Abbey Klaassen

Time spent with the Internet, as it turns out, doesn't balloon indefinitely. That might sound obvious, but this is the year web surfing leveled off at 12 hours a week.

Twitter's been the toast of TV news programs, daytime talk shows, magazine editors and newspaper reporters. But what's all that chatter worth? According to news-monitoring service VMS, a cool $48 million over the past 30 days.

Unlike the last recession around 2001, when local markets stayed relatively insulated from the fallout of the dot-com bust, they are anything but immune to this one. And that's bad news for local media.

The inconvenient truth is that for all its new-media spin, display advertising is "old" media -- a commercial message to be placed next to editorial or entertainment content. And we know by now that measured-media growth has pretty much ground to a halt as marketers continue to increase their dollars in unmeasured disciplines such as web development, public relations and database marketing at the expense of paid advertising.