My tenure as ombudsman is coming to an end, and this will be my last column. It’s customary in such situations to issue solemn benedictions, complete with personal assessments, admonitions, even premonitions — with an obligatory ending flourish of optimism. If that sounds like a mouthful, it is; I’ll try to make it simple, and start off with that last element.

What, you may ask, is there to be optimistic about in the realm of newspapers? Everywhere, they are suffering. The largest and most prestigious among them are shedding profits, people and readers. Some are shutting down.

Another shoe dropped last month on the ASY episode. You remember the case (or maybe you don’t): A probe was launched last year into allegations that funds were shifted improperly through Stars and Stripes for the benefit of a Department of Defense undertaking called America Supports You. More precisely, the undertaking was that of American Forces Information Service (AFIS), until recently the parent organization of Stripes. ASY’s original mission was to make it known to the troops fighting in the Middle East that America was behind them.

Good newspapers, and Stars and Stripes is one, don’t try to push any political or cultural agenda in the news columns. Sure, the selection of what goes in a paper comes from the personal judgments of the editors. The choice is supposed to be based on the relative importance of what is to be reported, and what you’d expect the readers’ interests to be. But readers bring their own points of view to the process, and then there can be a conflict. That’s what’s happened with some stories Stripes ran this month.

As long as there are official secrets, there will be those who will reveal them — anonymously. That distresses people in authority, but also some ordinary citizens. You may think that the media, on the other hand, would cheer. Not necessarily.

In the first place, editors have to struggle with whether the revelation is harmful to national security or overridingly in the public interest. And, secondly, they have to face running a story based on information provided by “anonymous sources.” Those two words have hung like a dark cloud over the media in recent years; newspapers raced to tighten rules on the use of unnamed sources after notoriously fake articles appeared in several publications, including The New York Times and my alma mater, USA Today.

A photograph in Stripes' American Roundup feature November 13 troubled a letter-writer. The photo, from The Associated Press, showed a reserve soldier saying goodbye to his girlfriend, forehead-to-forehead, as he was being shipped off from South Bend, Ind., for more training before going to Iraq. The caption said the soldier was 22 years old, the girlfriend 17.

Sgt. Selena Coppa of Wiesbaden, Germany, accuses Stars and Stripes of a double standard. The paper writes hugely about demonstrations by populations overseas, she argues, but gives little notice to protests at home — specifically those that target U.S. military policy.

What set this off for Coppa was a big feature in Stripes last month that described South Koreans’ penchant for protest demonstrations of one kind or another. (Several of the protests have been against the U.S. Army in the country.)

"Doonesbury" is a perennially favorite topic for letter writers to Stars and Stripes. You either hate that studiously controversial comic strip, or you love it. You want Stripes to yank it, or you plead for it to stay in the name of free speech.

Attention to the strip and its creator, Garry Trudeau, welled up again in the letters columns recently. Readers unburdened themselves of mostly generic arguments about the strip’s supposed status as a vehicle of treason, or a treasure. What surprised me was that a great example of "Doonesbury’s" chutzpah went virtually unnoticed: It called the presidential election before it was held.

The dustup over Stars and Stripes' efforts to cover servicemembers' reactions on election night, and the Pentagon's efforts to prevent that, is not over yet. Stripes on Friday published four letters-to-the editor on the subject. They reacted to a news story that Stripes ran on Thursday, and a column I wrote as ombudsman that ran the same day. (See it below.)