Today is February 28, and by bending time and space and peering through the Intertubes, I have just read a March 1 piece by Los Angeles Times columnist David Lazarus.

He is not back from the dead, just from the deathlike sleep that gripped so many print journalists over the last 15 years. Like so many other newsroom Rip Van Winkles, he has awakened to the importance of this Internet thing but failed to understand it: "iTunes proves newspapers can and should charge for online access."

British journalist Charles Arthur's post "Newspapers: why fungibility means they’re really really really really really REALLY screwed" shines a light on a basic disconnect between reality and the center of gravity in American journalism.

Well, two disconnects.

The silly season is supposed to be in late summer, and here we are in late winter. Yet we are right in the middle of the silly season, judging from the preposterous nonsense being peddled as "solutions" to the "death of newspapers" crisis. Lately I'm seeing ideas that fall into one or more of several simple categories:

Ideas from aging printies who apparently fell asleep in 1994 and just woke up. This includes most of the paid-content and microcharging nonsense, and just about everything written in the last 12 months by a "columnist."

Clayton Christensen and the disruptive-innovation crew from Harvard -- who developed the NewspaperNext program with the American Press Institute -- struggle to get us to understand how and why simple, low-end, inadequate, "junk" products and services so often topple the big guys.

I really hate being in a position of defending the newspaper industry. It's much more fun, and in the big picture perhaps more productive, to kick it in the pants. But I have to call bullshit on the "Newspapers Are Dead" meme.

No, they're not. Neither is print. Schadenfreude and gravedancing do not advance a rational conversation about how journalism will work going forward, and irrational negativity will not help us invent the future.

I've written previously about MOM -- a whiteboard project dreamed up last century at a New Directions for News workshop. MOM stands for "My Own Matrix," a universal personal infobroker that would monitor all the news, tell you what you need to know, keep track of your schedule, recommend activities and even suggest friends. Mom wouldn't be a device, but rather an entity on a network that would interact with you through any number of devices.

Here's an image I've been using a lot lately, both for internal training and external presentations such as last week's BPB Forum Lokaljournalismus in Schwerin, Germany.