Jessica DaSilva, an intern at the Tampa Tribune, blogged about her boss’s plan to reorganize the newsroom and lay off a bunch of staffers. Sounds all too routine, but she generated a wave of over 100 comments that capture the restive state of the industry today. In a nutshell, nobody’s happy. Many are attacking her for being insensitive about the layoffs and naive about management. Others are defending her as a standard-bearer for innovation against the forces of the status quo.

This isn’t an edifying conversation. There are no good guys and bad guys here. There aren’t really innovators and curmudgeons either. Almost every round of layoffs/retrenchment occurring in the newspaper business today is born of desperation, and the people making the decisions, as John Zhu notes, are the people who made the all the overcautious bad decisions that brought us to this pass. There is no particular reason to believe they know what they’re doing. The truth of the moment is, when an editor announces the latest round of layoffs and embarks on a plan to reinvent the newsroom, odds are it won’t work. A year will go by, and we’ll see another announcement, maybe with different faces, a different emphasis, but the same desperation.

A massive asteroid has struck, sending shock waves through the media ecosystem. Old species disappear very rapidly; meanwhile various mutations emerge but most of them die off too. Only a few new species will actually thrive, then diversify and take over. We don’t know yet what they look like.

Such an environment is unforgiving. It rewards risk-taking, throwing paint at the wall and seeing if you get art. But rarely - risk-taking is still likely to fail.

Meanwhile, the default attitude of newspaper management is still caution and probity. And if you point a gun to the head of caution and probity and say “innovate or die,” don’t expect wonderful things to happen. Instead, expect buzzwords.

“Hyperlocal” is what market surveys say people want, and it makes a certain amount of sense, being the one thing a local newspaper can provide that the Internet cannot. But who knows how to do this well? Just scaling down the geography of coverage while using the same set of tools as before won’t cut it. News gathering operations have to become more flexible and informal: interact with the community, open up the exchange of information and opinion, and above all forge an interesting conversation. That means being provocative, cultivating original voices so that your site is always saying something new and interesting - not just serving up what happened at the community association meeting last night.

In short: we need more paint thrown at more walls. But there aren’t many true innovators out there yet in positions of authority, and those who are are struggling against an archaic institutional architecture that remains despite all the layoffs: everything from the strictures of AP style to the cluelessness of corporate overlords.