Where are newspapers headed? It’s hard to say given the varying tone of reporting on the newspaper industry and fate of newspaper reporters. On one hand, Journalism.org’s The Changing Newsroom study describes today’s newspapers as being run by smaller, younger, more tech-savvy staff. But Mark Glaser, writing in his MediaShift column at PBS.org, says papers need to do a better job innovating or they’ll lose those young, new media-savvy writers. Meanwhile, writers are still trying to figure out where Twitter fits in as a form of reporting and writing. Read on:

Out with the old, in with the new – Newspapers across the country have slashed jobs to deal with shrinking revenue, and many cited the departure of long-time journalists as their single greatest loss, according to The Changing Newsroom, a study of U.S. daily newspapers conducted by journalist Tyler Marshall and the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. Read all of the findings here.

Young reporters leaving newspapers - At a time when newspapers have every reason to innovate, some of their most progressive thinkers – young journalists – are leaving. Why? Frustration with the slow pace of change and papers’ often-stifling top-down newsroom management style. Read more on the phenomena from MediaShift’s Mark Glaser here.

Twitter no threat to traditional reporting – John Dickerson, chief political correspondent for Slate, postulates in this article in Harvard University’s Nieman Reports that while Twitter isn’t the next great thing in journalism, it’s not the end of reporting as we know it either. The microblogging service has its uses, Dickerson says:

Twitter is the perfect place for all of those asides I’ve scribbled in the hundreds of notebooks I have in my garage from the campaigns and stories I’ve covered over the years. Inside each of those notebooks are little pieces of color I’ve picked up along the way. Sometimes these snippets are too off-topic or too inconsequential to work into a story. Sometimes they are the little notions or sideways thoughts that become the lede of a piece or the kicker. All of them now have found a home on Twitter.