news is still news and paper is still paper

The death of newspapers has been a hot topic lately, spurred on by several reports of major newspapers in trouble, the release of some in-depth market reports on declining print revenues, and everyone's knowledge of the constant growth of online news. 

News hasn't died however.  Paper is dead but that hasn't changed.  As people like Matthew have also alluded to, the change is that the very much living news is no longer bound to the very much dead paper.  This is great for news and great for us.  It can also be great for news organizations - whether they used to distribute the news via paper or not. 

MediaShift blogged about some of the ways that traditional paper based news orgs can evolve in response to the evolution of the Internet and related technology - a cataclysmic event for media.  I like the way Mark set the stage for these news orgs becoming community hubs.  Didn't many local newspapers specifically used to be exactly that - community hubs, but became less and less so over time?  How much more of your local newspaper is taken up by Associated Press and other syndicated content than x years ago? 

However, the new media paradigm can bring us back to the future.  Local news orgs can focus on local content, and get much more local content due to the means of content production and distribution now being in the hands of more citizens in each community than ever before in history (anyone with access to a broadband connection).  Not only can news orgs accumulate more local content, but they can use today's technology to deliver it to the people that want to consume it - the news doesn't have to be relevant to the subscriber base as a whole, and catered to the masses - it can be efficiently delivered at the individual level.  And it is living news - link to it, add text/photos/videos/sound to it, aggregate it, comment on it, follow it continually as it evolves and changes - most new stories are not discrete events that can be put in a column. 

We may look back at all this and say that newspapers once put local news in a straight-jacket and actually killed local news in some communities by binding it to paper, but news organizations (some of which formerly delivered news via paper) then became community hubs, and stronger hubs than ever before. 

Is news dying?  Especially for local news, I think it is only starting to be resuscitated.