A newspaper in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, has announced it is giving up publishing from a fear of its journalists being killed for doing their job.

It certainly gives American journos reason to pause and reflect on the difficulty of putting out the paper in a difficult economic times … and conceding our colleagues in Mexico face much more frightening and deadly situations.

Three journalists were killed — assassinated — in Mexico in the month of March, and a top editor at the paper says

The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that 38 Mexican reporters or editors have been killed — for doing their job — since 1992.

That leaves Mexico as the 11th-most-dangerous country in the world for journalists.

The newspaper Norte, located in a city just south or El Paso, Texas, said the danger of the journalism business caused the paper to fold after 27 years.

“Everything in life has a beginning and an end, a price to pay. If this is what life is like, I am not ready for one more of my collaborators to pay for it and I am not either,” wrote newspaper executive Oscar A. Cantu Murguia.

That things have become so dire in a city just south of El Paso, Texas, is alarming in the extreme, and a moment for journalists everywhere to be concerned about the future of our profession.