Is the newspaper advertising slump about to end? Nope. But it’s continuing to get a little bit less awful.

The New York Times polled some of the remaining analysts covering the industry, as well as people who actually work in it, and concluded that Q3 ad revenue will be down 25 percent, or “possibly a bit less.” Awful by any standard except those of this year: Q1 was down 28.3 percent and Q2 was 29 percent.

Worth noting, but not in a newsworthy way: We’ve been headed in this direction for a while. Publishers, including the New York Times (NYT), Gannett (GCI) and McClatchy (MNI), started making hopeful murmurs–or less hopeless murmurs, really–earlier this summer. But all they’re really saying is that:

• Things don’t seem to be getting any worse, and
• It’s nearly impossible for year-over-year comparisons not to improve for the rest of the year since results will be measured against those posted in the fall of 2008, when the economy was in shocked-and-awed mode. Which we knew. But still worth repeating, and something we’ll probably repeat many more times through the rest of this year.

Getty’s involvement with Daylife is actually several months old. The amount of the investment, but not the investor, was previously disclosed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. Daylife announced the deal today in conjunction with another Getty tie-up–a deal to create photo-curating tools for online publishers.

Daylife formally launched in January 2007 with a good deal of buzz, due primarily to its high-profile investors, which included the New York Times (NYT), Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington. The initial plan was to create both content-aggregation tools for publishers as well as a destination site, but the latter never took off and is now just a demo site for customers.

CEO Upendra Shardanand says the company has found traction as a white-label aggregation engine, though he won’t disclose revenue for the 26-person company. Clients include Gannett’s (GCI) USA Today, GE’s (GE) USA Networks and News Corp.’s (NWS) Sky News.

[Image credit: Tallest man in the world visits London, via Getty]

Last week, Gannett (GCI) said national ads had only dropped 12 percent in June, compared to a 24 percent slide the previous year. Yesterday, McClatchy (MNI) said that while ad revenue was down 30 percent in the last quarter, this figure was at least stable compared to the previous quarter, and that things were picking up, just a bit, this summer. And today Media General (MEG) said its declines had also become a bit less severe.

Tomorrow we hear from the New York Times (NYT), and if we use the the very low bar set by its peers, there’s a decent chance the publisher will have a not-terrible story to tell.

That’s because the Times had previously warned that its Q2 would look as unpleasant as its Q1, when its ad sales dropped 27 percent; anything less lousy will constitute a win. Investors seem eager to hear about it: NYT shares are trading up today along with many other newspaper publishers.

And again, be very wary of overvaluing these numbers, particularly as we get farther along into summer and fall. At that point, the comps will be measured against last year’s black hole of an economy, and any company that can’t show an improvement against that performance will likely be DOA.

Still. It’s a very nice day in New York, and newspapers deserve a shot of good news. Enjoy.

We know that, in general, the papers have been talking about ways to make more money from their products, including subscriptions and microtransactions, and have been talking about this for months. And we know, via the Atlantic’s James Warren, that the subject of yesterday’s meeting was “Models to Monetize Content” and that the agenda included sessions titled “Journalism Online: Presentation on proposed service to charge for access to newspaper content and to license that content that (sic) online aggregators” and “Fair Syndication Consortium/Attributor.”

That first session sounds pretty straightforward. What’s that second one about? I asked the PR firm that reps Attributor, the content-tracking service referred to in the session’s title, and it declined comment. But it did refer me to the Web page for the Fair Syndication Consortium, which it turns out is the name for the Attributor-led program that wants to get the likes of Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO) to share some of the ad revenue they make when they sell ads against copyrighted content.

You can read more about that in this Wall Street Journal story published in April. See? Not so mysterious, after all.

So that’s a big deal. But it has also been expected for some time now. So what should you be looking for?

As Barron’s Eric Savitz notes, Wall Street analysts have been furiously tweaking their estimates–generally downward–in advance of this afternoon’s report. Citigroup’s (C) ever-helpful Mark Mahaney provides the following “cheat sheet” that lays out the key metrics, along with a range of possible results (click to enlarge):

I’ll also be interested in what, if any, color Google (GOOG) offers about its nascent move into display advertising and if it can clarify exactly what is going on at YouTube–is the video site bleeding $500 million a year, as Credit Suisse has recently suggested, or is it “nearing break-even,” as Bernstein’s Jeffrey Lindsay argued in a note yesterday?

And given that Google is the first big Internet company to report this quarter–and, aside from Gannett (GCI), the first big media company to report–I’ll also be interested in whatever Eric Schmidt and company have to say about the advertising market in general. The Google earnings call is scheduled to start at 4:30 p.m. Eastern; you can find live coverage here.

If you’re one of the few people gambling on Gannett (GCI) stock, you’ll want to note that the company’s earnings per share, after factoring out one-time gains, came in at 25 cents. That’s a penny better than the street’s estimate. And the company recorded $1.38 billion in revenue, missing the $1.44 billion consensus.

