To a certain extent, that headline is gallows humour, but columnist Richard Siklos sums up some of the bad news coming out of the United States for media companies operating there.

From the Nov. 28 Globe and Mail:

Some parts of the industry - particularly local U.S. media - have seen their sales fall off a cliff and their long-term viability as business models called into question as a consequence of the shakeout in the financial services companies and car makers, two of the largest advertising categories.

"It looks like 2008 will be the first year in 48 years that TV-station advertising will decline in a presidential election and Olympic year," said Michael Nathanson, media analyst at Sanford Bernstein.

Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corp., one of the world's largest media conglomerates, told investors this month that automotive advertising has represented as much as 40 per cent of the advertising at his local Fox TV stations, and that category is down by 40 per cent this year, with some big advertisers such as imperilled General Motors cutting their spending by more than half.

"It is going to take time for that to come back or to come back from other sources or to be replaced," Mr. Murdoch said.

Sam Zell, the Chicago billionaire who bought Tribune Co. (which owns the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and 23 TV stations), told a conference in New York this month that when he took the company private last year he budgeted for a 6-per-cent erosion in newspaper advertising, which was twice the rate of recent years. Instead, he said, this year's sales have tanked 19 per cent. ...

Mr. Nathanson this week offered a harrowing look at how the landscape has darkened for media companies. He notes that in the third quarter of the last U.S. election year, 2004, ad growth among traditional (that is, non-Internet) media was a strong 5.7 per cent over the previous year, thanks to the usual influx of political spending. Excluding Internet spending, ad spending across all traditional media in this year's third quarter was down 8.5 per cent, the sixth consecutive quarter of declining spending. ...

Even online advertising, the hot growth sector for media, is being revised downward by a little or a lot, depending on which analyst you ask. Sanford Bernstein & Co. recently lowered its forecast for next year down to 11 per cent from 13 per cent, while Cowen & Co. reduced its previous forecast of 13 per cent to a meagre 3 per cent. ...

With advertising possibly not recovering until early 2010, many are wondering if those companies that went into this severe downturn already weakened will be around to see the economic sun shine once again.