In your energizing Wednesday media column: ad spending is rising towards an inevitable deadly explosion, Yahoo hires some good writers, AOL enters the food blog wars, and a Cleveland reporter is a wanted man.

  • Huzzah, green shoots in the media advertising landscape! If you look at the very positive side of things. New numbers show US ad spending was down more than 12% in 2009. But the good news is it was only down 6% in the fourth quarter, which could mean that the rate of decline is rapidly decreasing, and soon ad spending will start going right back up again, and media people can have jobs once more. Using arithmetical calculation, we see that if the numbers keep following this progression, ad spending will have increased 66% by the end of 2012. Mark of the beast, apocalypse, numerology. It's all here.
  • Yahoo has hired Chris Lehmann and our own (former) Cajun Boy for an upcoming news/ culture/ media site thing that is described very vaguely, but which has been in the works for months and months now. We hope it will be almost as good as this site, but not quite.
  • And in other internet blog publishing news things! AOL is launching a recipe site called Kitchen Daily with some Conde Nast refugees at the helm, all ready to take on Epicurious. Food blog wars are the World Wars of the food blog world, a wise man once said.
  • Oh shit: a judge has ordered the arrest of a Cleveland Plain-Dealer reporter after the reporter failed to show up in court for a hearing about how the reporter, Gabriel Baird, obtained some confidential documents about a serial killer suspect. Dude even if you go to jail this will make such an awesome movie, don't even sweat it.

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