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The debate over mainstream media's future is going mainstream.

Over the last ten days, it's shown up as a Time cover, a New York Times op-ed and an NPR piece imagining life without your local paper.

Local columns and blog posts are swelling my Google Alerts with discussion of micropayments, endowments, online fees, asset sales, non-profit ownership, and government assistance. Not to mention the old standbys of subscriptions and advertising.

Newspaper Troubles, a slice of coverage tracked by the Pew Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, emerged as the leading topic within the Press and Media category PEJ's News Coverage Index for the month of January. The index tracks about 1,300 stories in 55 outlets across five platforms.

"More than 25 percent of the news hole (in the Press and Media category) was about newspapers in trouble," said PEJ Associate Director Mark Jurkowitz. "It's by far the leading story in that category."

It's not as if problems with media economic models are anything new. But a variety of forces are getting them much wider coverage.

From April 2008 to Feb. 1, 2009, the Newspaper Troubles category amounted to just over five percent of the time and space devoted to Press and Media stories. The share increased to about 15 percent for the Sept. 1- Feb. 1, 2009 period. In January of this year, it approached 30 percent.

The whither-journalism topic has not grown to the level of PEJ's top overall stories tracked each week on its Web site.

But Jurkowitz says, "My sense is that the problems in the industry are reaching more critical mass. We may be reaching a tipping point where this is not simply a story for industry insiders any more."

He said he believes debate about bailouts for banks and auto companies is also driving discussion of "which institutions the government ought to prop up."

NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik has been working the story from various angles for the past several months.

He cited two developments he described as "markers" that focused attention on the problem: The departure via buyout of 200 staffers at the Newark Star Ledger and Tribune Co.'s bankruptcy filings.

Folkenflik said he found the Times op-ed by Yale investment experts David Swensen and Michael Schmidt to be "a provocative moment" that helped "fuel the discussion."

The Swensen-Schmidt piece, "News You Can Endow," concluded with a plea to "enlightened philathropists (to) act now or watch a vital component of American democracy fade into irrelevance."

Folkenflik pointed to the challenges mounted by many bloggers to the proposal as "a testing" that serves the discussion well: "It's like legislation being thrown back into committee to see if it can get more votes."

He's on to something. More invention. More debate. More models, some of which might actually work.