I have a fascination with Front Pages of newspapers. I have saved some of the front pages of The Arizona Republic on 9/12 –the day after. Dipping into the large format book “Page One” with hundreds of front pages of the New York Times from 1900 onwards is like a sweeping history lesson.

The Newseum which recently opened in Washington, DC has an exhibit capturing the same sweep of history for us, but in a digital realm. From the Gulf News featuring Obama, to the tabloid-like The Sun from Kuala Lumpur and 500 other newspapers, they have the front pages of world newspapers digitally transmitted to the Newseum.

But even as many are anxious to write an obituary for the newspaper (since newspaper reading habits are on the decline) there is a positive trend: “the total audience for what newspapers produce is rising, not falling,” says the State of the News Media, 2008 report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

“What newspapers produce” may not be elegant snapshots of each day that we can archive or thumb through in a book, but the news about where news production, consumption and distribution are headed is not so bad, after all.