News Corporation boss Rupert Murdoch told the Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital conference that print newspapers would outlast him. Not so sure. Industry analyst Mark Potts has been telling clients that rising online advertising will finally offset the decline of print revenues by about 2012. (That's his chart on the right, with online revenue in red making up for the shrinking blue, so overtaken by events that it now represents the optimistic scenario.) But the American Journalism Review challenges Potts' assumptions: traditional newspaper revenues are declining more rapidly than the analyst predicted; and the AJR's Charles Layton reckons their websites will never make up the difference (see left). Ouch.

Television networks, still reeling from strike-related ratings slips, have gone and broken the glass on their last-resort failsafe. They're cutting costs on reality shows. Executives are looking to further streamline the already seductively cheap 'n easy (that's why there are so many of 'em!) younger siblings of scripted programming by cutting down on non-studio filming and long editing times. Expect more shows, like the odious hit game show Moment of Truth (where contestants reveal terrible secrets while drooling for cash), that really only amount to "two people sitting in chairs onstage." More expensive reality shows like Hell's Kitchen need to be overseas hits before American networks will consider producing their own versions, which doesn't happen every day. What could this mean for reality favorites like Top Chef, Project Runway, and America's Next Top Model? We have some grim forecasts after the jump.

Hip hop, as a business, is on the slow downward slope of its peak of several years ago. The traditional music industry as a whole is crumbling under assault from online distribution. And print magazines, of course, are one of the most perilous business ventures in all media. So the launch this month of the print-based Hip Hop Business Journal is truly an idea that takes after one of its cultural heroes; it combines Tupac Shakur's heedless, go-for-it bravery, his headstrong pride, and his inevitable tendency to die young.

Angelo Mozilo is the CEO of disastrous mortgage lender Countrywide, and one of the most overpaid, reviled, and villainous business executives in America today. He's drawn huge salaries even as his company led to the way for the subprime mortgage collapse. So you might expect the guy to be surrounded at all times by a team of highly-paid image consultants, ensuring that every word out of his mouth in some way helped to resurrect his shattered reputation. Wrong, bitches! With a classic "Hitting reply instead of forward" move, Mozilo inadvertently let a desperate homeowner (and the world) know what he thought of his plea for help: "Disgusting.":

To help promote the 50th anniversary of Disneyland, Disney launched a free "Virtual Magic Kingdom" website, where fans could make little avatars and walk around the virtual theme park doing little virtual activities. The VMK was originally scheduled to run for 18 months. But now, three years after it launched, the site is still going. Why? Because creepy Disney-obsessed adults who scare everyone have staked their claim to the site, and they're not about to let the company shut down this free temporary children's amusement. Their very identities depend upon it! The company says it makes no money on the site, and it needs to shutter it and move on. The fans say: we are creepy obsessed adults, and we are picketing your theme parks. As well as making slick protest websites, which showcase their virtual "Save VMK" protest videos. Like this one, in which a virtual boy in a feathered head dress persuades the multibillion-dollar corporation to listen to reason:

Going to the movies is already way too expensive. In Manhattan, two tickets, a large popcorn, and a drink will run you more than $30. And since most movies suck, it's a hefty gamble. But "the price of movie tickets is expected to skyrocket by as much as 30% this year." What? Shouldn't competition from the internet and Netflix be driving the price of tickets down? How the hell can this happen? Besides the fact that Adam Sandler ain't getting any cheaper, this cinematic economic time bomb all comes down to one thing: precious, precious corn.

Ethiopia doesn't have the world's most sterling reputation. Many people think of "famine" and "drought" when the country's name is mentioned. But the Ethiopians are lucky, in the sense that Starbucks has forged a connection between the parched and war-torn nation in northern Africa and yuppie coffee swillers across America who just adore the subtle fruity undertones of the Ethiopian Yirgacheffe blend. So the country went to a branding firm to come up with a logo to stick on all of its coffee, to make people think of it as more of a luxury item. The logo is pictured. It looks like it should be in lime green on the side of can of a new and exotic type of energy drink. Instead, it's on the oldest energy drink ever. The kind that comes from Ethiopia (and is not qat)! We wish the country well in its yuppie-swindling mission, but we would have gone with a logo that's a little more cutting edge, with both hipster appeal and a strong connection to Ethiopian history. Like this:

We hear that People magazine paid around $2 million (if not more) for the recent wedding pictures of Barbie-like singer Mariah Carey and younger actor Nick Cannon. People triumphed in a bidding war with OK!. This surely rates as one of the biggest paydays of Cannon's career, if not his wife's. And that figure would make their photos even pricier than the baby pictures of Nicole Richie and Christina Aguilera, though only half as valuable as Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's baby shots of Shiloh. Does Mariah still move that many magazines?

