ReadWriteWeb has a neat post featuring a video documenting the death of the Rocky Mountain News, which recently shut down due to the recession and the general malaise affecting the newspaper industry.

It’s a very humanizing look at the people behind the layoffs and their emotions surrounding a company and product that they feel is very important to society.

However, as I was watching it I noticed a strange disconnect. Pretty much all the employees work on computers, composing stories, looking over each other’s shoulders, and designing the layout on a screen. Yet all this hard work is ultimately delivered on paper – a dead tree.

There are some clips of newspapers coming off a printing conveyor belt which had me feeling, that’s still being done these days? I have somehow developed an aversion to printed media (save the occasional book), and seeing one is like accepting a plastic bag from a grocery store. It just seems wasteful, antiquated, and silly. You read a few articles and the rest are glossed over. Then what do you do with it? Stick it in the recycle bin, or worse yet, the trash, because there will be another copy the next day. The medium itself literally induces guilt.

I don’t think for a minute journalism itself, or the demand for it, are failing. There’s a voracious appetite for news and information as any of us RSS feed junkies would attest. I suggest it’s the dead tree media as a delivery method that is a failure.

As a reader, I don’t want to read articles on paper. I want to read it on a computer or better yet, the iPhone.

In my little corner of the world, every day during my work commutte I make a mental note of how people pass their time. This morning the bus had four iPhone users, and another three or four Blackberry users. Everyone else had a cell phone and most of them were staring at them. On the CalTrain the majority of people have laptops.

I occasionally see someone reading one of those print, book things. But I literally, cannot remember the last time I saw someone reading a print newspaper.

My point is there’s a willing and waiting audience that isn’t being reached. Putting up a website isn’t enough. Newspapers continuing to put out print newspapers and websites is like a music company continuing to put out LPs and CDs. Meanwhile, the future is clearly digital downloads.

I read some glimmers of newspapers dropping the “paper” part of their name. The Christian Science Monitor is going online only, and there are iPhone Apps for USAToday and The New York Times (both free). But there’s certainly more work to be done. What’s going on with newspapers the Kindle? I’d pay for a killer newspaper iPhone app. It hasn’t shown up yet.

I know this cannot be the full solution but it certainly can’t hurt at this point.

Meanwhile, here in the Bay Area, the San Francisco Chronicle is on the verge of shutting its doors. It’s a safe bet we’ll be seeing another sad video soon.

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