When the bankers start jumping out of windows, the publishers will be lined up behind them. Via Media Life:

With the global economy teetering, socked by one crisis after another, it’s looking increasingly difficult for media, which typically hurl whip-like at the tail of the overall economy as it swings about. These gyrations have already led to cutbacks in the outlook for ad spending, and now ZenithOptimedia is cutting back its forecast. Forecasters at the giant media agency are chopping their outlook for global ad spending for both this year and next year as well. Their latest revised forecast chops 2008 spending to 4.3 percent from the 6.6 percent it forecast in back in June. It’s chopped its 2009 outlook to 4.0 percent from 6.0 percent, and it doesn’t see growth picking up until 2010, when it’s forecasting 6.1 percent growth. ZenithOptimedia’s outlook for the U.S. is far grimmer. It’s pegging 2008 growth at 1.6 percent, down from the 3.4 percent it foresaw in June, and 2009 growth at 0.7 percent, down from 2.6 percent. “These are fairly big revisions, more than we would expect for a normal quarterly revision. Forecasts for Western Europe and the U.S have effectively been cut in half,” says Jonathan Barnard, head of publications at ZenithOptimedia. “They have borne the brunt of the recent lack of confidence.”

It’s worth asking how much the particular economic challenges of the media business affect coverage of the overall economy. We haven’t even been in an official recession yet (though we are very probably going into one) but if you work for a U.S. newspaper company it’s felt like a recession since about 1999 and like a serious boot in the shins for the past two or three years. The New York Times has just eliminated its freestanding metro section — it’s got to be feeling positively funereal in that newsroom.