The idea is this: While local TV stations are getting killed in this current environment, they are uniquely poised among media serving local markets to bounce back, and bounce back more strongly, once the economy turns around.

Embedded in this notion are the following assumptions:

2. That classified ads will not come back to newspapers in any significant way.

3. That the familiarity of TV will continue to beat back or at least significantly marginalize new Web-related ways for local businesses to reach consumers.

4. That the big broadcast networks will not find a way, in the near-term, to bypass their local network affiliates and get their programming to consumers.

I ask you all: Am I right? Am I nuts? In either event, why do you think so? I’m calling a bunch of people to try to get a sense of what execs and dealmakers think, but while I do that I’m curious to see what responses this blog post may elicit.

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It was the kind of day where I couldn’t tell how serious all this was, so I emailed back. This led to an email exchange and phone call with a person involved with the site.

Is it a joke? Sure, sort of. The Web site aggregates all manner of unpaid jobs—read “internships”—across the media job. Among the most recent jobs listed on the site come from the Huffington Post—the now-famous internship that was auctioned off—and Vogue. It sort of works as a directory for many internships that are out there, although the SalaryTKers have stripped all contact data out from the posts, "Sally" says, over concerns that contact data would lead to “employer” inboxes jammed with angry messages.

As for the email’s claim that SalaryTK will help meida companies snag top talent free, well, a SalaryTKer (the SalaryTKer?) said in an email “it’s true we’re not consultants. At least until someone wants us to be.”

The site came about, "Sally" said, “through a lot of frustration, going around on job boards looking for paying jobs that didn’t exist.” One watershed moment came from an ad (unfortunately not preserved on the site) that advertised an offer that, per Sally’s recollection, asked applicants to work for free with the inducement of getting “bylines for a reputable name while having their work exposed to millions.”

Are there a lot more ads like that out there now? Hard for me to tell. The media world has always leaned somewhat on the work of unpaid interns. (During this summer—indeed during all summers--there are a number of college-age interns at BusinessWeek, but all of them receive salaries. And while I'm disclosing, so long as we're talking about job boards I should point out that my wife is the founder of mediabistro.) Whenever there’s a downturn in media and media employment, the abundance of internships causes more irritation and grumbling than when the job markets are robust. In pre-Web recessions, there wasn’t an easy way to surface such irritation. Today, there is.

But this doesn’t get to the root questions of whether there’s anything wrong with relying on unpaid internships, or whether there’ many more of them these days.

Anyone got answers, or guesses?

--TMZ.com broke the news about Michael Jackson’s death.

--Columbia S.C.’s daily newspaper The State did an old-school stakeout at Atlanta’s Hartsfield airport to break the news about Gov. Mark Sanford’s trip to Buenos Aires. (They also had the emails.)

--UPDATE: And the Huffington Post's Nico Pitney asked the President a question at a press conference, a development that, for some reason, some folks found newsworthy.

Verdict: Either “everybody wins!” or “there’s something for everyone in these results” or "who cares?" You decide.

But can we please agree to stop using each major breaking news story as an excuse to flog your favored hobby horse, whether it’s “new media can’t do what traditional media can” or “old media is sluggish and nonresponsive”?

There's no reason we have to choose between old and new, 'kay?

But while I may be convinced that that the Economist’s admiredness-to-actually-being-read ratio tops that of every other magazine on the planet, including The New Yorker—a magazine I do actually read, but is notorious for existing primarily in unread piles atop nighttables—The Economist is managing the feat of bettering its business in an absolutely gruesome market.

For the year ending March 31, sayeth paidcontent.org:

Economist Group posted operating profits 26 percent higher than last year at £56 million and revenue 17 percent better revenue of £313 million.

The profit numbers were boosted, the company admits, by layoffs. But the revenue growth is what surprises me. You don’t hear many stories like among old-media companies these days, regardless of the dismissive things said about your primary product by certain irritable media columnists.

But forget how they appeared to one guy (and to those who commented on said guy’s blog). Are the ads working?

Data provided by a company called Zeta Interactive suggests they might be.

