Last week, Time Inc. and its partner, the Wonderfactory, released a video on YouTube imagining what a tablet version of Sports Illustrated might look like.

Narrated by Terry McDonell, editor of the Sports Illustrated Group, the video shows a pair of curiously Sims-like hands touch-navigating through a mock-up of a kinetic, interactive magazine full of video, photography, and text. The user is seen flipping through multiple photos, rearranging the order of features (no more "front of the book"), and customizing his reading experience to suit his preferences.

Gawker's Ryan Tate called it "pretty darn cool"; All Things Digital's Media Memo blogger Peter Kafka called it "nifty" in a post headlined "Game On."

"We're in a place where anything goes," McDonell told Portfolio.com. "We want to be ahead on this. Why wouldn't we?"

Why not, indeed. As 2009 ends, media companies continue to grapple with changing models, their readers and advertisers still drifting away, and revenues suffering. According to a report from Mediafinder, a database of American and Canadian publications, 383 magazines closed as of October 2009, among them legendary titles like Condé Nast's Gourmet. (Less than a month after that report, Window Media closed the Washington Blade and a handful of other gay and lesbian publications across the country; More recently, National Geographic folded Adventure and Bloomberg decided to absorb BusinessWeek SmallBiz into the main magazine, pushing that figure higher still.)

With the New Year looming, publishers are coming up with new plans to fight back. In the last few weeks News Corp., Hearst, Condé Nast, and others have made bold announcements, unveiled splashy prototypes, and generally did some of that "out the box" thinking management gurus have been recommending for years in the hope that they can cement their places in the market. In some cases, they're even working together, an unusual move given the companies' usual zero-sum approaches to the newsstand.

"Traditional competition, which is usually good, tends to stifle innovation," McDonell told Portfolio.com. "We're at a time in this that collaboration is fantastic. It'll help everybody."

To borrow a phrase of football (a topic featured prominently in SI's tablet demo), as 2010 approaches, media companies are breaking out their Hail Mary passes, doing anything and everything to get ahead of whatever comes next. Some are taking aim at Google, threatening to go "invisible" from the search giant's bots. Others are readying their pay walls, while still others are unleashing iPhone apps or creating impressive demos for nonexistent technologies. Somewhere in the bowels of some publisher's R&D labs (they have those, right?), technicians are probably attaching electrodes to a lab rat, attempting to transmit a "Summer Movie Preview" or think piece on Afghanistan directly into its brain.

Meanwhile, all that poor rodent wants to do is check his Twitter feed.

So many "solutions" are being thrown at the problem here, but as with the Web—which consensus holds hit publishers hard and fast, leaving them very nearly for dead—is it too late? And are their efforts now too little?