Back in February, I wrote:

When I interviewed Glenn Reynolds last year for my TCS Daily article on An Army Of Davids, he quoted a passage from Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End that "utopia was a Red Queen’s Race with extinction". Glenn added, "Even if things are going terribly, it will seem like it’s going well, right up until the end".

Have the mainstream media quietly begun some sort of Red Queen's Race of their own? Or is the Blogosphere merely getting increasingly better at catching the media's worst moments and publicizing them? By and large, I believe the general public has come to believe that the vast majority of old media outlets lean to the left, despite the exponentially diminishing claims of objectivity. And since half the country does as well, newspapers and television have a wide audience to aim their content. So does that mean that Blogosphere complaints about the MSM are being read as mere partisan sniping?

The media as a whole aren't going away any time soon, of course (although Hugh Hewitt might argue with that). They're too well funded via advertising, subscriptions, stocks, bonds, and other revenue.

Found via Hugh Hewitt, the Wall Street Journal writes that one element of the industry's financial pyramid is looking more than a little shaky this year:

Even as News Corp. negotiated to buy Dow Jones & Co. over the past few weeks, a grim reality was increasingly evident to executives on both sides of the discussion: The downturn in the newspaper industry is getting worse.

Last fall, newspaper executives and analysts were caught by surprise by the severity of a slump that took hold last summer. Since the beginning of this year, the rate of decline in advertising revenue has accelerated. Total print and online ad revenue was down 4.8% to $10.6 billion in the first quarter from a year earlier, according to the Newspaper Association of America, compared with its full-year decline in 2006 of 0.3%.

In the first quarter, revenue for every major ad category -- classified, national and retail advertising -- was down. The sharpest declines were for classifieds, where spending dropped 13.2% -- not so much a result of competition from the Web [Are you sure?--Ed] as of economic woes affecting certain categories of advertisers. Real-estate classifieds, until recently a bright spot for the industry, have plunged along with the property market. Auto and employment classifieds are also sinking. Financial-news outlets such as the Journal are being hurt by a slump in technology advertising.

"Right now, you've got a perfect storm," says Edward Atorino, an analyst with financial broker Benchmark Co. [Hey, that rings a bell!--Ed] He predicts total ad revenue will fall 4.3% this year. The decline will be one of the steepest in history.

And that's in a year when the Dow is flirting with 14,000. Combine this with a rampant case of BDS, and you've got a pretty good explanation as to why the average newspaper columnist sounds more than a little harried these days.

(Though I don't think we can blame an article like this solely on reduced ad revenues...)

Update: "New Poll Reflects Media’s Negative Impact on Economic Perceptions". As Virginia Postrel and Ed Morrissey have written, the media's own economics also color how they view the economy as a whole, in addition to their issues with whichever party is controlling the White House.

More: And now for news of fresh disaster: James Lileks writes that Minneapolis' "Pioneer Press Sheds More Jobs". And AP notes that "The E.W. Scripps Co. said Tuesday it will end publication of The Cincinnati Post and The Kentucky Post on Dec. 31, when a joint operating agreement with Gannett Co. and The Cincinnati Enquirer expires."