It's a warm, sunny afternoon in the Mission, but despite several parks in the immediate vicinity, Sugarlump café is packed. Crowded rooms lined with middle-class locals sipping espresso in urban settings aren't anything new - the media revolution staged by some of those frequenting these establishments, however, is.

Many Mission district residents, like most San Franciscans, are using the Internet to get their news, but they're not just looking up the electronic version of the Chronicle anymore. They're now using community-based news Web sites to keep up with local current events.

Neighborhood-focused Web sites such as Mission Mission, Burrito Justice and Mission Loc@l are enjoying a steady rise of daily clicks from locals and foreigners alike. Instead of coughing up change for the Sunday edition paper, readers are now using that $2.00 to buy a cup of coffee and read the news from their laptop computers and cell phones, free of charge.

"Print is dead," Mission Mission founder and poster Allan Hough said of the struggling traditional medium. "Blogs are raw and immediate ... it keeps your brain muscles fit."

His blog (missionmission.wordpress.com) embraces 3,000 to 4,000 daily visits, he says, and is updated several times throughout the day by a handful of posters. The simple, easy to follow layout depicts life in the quirky Latino neighborhood: news of a market catching fire, a Mission-set film review, a flyer for a backyard party. Many of the blog's posts are opinionated, something readers have come to expect and enjoy.

The on-going discussion of dying print news and its fresh, recently arrived cousin -electronic media - has been exhausted in all forms. The newspaper era just might be on the way out (national newspaper circulation fell another 7%, compared with the same time last year, the Audit Bureau of Circulations reported) but Americans are still using places like the retro-themed 24th Street café to read up on issues that affect their daily lives.

But not all of this neighborhood's community-focused news sites are a Missionite's editorial e-collage.

Mission Loc@l (missionlocal.org) takes a more traditional approach to reporting neighborhood news. The site provides visitors with photo slideshows and video to go along with its professional-grade news stories. Most of its content is also viewable in Spanish. The Web site was launched in November 2008 and has journalists formerly of Time, the Los Angeles Times, the San Jose Mercury News and the New York Times contributing regularly. It claims to have 16 reporters as well as several "contributors" on hand.

Although local news is something people the world over have always sought, traditional mass media have been losing their information "gatekeeper" status once so powerful, which is giving way to community-based blogs and news sites.

"Now the consumers have taken charge - they decide what news is," Burl Osborne, former chairman of the board of The Associated Press, recently said at the Texas Associated Press Managing Editors' annual convention. "Monopoly power vanished ... and we should have known and we should have anticipated that."

It is no secret that print media is struggling and might soon be a thing of the past as localized media takes the place the once mighty Chronicle. But what will happen when the power goes out and laptop screens across the country go blank?

"The global economic system will crumble, society will descend into chaos, warring barbarians will do battle in the desert over drums of crude oil, grown men will eat newborn babies for dinner," Mission Mission's Hough said. "And nobody will ever give another thought to media - print, electronic, or otherwise."