Henry Blodget has a good look at trends in advertising spend, and some thinking on what it means overall. Two points, one sort of random the other worth thinking more about:
Traditional media executives--especially in the newspaper business--often blame their current woes on "the real estate market" or "cyclical weakness." Economic weakness may be exaggerating the downturn, but it's not the real problem. Whatever weakness is hitting the newspapers is also hitting Google.
Media power is not only shifting by medium (the handful of Internet companies are collectively valued more highly than most of their traditional media brethren combined), but by geography. Most "big media" companies are still headquartered in New York. Most media power, however, is now headquartered in California.
Regarding the first, I don't think there is a newspaper exec anywhere with his/her head still so buried in the sand to think what they are seeing is "cyclical." On the second, it's a great point. From a communications perspective, NYC has long been the center of the media universe, both in terms of access to writers and editors, as well as proximity to power. If Blodget is right (and there are some signs that he is) then at least the access to power/decision makers from a pure money sense is going to be more distributed than it's been previously. My sense is that we are not going to see a collection of power again in a single place, and that the likely outcome will be a dispersal of editorial talent more uniformly around the world. The same trends that allow work from home and outsourcing should theoretically free the ink stained wretches of the world from their expensive domains in major cities to more affordable places elsewhere.