Yesterday, Viacom told Wall Street that its third quarter had been better than most analysts expected. Today Time Warner delivered a similar report: Revenue was on track, but cost savings improved the bottom line. That won’t help hundreds of Time Inc. employees who face job cuts this quarter. Meanwhile, the company can’t ditch AOL soon enough: It has already spent $100 million prepping it for a spinoff this year.

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Many newspaper publishers say the ad sales slump has stopped, but not at Wapo: Both print and Web ad declines accelerated over the last quarter. Newsweek, meanwhile, saw its ad sales drop by half.

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The good news: Two of music’s biggest acts helped slow the industry’s sales slump last quarter. The bad news: It’s still slumping. And the Fab Four and MJ are probably out of tricks.

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We saw a mini-rally in newspaper shares yesterday, based on the notion that the worst may be over for the industry. But the New York Times’s Q2 results are pretty inconclusive:
The publisher was able to take a big chunk out of costs, but revenue kept plunging, and Web ads dropped by more than 15 percent. The paper did say, though, that things got less bad as the quarter progressed, and that they’ll get slightly less bad next quarter, too.

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This is now an Apple earnings-call tradition: Analysts try their hardest to convince Apple executives to express interest in the booming market for cheap netbooks and Apple executives make it perfectly clear how much disdain they have for netbooks. But an $800 iTablet? That’s something else altogether…

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While it’s true that Time Warner’s magazine unit is embattled, there are bright spots in the portfolio. Take People.com: The gossip magazine has always been one of Time Inc.’s strongest performers. Now its companion site is, too. Who gets credit? Some of it goes to celebs like Ashlee Simpson, and their babies.

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Are you still thinking there might be growth in the online ad market next year? Perhaps this will disabuse you of the notion: New numbers from an industry trade group indicate that growth has already stopped for everyone except Google.

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