The broader economy is showing signs that we can at least interpret as positive, but this doesn't extend to the media industry, it seems. Condé Nast's ad page results are out for its 2009 issues, now that the last issue of the year has been sold for each of them ... and the situation is grim.

Condé Nast lost 8,359 ad pages this year, according to a report released on Wednesday. Ad pages have plunged 30% this year. Cost cutting has been used to offset the revenue declines, with more than 450 positions removed this year and several magazines shuttered, including Gourmet and Modern Bride.

Vibe, the urban music magazine, is clawing its way back to life. New owners and editors are trying to make the magazine a success reality again, and they are making the web a priority ... which shouldn't be news but is for an ailing print industry.

The new editor-in-chief, Jermaine Hall, told AdAge that "Vibe.com is really the hub," and that everything needs to point back to the online presence. The print publication will be just one part of the Vibe Lifestyle Network, a move we're also seeing with the likes of Rolling Stone, where the website is being brought back into the fold (and may actually get some resources).

Eventually, Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) will just be Warner Brothers, HBO, and Turner Networks, says Gordon Crawford, managing director of The Capital Group.

Why does this guy's opinion matter? Well, his company is Time Warner's biggest shareholder. He sees the coming divestiture of AOL (to which BloggingStocks belongs) as part of a broader effort that will eventually include the sale of its print division.

Rolling Stone magazine recently published a fortieth anniversary issue celebrating the magazine's tenure in the popular culture business. After reading the issue and wading through the multitude of advertisements, I started thinking about Rolling Stone as the precursor to so many of the music magazines in existence today and how these kinds of media serve the record industry in an increasingly digital world. Forty years ago, Rolling Stone may have been an inventive method to sell music, with interviews and features about artists, but as it is now the magazine and its followers are hardly what they claim to be: music magazines.

The very notion of a "music magazine" is quickly becoming outdated, as is found simply by perusing through the articles and features through most of the print I purchase regularly. Compare it to other, older magazines, like the British NME and you will find that the Rolling Stone falls down in coverage simply because there is an overabundance of non-music advertisements. Even other contemporary magazines, like Blender, manage to advertise the actual music, while both sell the digital devices that are quickly becoming the mediums of music transferal.

If championing the music is the goal, which presumably it is, Rolling Stone has never seemed far from what we call "mainstream," so it hardly has the capacity to introduce new bands and compete with the growth of online services like Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG)'s YouTube or News Corporation (NYSE: NWS)'s MySpace. Even other magazines quickly champion lesser known bands into mass-popularity. Consider NME, the magazine was a massive supporter of the Arctic Monkeys and they quickly became more popular than they had been, even with the online support. With the weekly issue NME prints, the publisher keeps a more up-to-date and consistent online news service, signaling that the move online is not contained to artists.