But RSS is everywhere. I use it for so many blogs and sites, as do many others. And for sites that don't have RSS there are services to turn them into RSS feeds. You can turn newsletters into RSS feeds. You can have RSS in your email client. RSS is thriving.
People keep saying that and I never quite get it. What was so unique about Google Reader? When it should down I imported my subscriptions into another reader and used that ever since, without problems.
It wasn't in anyway special or unique. Though, it was a good app and it took competitors several months to years to reach a similar level. But Google Reader dominated the market back then, and them closing it was a kind of signal. It was around that time that other rss-related services went into decline, while competing solutions like social networks and reddit were on their hype-train to popularity.
So it's kinda natural that people saw the shutdown of Google Reader as a death-flag for Newsfeeds as a whole. And they are not so wrong on this. The decline continued since then and so far there is nothing in sight to reverse it and start a new hype.