According to said Zeta rep, it’s sort of a good-news, bad-news situation:

The campaign strategy seems to be paying off, as GM buzz is currently at 73 positive and 27 percent negative over the past two weeks, compared to being only 59 percent positive in the month leading up to the campaign launch – a 14 percent positive buzz increase.

[In comparison] to Toyota, however, the GM brand still has a lot of catching up to do (no surprise there). Toyota’s buzz over the past month has remained consistently positive, coming in at 81 percent positive overall, and the overall volume of posts around the Toyota brand is 12 percent higher than GM.

If we widen the lens a bit and see how car brands have done with Zeta Buzz in the past 90 days, we see—interestingly--that Ford has done remarkably well, with a 76 percent “positive” buzz rating. Chrysler? Not so much. 64% positive. But that’s still better than GM, which over the past 90 days had 57 percent positive posts.

But! This means that in the period after the “Reinvention” ad campaign launched, by Zeta’s metric GM is remarkably outperforming its prior performance.

(In case you’re wondering, Toyota outclassed the field again over the 90 day timeframe, with 83 percent positive posts versus 17 percent that were negative.)

Now, are all of GM’s recent gains due to the ad campaign? Of course not. GM’s situation is not neatly vacuum-sealed from any other influence. It is the subject of a massive, complicated, and multileveled story playing out in real time. And it’s plausible that the natural pendulum swing of the news cycle has, moved slightly away from GM being broken and beaten-down since the bankruptcy filing: the one true bias of news organizations is to look for a countervailing narrative when the storyline gets too familiar.

Nevertheless, no matter what I or other commentators wrote about it, it bodes better for the “reinvention” campaign that GM’s chatter is trending in this direction, rather than the other one.

I’m nowhere near so sanguine as he is that getting people to pay online will be so doable. Not that the big newspaper and magazine and TV players won’t try; some of those houses are burning down so quickly that their occupants no longer have a choice. But there’s a very big difference between putting a tollbooth up and stopping motorists from flocking to the other free roads available to them.

I typically do a terrible job remembering and notating exactly what was said in such onstage situations. Luckily CNET’s Caroline McCarthy was all over today’s session. Read her full account, but some of her Diller quotes appear after the jump:

(Tim Shey’s Twitter feed quotes Diller as saying Internet video “is going to get paid for” as well.)

"People were so frightened of not being dinosaurs, and [burying] their heads, and not having what happened to the music industry happen to them, they just slapped everything up on the Internet for free," he said. "That's an accidental historical moment that will absolutely be corrected."

"One of the greatest barriers to buying things is the steps that it takes, and we all know the difference when you go to Amazon and you just push your little thing and it's bought, paid for, delivered, billed, et cetera., instantly, and how much that has enabled or how much that has made the difference between just browsing and buying...that little thing, that in fact you scroll it, you do it, it comes, everything else is taken care of, is the answer to what's going to happen on the Internet when, in fact, we get the applicability of that broadly."

That last bit appears to endorse the work of Steve Brill’s upcoming Journalism Online launch, which promises to have a single payment system that will work across the paid-only areas of many different sites, and which will debut later this year.

As for me, I wish it were such a simple leap from iphone applications to paying for content online. It’s one thing to pay for a utility—like a souped-up GPS for iPhones that don’t come with it—and another thing entirely to pay for a short video or an article. Yes, people pay for songs and movies and TV show episodes on iTunes. But these are much more durable artifacts. You can consume them more than once--and in some cases, many more times than "more than once"--unlike the average gag video or newspaper article. Also, uhm: many iPhone apps are really cheap. I’m not sure a New York Times app for 99 cents is going to save the company.

The bias for free content online has little to do with there being no easy way to simplify a buying process. It has to do with people being unwilling to pay for most online content. I strongly suspect that we’re going to see much broader experimentation and implementation of ways to cadge fees from online users. I’m much less sure that it’s going to be easy to get those users to go along.

I'm interviewing IAC Chairman and CEO Barry Diller onstage tomorrow at the Advertising 2.0 conference in Manhattan. There's no set agenda for our discussion, but, as you might guess, I'll be asking him questions about the whole media/advertising/Web environment, as well as about his company's strategy.

What questions would you want him to answer?

