Editor & Publisher's Mark Fitzgerald details the results of a recent effort by the Carnegie Corporation to look into the newsconsuming habits of young people - defined as 18-to-34 year olds - that showed more than double as many respondents had visited a news site on daily basis than had read a newspaper.

Only 14% of respondents called the newspaper their "most important" source of news. Local TV newscasts were called the most important source for news by 31% of the young adults, while another 25% cited the Internet.

While the Internet as a source lags a bit behind television for news (television is still fairly ubiquitous, being on in the local deli, pizza shop, whatever, plus it has lots of moving pictures for those whose attention span can't fulfill a scrollbar's trek down a page), this clearly shows that the newspaper as a distribution channel is not dying off slowly, it's sitting in the OR and the crash cart just got thrown out the window. Speed is the key here, and the paper just doesn't have it.

Hell, even the Chicago Tribune's efforts with the young reader-focused RedEye are viewed as disappointing - by the target audience. That item at J-Log has contributor RandallS calling shenanigans on whoever pulled the wool over Fitzgerald's eyes just a few days ago. Sure, surveys are surveys, and you never know what you're going to get - but take your own by casually asking people you know in the 18-34 age range what they do to get news. You shouldn't be surprised.

As an ex-one-to-two hour commuter via train into New York City, I can say that having a newspaper was handy for the ride back and forth. That was until I started cramming my Handspring device with everything from restaurant reviews to news stories before leaving home or the office. After that, my reasonably large amount of bandwidth per month on my cellphone had me checking sports scores and reading the news on there. Now, if I'm not listening to a book or one of a few thousand songs on my iPod when traveling from point to point, I'm getting SMS alerts of things that are important to me. Holding a newspaper that was printed ten hours ago isn't relevant anymore when my cellphone just told me who the qualifiers were for this weekend's Nextel Cup race or whatever.

It's not that young people can't handle the volume of news - or volume of words in the news - it's that the method of distribution via print is outdated and unnecessary for many people. Maybe the crossword puzzle is still nice to do with an actual pencil while eating breakfast, but trying to show people these days how the jump pages in the city tabloids work from the back to the middle for the sports sections isn't going to be necessary much longer. Not when we've got people getting huge throughput while in traffic in the Holland Tunnel or if the possibility of hooking up your whole crew with WiFi while on a road trip or riding the train is as simple as a little hack.

Print is dead to the (young) world. News, however, is not. And you can quote me on that, if you choose to do so.

[update] Matthew Sheffield properly chides me for declaring print dead as a whole. While I did truly only mean for the newspaperish publications, it's definitely not clear from what was written above. Great points, Matthew!