The rest of you care about Gannett because you want to get a sense of how bad the advertising market was for newspapers and local TV during the first three months of 2009. Short version: Very bad.

Relevant numbers:

Publishing advertising revenue: Down 34.1 percent (or down 29.8 percent if you exclude currency fluctuation)

Classified ad revenue: Down 46.5 percent

USA Today ad revenue: Down 33.5 percent (which is where Gannett had warned it would be

TV revenue: Down 14.9 percent

Later this afternoon, we’ll get a look at a different media industry bellwether when Google (GOOG) provides its report card. It’s not going to look nearly as bad, obviously, but by the very high standards of the search giant, it’s still going to be upsetting. More on that in a bit.

In the old days, this might have qualified as news. But for the past year or so, Zenith Optimedia, along with just about every other ad forecaster, has been revising its forecasts downward every couple of months as the reality of the financial meltdown sinks in. So it’s hard to get worked up about this stuff.

More stuff you pretty much knew already: Online advertising is doing better than traditional ads.

Citigroup (C) analyst Mark Mahaney summarizes his chat with the CEOs of PubMatic and the Rubicon Project, which help online publishers sell inventory through ad networks. Their takeaway is that while pricing for online display ads has dropped dramatically in the past couple quarters–by as much as 50 percent in some cases–overall spending should remain flat this year. And as we all know, that’s the new up.

If you’d like to see concrete numbers from the ad market, hang tight until Thursday, when we’ll get earnings reports from two companies at the opposite end of the media spectrum: Gannett (GCI) and Google (GOOG).

That revelation is supposedly what goosed shares in Gannett (GCI) 34 percent today. The problem with that theory: The same news–that Ariel Investments LLC had more than doubled its stake in the company, from 4.5 to 12.5 percent–had already caused Gannett shares to jump 39 percent last Thursday when the news was first disclosed.

The more obvious and less savory reason for Gannett’s share swings today, as noted by Editor & Publisher’s Fitz & Jen:  a short squeeze. About 30 percent of the company’s shares are shorted, and now that GCI shares are down in the $5 range–less than a year ago, they traded above $31–you’re likely to see this kind of volatility on any given day.

In any case, the excitement appears to be over: As I type this, GCI shares are back down to the $4 level, just a bit above where they opened this morning.

If you’re looking for actual news about Gannett’s performance, you can tune in on Thursday, when the company releases its quarterly report card. Or you can read this prediction from The Wall Street Journal, which wins the concision award–spoiler alert!–with this headline: “Gannett Earnings Set To Show Depth Of Industry’s Decline.”

So what’s left to sell? The front page.

Today’s edition of the Times features the first display ad the paper has ever sold on its front page. We’re talking about the print edition here–the Times Web site has long been strewn with ads, including those annoying/awesome Apple (AAPL) ads that stretched across most of the front page.

Given that it’s a historic move, the ad in question is a pretty dull piece of marketing: A modest little thing promoting programming at CBS (CBS). Behold! (It’s all the way at the bottom, in case you’re confused.)

Then again, this is only historic because the Times management has been so stubborn about keeping its front page pristine. It’s hard to imagine that any reader will care.

As the Times itself informs us, The Wall Street Journal (owned by Dow Jones, which also owns this site) sold ads on its front page even prior to its acquisition by Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. (NWS); so does Gannett’s (GCI) USA Today and Tribune’s Los Angeles Times. Now the only major holdout is the Washington Post (WPO).

But the Washington Post is owned by a parent company that’s still actually relatively healthy (because it’s not actually a media company, but an education company).

And you can’t say that about the Times, which reported a miserable November and has a looming cash crunch. So if the paper can find anything else it can sell, expect to it part ways with that, too.

That’s what’s happening at Gannett Blog, where former Gannett (GCI) employee Jim Hopkins is asking other former Gannett employees to share the details of their layoffs. Unfortunately, there are a lot of them to talk about–Hopkins, via a network of Gannett tipsters, has tallied up about 1,000 cuts just in this round alone.

Some of them pass along memos from managers announcing cuts at specific papers and publications. Others pass along unverified tips. Hopkins, a 20-year Gannett veteran who took a buyout from the newspaper chain in January, is asking people to send in their personal stories. Here’s one:

I sat across from Executive Editor and heard words: restructuring, position, sorry, future. I said nothing. I listened to HR woman painfully recite her lines and all I could think was: her day is as bad as ours. She was the only one close to tears. I walked back to my desk to get my things and gave my colleagues a sad smile. I said nothing. I started forwarding emails to my editor, tying up loose ends and then I thought: just say nothing.”

And, yes, I’m reporting on layoffs too. At Time Warner’s (TWX) Time Inc., for instance, where cuts are still ongoing, I’m told a few dozen people were laid off at the company’s IT department last week.

So if you want to pass along information, please do. It’s more helpful if you send it directly to me via peter@allthingsd.com. But if you want to be completely anonymous, you can use the blind tip box here.