“The news industry is not facing change,” said Randy Parker, managing editor at the York Daily Record and Sunday News. “It is facing metamorphosis.”

Comparing newspapers to a butterfly emerging from a cocoon, Parker challenged his audience at this year’s journalism discussion, “Mojo Rising,” to think of all the ways people communicate today. The list went on almost endlessly, from the timeless word of mouth to the new-yesterday, old-tomorrow vehicles of social bookmarking and presence networking.

“The DNA of our business will be the same,” Parker said, referring to basic journalistic ingredients such as storytelling and character, tenacity and critical thinking. But the ways the public receives news will be different. “It won’t be something sitting in our driveways and getting wet,” he said.

Information, the editor said, will reach out and find you, on whatever device you have. It will be active, instant, vibrant, and interactive. For instance, databases will surface as a new form of story. Beat reporters will cover their areas in novel ways; an education editor, for example, will use a flow of school district web sites and blogs to report on school closings, cafeteria menus, classroom news.

News organizations will mine databases overlaid on each other, as political parties are doing now. Before the Ohio Presidential Primary, Parker said, political parties chased databases to locate registered voters and their addresses. Campaigners then knocked on the doors of people who might be persuaded to change their minds. It is the responsibility of journalists, Parker feels, to be better at these techniques than political and business entities are, to help people avoid becoming “quiet victims” of other organizations who may not have their interests and needs in mind.

In order to do this, journalists must have a passion for using all resources, not just traditional ones. When Parker hires reporters for his newspaper, he looks for “fresh ideas for telling stories, people living in this world, breathing these types of tools.” He urged anyone unfamiliar with the new technologies to familiarize themselves with them.

“You have a leg up,” Parker told the audience, mostly of students. “You are not wrapped up in the traditions, habits and patterns that we are in, in print and broadcast journalism.”

Parker believes that embracing new ideas is crucial if local newspapers are to perform their special roles. “You have to be needed,” Parker said. National news media do not inform you about nor discover a community’s concerns.

Parker’s own York Daily Record and Sunday News is evidently doing so, as shown by modest but consistent circulation gains in an era of evaporating subscriptions. The newspaper recently won a John Bull Freedom of Information Award for its tenacious reporting on Iraqi soldiers and suicide.

News is reaching more people and doing so ever faster, Parker said. “Journalism will be an amazing machine for sharing news and information.”