The New York Times video obituary of Art Buchwald is the type of innovation we’re seeing more and more from newspaper companies. Newspapers continue to push innovation as the way to get out of a five-year slide in circulation and revenue. In a recent report, the Newspaper Association of America and the American Society of Newspaper Editors highlighted media companies that have embraced the type of “out of the box” thinking that they believe can lead mainstream newspapers out of the doldrums.

Their examples were chosen for innovation in collaborative journalism, storytelling and distribution, news management, and repackaging of content.

Here’s a rundown of some of the projects from the NAA and ASNE report, called “Growing Audience, Innovation in Action”:

* Las Ultimas Noticias, a newspaper in Santiago, Chile, uses its Web site to survey its online readership to determine what stories should go into the next day’s newspaper. The process is similar to Digg, the popular social news site that lets users vote to pick the best articles of the day. In the online media world this type of relationship is becoming the norm, as countless sites now use voting features to determine what gets play at the top of a site. Only LUN takes it a step further.