There has been a lot of news about news lately and on the surface, none of it bodes well for the traditional newspaper business, regardless of whether you’re talking about paper newspapers or their online cousins. It does, however, reveal opportunities for people working in PR.

It should come as no surprise that readership of newspapers—both print and online—continues to decline. A Harris poll released just yesterday finds that only two out of five Americans read a newspaper every day, while 72% read a newspaper at least weekly. Ten percent never read a newspaper.

I’m not convinced that last number is all that different than it was, say, 30 years ago. I remember the number of people I encountered when I was in journalism school who didn’t read newspapers—and this was back in the days of the manual typewriter. But the size of the traditional news audience is shrinking. In a presentation delivered at Yale, Pew Internet and American Life Project Director Lee Rainie pointed out that 19% of Americans get no daily news at all, up from about 14% a decade ago. What’s more, Rainie pointed out, the people who do consume news daily spend eight fewer minutes with the news than they used to.

If this isn’t dire enough, the population of newspaper reader is aging; the younger you are, the less likely you are to read a newspaper every day. Nearly two-thirds of those 55 and over make daily newspaper reading a habit. (That might explain my own morning routine.)

All of this—and a host of other statistics that seem to predict the ultimate demise of the traditional news business—leads a lot of communicators to wonder if there’s any value in maintaining a traditional media relations function.

But shrinkage isn’t the same as death. There’s no indication that the trend will continue until there are no newspaper readers.

Remaining newspaper readers still matter

Consider this: While less than a quarter of people 18 to 34 read a daily newspaper, that’s not a number to be trifled with. The 18-24-year-old demographic accounts for about 25% of the U.S. population, or about 77 million people. When you have 19 million young people reading newspapers every day, you’d be foolish to ignore the channel when trying to reach that market, especially when you consider that many of them are likely influencers.

Remember, most of the content reported via social media is not original reporting. Bloggers, Twitterers and others are repurposing content that comes primarily from newspapers. The news that so many people get through these other channels originates in newspapers and is reported through social media by people who read newspapers. Having your story told in a newspaper increases the likelihood that it will be seen by people who rely on alternative sources for their news. Just today, PostRank reported that 80% of all audience engagement is offsite. That means even bloggers’ content is being read on Facebook, Digg, and other venues other than the blog where it was originally produced. It isn’t just newspapers that are in this boat.

In a study that focused on the news delivered over a weeklong period in one major city—Baltimore—the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism found that, far and away, newspapers were responsible for reporting new information. Examining six key story lines, Pew determined that 95% of new information came from a combination of traditional media (newspapers, television and niche media, with newspapers leading the pack) while “new media”—including social media—reported the least new information.

The Pew study also found that the press was responsible for triggering only 15% of the news they covered. The rest came from other sources. If you’ve been thinking the downturn in the news business has signaled the end of any need for traditional media relations, think again. Yes, 10% of people who have social networking profiles get news through those sites. But those sites didn’t originate the news. By and large newspapers did.

This means the the role of the newspaper is shifting. They remain the primary source of first reporting, but now serve as the inadvertent distributor of news to secondary channels through which an increasing number of people get their news.

A study I’d like to see would determine if social media content creators are among the remaining newspaper readers. I’d be willing to bet real money that they are.

Authoritative sources still matter

It’s equally important to have channels that let you get your organization’s news directly to its audiences. While media relations will be important for the foreseeable future, you’re competing for a shrinking amount of news space. The Baltimore Sun, for example, produced 32% fewer news stories in the period of the Pew study than it did 10 years earlier and 73% fewer than it did in 1991.

Some smug new-media pundits may be basking in the warmth of the certain knowledge that blogs and other social channels have taken up the slack. But that’s not so. According to the Pew study—as I suggested above—social media has served mostly to notify readers of the mainstream article’s existence. Social media has a greater impact on the speed with which news breaks than on the overall number of new stories. Citizen journalism has its place to be sure (just look at the iReports CNN is including in its coverage of the Haitian earthquake), it’s not panning out as a replacement for professional journalism. Social media is finding a more comfortable niche in areas such as fundraising (again, look at the Haiti situation, where social media is responsible for raising awareness of the U.S. State Department and Red Cross relief efforts, generating millions of dollars in giving.)

The repetition of news items by social media content producers—from blog posts to tweets—satisfies the growing preference for news grazing, consuming bits of news all the time instead of all at once (whether that’s sitting at the breakfast table with a newspaper for half an hour or watching the nightly news). Fewer people get their news at all one regular time than get it from time to time, according to numbers Rainie cited during his Yale talk.

But this repurposing of news creates confusion. As the Project for Excellence in Journalism put it, “As news is posted faster, often with little enterprise reporting added, the official version of events is becoming more important. We found official press releases often appear word for word in first accounts of events, though often not noted as such.”

Blogger Adam Sherk beat me to the punch with the observation that the long-abused press release still has legs: “Companies can increase the likelihood of their press releases being used by bloggers and local news sources by giving them a more news-like tone and dialing down the marketing hype,” he writes. Press releases bearing the company’s official imprint can be authoritative statements of record in the absence of other sources people can trust.

Press releases still matter

That’s a significant change in the press release’s former role as a pitch to mainstream media. That role is dead, but as a channel for getting information directly to people—information they can cite—the press release has new life. (They also do a bang-up job of search engine optimization, when done right.)

You should also read Shannon Cherry’s post extolling the virtues of making your press releases available for subscription via an RSS feed, which contradicts the growing popular belief that RSS has outlived its usefulness. “Many reporters are using RSS feeds to get their releases, because they can customize what they are receiving for their target market,” Cherry writes. “Many of the press release posting sites only have one feed, so journalists avoid them due to all the clutter of releases not pertinent to them. They would certainly rather subscribe to news feeds, like your press release feed, that???s targeted.”

In other words, if you want your company’s or client’s story told, you need to make sure it’s everywhere. To get social media content creators to report it, you need to do your damnedest to get it into the papers. To get it in the papers, you need to maintain a solid media relations effort that accommodates reporters’ preferences (like RSS). You also need to go directly to influencers (through blogger outreach) and directly to the public (through a variety of techniques ranging from a strategic social media presence to tried-and-true SEO practices).

The news space has grown more complex. The sophistication of your efforts to earn coverage need to grow with it.