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.

If you want to get a read on how loyal users are to a particular citizen-based web site, look no further than the comment section of FresnoFamous.com, when it reported on its own sale to newspaper conglomerate The McClatchy Company.

If you missed it, one of the telling stories about the weight of citizen journalism came in mid-December when McClatchy, the second-largest newspaper company in America, struck a deal to buy FresnoFamous.com and ModestoFamous.com. The fetching price should get revealed in McClatchy’s next quarterly report.

What’s noteworthy about the announced sale is that Jarah Euston, who launched Fresno Famous in 2004, wrote the story, herself, about the sale to McClatchy when it was announced on Fresno Famous.

When John Byrne wanted to upgrade the computers his staff at The Raw Story were using, he reached out to the readers of the news website to help pay for the upgrade. His audience was equally generous when he wanted to bring on board additional staff to launch Raw Story’s own investigative work.

Byrne calls the donation drives part of a hybrid business model. “Most of our funding is from advertisers, but when we want to do more extensive projects, we’ve found our readers to be very responsive when presented with specific goals.”

In 2004 and the beginning of 2005, the Contra Costa Times established its strategic plan for the future, built around the concept of hyper-local news. The 180,000-circ. newspaper (200-plus journalists), located east of San Francisco, would create a citizen-based site to emphasize unique-value local content, and then match that vision in print.

The hyper-local concept would allow the paper to establish the capability for citizen participation in its news creation. It would hold community meetings to recruit citizen journalists, then offer those citizen journalists training in order to create pro-am journalism projects. I know about it because I was one of the architects of the plan in my position as executive editor and vice president of news. Little did we know that Knight Ridder, our parent company, would soon be on the auction block, and the vision we created would be collecting dust.

Fast forward to November 2006, and the memo issued by Gannett CEO Craig Dubow. In it he calls for an emphasis on “local,local” content.

Last week we found out there are conscious plans for journalism and crowdsourcing in the works. But instances are already taking place in newsrooms all over America intuitively. When a local reporter takes interest in a discussion thread on the newspaper’s website, then reports out what citizens are saying, this is the dawn of open source journalism.

Take the case of the Contra Costa Times and its reporter, Simon Read, which happened just 13 weeks ago when I was the executive editor of the newspaper. When almost 200 complaints about a carpet business fired up our discussion boards it led to great community reporting that was informed by the community itself.