GM is, obviously, also reaching out to consumers in other ways. But how is the ad, the one to be released in the wake of GM's bankruptcy filing? Well, I can’t really tell if it’s the situation or the ad that’s deeply strange. I’ve been watching TV for decades and I’m fairly certain this is the first time I’ve heard to term “cost structure” in an ad. (UPDATE: Slate's Seth Stevenson had a much less measured response to this ad.)

But judge for yourself:

The voiceover in full:

I guess making an ad in this situation involves playing the hand you’re dealt and all. But all this raises at least as many questions as it answers. To name but one: perhaps GM might have made some of the above changes without taking billions from the US government and going Chapter 11?

But mayhaps I’m being churlish. What are your thoughts?

“Recorded music is more a marketing tool than a revenue source” for acts now, said Azoff, who also still manages the likes of The Eagles, Neil Diamond, and Christina Aguilera. His storied career, and well-earned reputation as one of the fiercest and savviest managers in the business, took flight with the Eagles, back in the Seventies when both Azoff and his artists were significantly more mustachioed and bushy-haired than they are today.

Much of what Azoff said pointed to a view of music revolving around the live music experience. This, obviously, plays into his wheelhouse as one overseeing business interests so dependent on concerts. Still, his logic is convincing, and the examples he cited concerning what he called the “demonetization” of the music business were striking.

Artists walk in to his office, Azoff said, “who used to make $300,000 to $500,000 a year in royalties [from selling recordings]. And now that’s diminished to less than $50,000” a year. This means, unsurprisingly, “the creative side” of the music business is “very anxious” about the changes that have swept this landscape.

His answer, as cringe-inducing is it may be to artistic types uncomfortable with the ways of business, is understanding the branding and promotional value of music. He cited new deals like his client Aguilera working with Procter and Gamble to launch a line of fragrances.

A glimmer of hope for his old-school artists: While Azoff said CD sales have been declining alarmingly, and especially back-catalog CD sales, that business “appears to be bottoming out.” And, he added, “I don’t think the CD will go away totally.”

Compare all this candor to the following exchange regarding TicketMaster and its proposed merger with LiveNation:

Interviewer Kara Swisher: How do you answer criticisms that [the merger] creates this behemoth.
Azoff: We think everything we do revolves around what’s good fir the artist and what’s good for the fan.

As Swisher pointed out, songwriter-cum-secular-saint Bruce Springsteen, among others, strongly objects to this view. But Azoff said that Springsteen was “uninformed” about what his company did.

I don’t necessarily agree with much of the below, but I did find it thought provoking. Posted quickly from a lightly edited transcription I took; all errors of grammar and spelling are mine.)

[In Denver, Malone’s hometown] We’ve seen one paper go out and second one is in serious financial trouble

You ask yourself, since the local newspaper has more journalists than all other media in the market combined, is it doomed? That this local newsgathering function is doomed by its technology?

The question is, what organizational structure has to evolve to make [localism] an economically viable proposition. It’s clearly under stress right now. Outdoor advertising, radio or print—it’s all under a lot of stress right now.

Am I right? Possibly. But even if you disagree, you’d certainly have to concur that when the below car ads tried to hop on some prevailing culture-of-the-moment, the viewers paid a very big price.

Datsun 280Z "Black Gold," c. 1980.

Plymouth Duster "My Duster," from a very scary moment of 1985 that I'm glad I've forgotten. (Warning: 91 seconds long.)

So people are, like, ‘yay, newspapers,’ right? Not according to data just released by the American Customer Satisfaction Index.

The first quarter ’09 Satisfaction Index data is out and can be seen in its entirety here. How did newspapers do?

Not good. In fact, really not good. In the first quarter of '09, newspaper customers’ satisfaction rating was 63. To put this in some perspective, those surveyed expressed a greater deal of satisfaction with airlines (airlines!) which scored 64. And cell phone providers (cell phone providers?) which score a 69.

(The most-satisfactory segment, per the survey? Full-service restaurants, which notched an ACSI rating of 84. Comfort food and comfort rituals for uncomfortable times.)

That’s bad enough, but what’s worse is how badly newspapers’ ACSI score has slipped since the surveys began plumbing consumer sentiment. It’s off 12.5% since the survey's debut in 1994.

