What are you going to do about it?

This is such an amazing time to be a journalist.

No, I haven’t been drinking. It’s just that newspapers have been sticking their collective head in the sand for the last 10 years. Even today, newsrooms are launching projects, pages and programs that aren’t being monetized. In this environment, it’s hard to sit by and watch. And an increasing number of people, even many outside the journalism world, are looking at newspapers and saying “What are you doing to do about it?”

So now, the rubber is most definitely hitting the road. And that’s an exciting place to be.

The Rocky Mountain News shut down on Friday, and there was a touching video on their site that day. But as I watched the B-roll of the hustle and bustle inside the newsroom, I couldn’t help but think that they never stopped making yo-yos the same old way.

And with the San Francisco Chronicle, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and countless other newspapers on a death watch, its been interesting to see the so-called battle plans emerge from the supposed media elite.

Newsday and the Hearst Corp. are adopting the one I like to call the “panic plan.” That’s the “oh shit, we’re losing our shirts, let’s start charging for information” approach. These people like to salve their anxious souls by likening city council stories to Britney Spears songs and saying to each other “See? It worked for iTunes.”

I find this idea extremely impractical. It takes one mommy blogger at a city council meeting to blow your nickel-a-story idea out of the water. And as far as charging for Big-J journalism only, I think most newspapers are going to find out just how much that’s worth to the web crowd: Peanuts.

I’m not saying its not important. I’m just saying that journalists have been giving people vegetables with their meat for a long time, and now you’re asking them to PAY for the vegetables?

There’s also the newspaper-as-nonprofit idea, and the newspaper-as-aggregator idea. This last one is one I am somewhat partial to. Drudge and Huffington Post have raised this to an art form.

But the one I’ve really got my eye on is the new hyperlocal venture being launched by The New York Times. I love this idea of newspaper-as-community-dinner-table, and I think that is part of what social media offers on a bigger scale.

It’s not fun to read about all the newspaper companies declaring bankruptcy. But lately ideas have finally begun emerging that make me think the industry has moved past the “Why don’t you love print anymore?” phase. And that’s a good thing.

So it will be exciting to watch these efforts evolve and see what comes of them. The world will be watching.