The year-in-review essay or chart is a journalism staple at this time of year—and not only because journalists and media commentators start phoning it in sometime around Thanksgiving. The relentless forward motion of the news cycle demands a brief pause to assess the jumble of news and news-like filler of the previous year. For one week of the year, we need to look back before the RSS feed refreshes and the headline roundelay starts anew.

Only a fool—or a masochist—would want to look back at 2009 in media. By almost any measure, it was a very bad year. Defined by layoffs, industry-wide belt-tightening, razor-thin revenues, and the closures of well-known publications, 2009 was a year most journalists (if they're still able to call themselves that as the new year dawns) want to put out their minds. Far out their minds.

In an effort to make some sense of 2009, let's look at some institutions (beloved or otherwise) that died this year. Since each vacant slot on the newsstand or gap in the programming schedule opens an opportunity (however small) for new a venture to break out, the death list is followed by a series of birth announcements, heralding newcomers who were idealistic (or crazy) enough to start up in 2009.

AOL-Time Warner: After nearly nine years, the long-in-the-tooth old-media giant and the once shiny, subscriber-bloated Internet dial-up and community service called it quits. AOL got a new CEO in Google's Tim Armstrong, shed a small-town-population's worth of staff via Project Everest, and rebranded itself with a new set of logos and less triumphant name, Aol. (Period included.) Time Warner shed some staff of its own, with as many as 540 people at Time Inc. being laid off before the year's end. One upshot: After this nearly decade-long failed attempt at blending corporate cultures and wrestling various company tentacles into something approximating an embrace, business "gurus" and journalists can finally retire the word synergy, a meaningless buzzword thrown about for far too long. A far back as 2002, Rob Walker writing for the New York Times op-ed page tried to put this bit of junk business philosophy out to pasture. AOL-Time Warner's failure offers a nine-year case study that should erase it from the management textbooks for good.

Ben Silverman: No, NBC Entertainment and NBC Universal Studio's former co-chairman did not actually die in 2009 (probably to the chagrin of more than a few bloggers and anonymous—though suspiciously informed—commenters), but his two-year reign of error did end at the peacock network. Silverman's tenure started out rocky when the agent-turned-producer-turned-executive gave a cocky interview to Esquire's Matthew Belloni in which he referred to his rivals at ABC and CBS as "basically D-girls," and rumors of drug use were floated by writers like Deadline Hollywood's Nikki Finke. All of which wouldn't matter if Silverman had delivered the network some solid hits: Instead, he brought NBC American Gladiators, Lipstick Jungle, Knight Rider, and Kath & Kim. As a final insult, he and NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker gave Jay Leno a five-nights-a-week prime-time show, for which the ratings have been consistently disappointing. Since no one really dies in the media business, Silverman has teamed up with Barry Diller on a reported $100 million venture. So far, the only thing that venture has managed to produce was a pretty good punchline for NBC's 30 Rock. (So much for show runner and star Tina Fey's gratitude for her old boss.)

Jobs: According to one report from News Cycle, a website that tracks newspaper layoffs, more than 15,000 people in the newspaper industry lost their jobs this year. Add to that the weekly rounds of layoffs at magazine publishers, content companies like AOL, and severe cutbacks in freelance budgets for writers, and it seems like one of the worst casualties of 2009 was what we used to affectionately refer to as "hacks," anyone who made a living writing. (However nominal that living—and, to be honest, some of that writing—might seem at times.) Even the most gilded of media aeries were not left untarnished: Condé Nast (which shares a parent company with the publisher of Portfolio.com) closed a handful of titles and reduced staff at most of its magazines, and the New York Times eliminated 100 jobs from its newsroom. There are no more jobs for life; no journalist, no matter how many awards he or she has won or what impressive scoops he or she can claim, can feel fully secure.

Longstanding Titles: Many of the publications shut down this year were anything but fledgling titles struggling to get their footing in a bad economy. E.W. Scripps closed the 150-year-old Rocky Mountain News; Hearst pulled the plug on the print edition of the 146-year-old Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and the 100-year-old Christian Science Monitor abandoned its print edition. Nielsen Business Media shuttered Editor & Publisher (founded in 1901) and The Kirkus Reviews (founded in 1933), publications devoted to tracking newspaper business and book publishing, respectively. On the glossier side of the newsstand, Condé Nast folded Gourmet, its beloved 70-year-old food magazine. While not closed, McGraw-Hill's 80-year-old BusinessWeek was sold to Bloomberg, LP, finding its identity subsumed by its new "borg-like" host, and its name changed to Bloomberg BusinessWeek. 100 of its employees were cut, a smaller title, BusinessWeek Small Biz, was absorbed, and longtime columnists replaced by Bloomberg pal Charlie Rose.