This marks the steepest “satisfaction” drop of any industry in this quarter's survey.

Anyone want to hazard a guess why newspapers' scores have dropped so far?

In dollars, this means little for these companies when ad revenues—which generally make up 80%, or more, of total US newspaper revenue each year—are down more than 20%, and, in some cases, down more than 30%.

It's more illuminating when it comes to the psychology of newspaper readers, by which I mean "people who read a printed newspaper." Overall newspaper circulation declined 7% for the six months ending March 31. Thus, much of these companies' gains are coming from increased prices.

That tiny bit of pricing power indicates there’s a still a decent tie with consumers, which persisted even when backdropped by many newspaper companies declaring bankruptcy and a steep economic turndown. Lots of places that make their money from consumer spending did not show single-digit revenue growth in the first three months of 2009. (Of course, lots of places sell products that cost more than a daily newspaper.)

So, yes, even today, there remains some tenacity in readers’ attachment to print newspapers. If you’re wildly optimistic, you might extrapolate from this data that a decent percentage of readers will tolerate some sort of online pricing to read newspaper content.

Or it might mean that a portion of the readership will still pay up for the physical newspaper,

I’m not wildly optimistic, so my money’s on option #2. Still, that’s something. It ain’t gonna save newspapers, but it’s something.

It’s the hottest topic on two coasts. Why in the world would David Geffen, perhaps the shrewdest investor Hollywood has seen in years, want to plunk down $200 million or so for the 19.9% stake in the New York Times Co. held by hedge fund Harbinger Capital Partners? Like most newspapers, The New York Times, which owns its fabled Gray Lady flagship, the Boston Globe and other assorted assets, is losing tons of money. Worse yet, with ad sales that make up 59% of its overall revenues tanking and not likely to fully recover, the Times is fast becoming a non-profit institution.

This is exactly what David Geffen understands. For $200 million, the Hollywood financier, who generously contributes hefty amounts to the arts and hospitals in the LA area, would be making a financial contribution to a national institution that likely will never be a large money maker.

I suspect that Geffen would love to make another billion somewhere, but he clearly knows that The New York Times isn’t that place. Last year, the company lost $57 million. This year it has already lost nearly $75 million.

But a Times investment would be deeply personal for the billionaire. Geffen came from New York, having been born to immigrant parents who lived in Brooklyn, and he has become for the last three decades a fixture in the power structure of the city. He grew up reading The New York Times, and knows its power as a national oracle. (He, after all, helped hobble Hillary Clinton’s fundraising efforts with a well-aimed barb to Times columnist and friend Maureen Dowd in which he said the Clintons lie with “with such ease, it’s troubling.”)

With its annual haul of Pulitzer Prizes, The New York Times is a journalistic giant and a national treasure. And, as I am sure that Geffen knows well, it is also an impassioned voice for the liberal causes that Geffen likely holds dear. Would he like to make sure it continues as the Oracle of the Big Apple? Does a Hollywood mogul live behind a large gate (and Geffen’s walls are the largest in town)? You betcha.

Harbinger would not comment, but a source close to the matter says that the firm “hasn’t made a decision concerning The New York Times.” This source also confirms that Geffen approached Harbinger and that Harbinger declined the offer. Geffen’s overture was first reported on Fortune's Web site.

So does Geffen make another bid for the Times, or was his offer to Harbinger just a passing fancy? That’s harder to say. He tried in 2006 to buy The Los Angeles Times, and I suspect that, too, would have likely gone from its alleged status as a profit-seeking venture to non-profit status had he won it. He backed out because the asking price was too high.

So, this is not a new idea to him. And while Geffen famously refuses to over-pay, my bet is that he and the Harbinger folks are likely still talking, or that they will before too long. Geffen these days is spending a lot of time on the 453-foot-long (yes, you heard that right) super-yacht he shares with Oracle founder Larry Ellison, and recently returned from Thailand.

Eventually he would likely run out of places to visit. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t voyages he still wants to take.

Carlos Watson, MSNBC daytime anchor and weekend host on Air America (his co-host on the radio network is one A. Huffington), is the CEO and backer of the site.

I wrote a story on Watson and his new launch for businessweek.com over the weekend. It can be found here.