin these days. Yet the chances are good that it’s Main Street’s needs the folks in your local newsroom are more worried about. The more you let them know what your needs are, the better the job they’ll be able to do of meeting them.

Ask a reporter a question about the county courthouse story that puzzled you. Write a letter to the editor, disagreeing with an editorial or a columnist’s opinion. Let your paper’s leaders know that you are watching the school-board coverage — and hoping that the young reporter they just hired will be given plenty of solid training. Tell the publisher you’d like to know more about the paper’s journalistic decision-making process. Tell the paper when you really appreciated something. And be sure, too, that elected officials know that you expect them to be responsive to open-records and open-meetings laws, and to speak with reporters regularly and forthrightly.

The more you let your newspaper know that you depend upon it, the more dependable it’s likely to become — for you and the many others in your community who are reading it. And even for those who aren’t.

Geneva Overholser is a syndicated columnist with the Washington Post Writers Group and Hurley Chair in Public Affairs Reporting, University of Missouri School of Journalism.