Overseas outsourcing of newspaper jobs started years ago as a slow trickle, mostly from IT departments and the like. As the financial prospects of the newspaper industry have declined, outsourcing has come to be viewed as more of a necessity. Even news jobs have been sent to India, although that is still a relative rarity. More common—and more threatening, if you happen to be a US newspaper employee—is the large-scale outsourcing of advertising department work. People in India can assemble newspaper ads just as well as people here, and "many sources agreed that a back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that metro newspapers can realize a savings of about $500,000 a year when ad production work is offshored."

David Rothkopf, a highly educated scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, penned an explosive op-ed for the Washington Post that could upend the global power structure and spark revolution across the earth. Because it seems that our world—far from being one in which each of the 6 billion humans shares in an equal portion of the political, economic, and cultural power, as you had believed—is actually run by a "superclass" of people who control everything. Rothkopf reports, in direct contradiction to everything that your third grade social studies teacher promised you, that very powerful people are, in fact, very powerful. Bummer!

In a cost-cutting move that is, frankly, kind of sad, the DC bureau of the legendary Hearst Newspapers chain has moved into the same office space as McClatchy's DC bureau [E&P]. "They just have a small area in the back of our offices, they have three rows of work stations," a McClatchy manager said. Your front line watchdogs of democracy, ladies and gentlemen. Among the new denizens of the cramped, back office workspace is 87 year-old Hearst columnist and prime Bush tormentor Helen Thomas. She really deserves better. But, death of print and all that. Below, a classic news conference clip of Thomas questioning the president about the Iraq war, to his discomfort.

So, major music magazines: are they in trouble or what? The music industry is driven by young influencers, who are some of the most tech-savvy people in the world, meaning they're turning away from print magazines in droves, if they haven't already. In addition to that, the majority of major music magazines are crap. Ad revenue at most of them plummeted in the first quarter: Blender's revenue was down 9%; Vibe's was down 19%; and Rolling Stone's was down 27% (Spin was up 27%, huzzah). But savvy managers like Blender publisher Ben Madden aren't concerned, because they know that you all turn to them when you want to real authentic info, man:

Maybe the possibility of an impending recession hasn't hit home for you yet, comfortable as you are with your South-Park-cafe Wi-Fi connection. But as this clip documents, times are tough in such middle American towns as South Park, Colorado.

Here's a clip of Fox Business Network personality Cheryl Casone explaining, in her role as totally impartial economic expert, why Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama's tax plans are so misguided: because the rich pay most of the taxes already! "Most middle and low income earners not only don't pay income taxes, they end up getting money back in their returns. So somebody needs to kinda work on their math a little bit. *Snort*." Right, except for middle class people like you and me who get money back that we overpaid on the thousands of dollars in taxes we already had taken out of our checks throughout the year, not to mention sales taxes. (Standard deduction on taxable income for single people this year: $8,750). Click to watch, then go register as a Republican.

Greedy professional athletes these days are making it harder and harder for their layabout friends to sponge money off them and land them in jail. TREND ALERT. It seems that athletic superstars and journeymen alike are getting their entourages more organized, incorporating them into real businesses and paying their hangers-on set salaries rather than just giving them unchecked credit cards and free cars [WSJ]. And then there's the NFL cornerback who pays his helpers on a per-task basis, like when "he gave one of his freelancers $5 to fetch him a Snickers bar." So it's still an evolving sphere of economics. One of the players cited is Mike Bibby, a slightly above-average NBA point guard who has organized his friends into "Team Dime" (he's #10!). That's nice and everything, but probably not worth the permanent tattoos, which send the lifelong message: "I was a member of an entourage for a slightly above-average NBA player":

Slate's pop-economist (every important media outlet is required to have a pop-economist who misuses the analytical tools of his inexact science to "prove" unlikely and surprising things each week) explains that housing foreclosures are good because after people are kicked out of their homes, other people get to move into those homes. Relevant excerpt: "I could use economics to explain why those readers are mistaken (a glut of homes on the market leads to falling prices, etc.), but that's unnecessarily complicated." [Slate]

Berkeley professor and Google's chief economist, Hal Varian:

It's humiliating enough that European tourists, marveling at the decline of the dollar, treat a visit to New York like a trip to the factory outlet. Mike Albo, in the latest installment of his occasional column, channels an even more annoying type: the returning expat.

Barely a month ago, Randolph Harrison at the Capitalism 2.0 blog sent in an extensive analysis of Second Life's economy that likened it to a pyramid scheme. Second Lifers reacted with dramatic venom, such that Harrison was apparently forced to abandon his research: