It's a disorienting time in the media business. Consumers can read newspapers on their mobile phones, watch TV shows on their iPods, and befriend advertisers in cyberspace.

To help you get your bearings, we've identified five big-picture developments crucial to understanding the industry in 2008.

An Advertising Recession?

This is the subject weighing most heavily on the minds of media executives. "It's certainly topic No. 1 around here," says Reed Phillips, managing partner of the investment bank DeSilva & Phillips.

A slew of recent forecasts have made it clear that a slowdown is already under way. The question is, how bad it will get in 2008?

Robert Coen, senior vice president at Universal McCann and an influential forecaster of advertising trends, wrote in a recent report that 2007 ad growth will fall "considerably short" of forecasts. And it's likely to slow further in 2008.

The outlook would be even gloomier without the prospects of the Olympics and the presidential election, two traditionally rich sources of ads. The election alone represents a potential $2.5 billion windfall for television and radio stations, says Mark Edmiston, managing director of AdMedia Partners.

To many, the recession question is less about how steep it will be than where it will be felt most.

Phillips says print outlets that have already been losing market share to the Web—particularly weekly news magazines and newspapers—will find their suffering increased. Glossy monthly magazines and others that compete less directly with the internet will fare better.

The writers' strike will hurt TV networks, which will be forced to broadcast reruns or pilots they had rejected. Cable networks, on the other hand, should benefit, as viewers channel surf for new shows and find cable programs they might otherwise have missed.

An advertising recession, should one occur, would probably not hurt digital media. The explosive growth of ad networks—firms that place advertising on websites—will make it easier for advertisers to spend money on the internet.

"It's going to bring fundamental changes to the architecture of the advertising business," says Jeff Jarvis, a media consultant who writes about the industry on Buzzmachine.com.

Another New Ad Medium

Even as established media worry about wrestling with the prospect of slower growth in 2008, they will also have to deal with more competition from a new class of competitor: the social networking sites.

Assumptions about the potential of social networks as an ad medium, at least among some experts, can be gauged by Microsoft's willingness to pay $240 million for just 1.6 percent of Facebook, the reigning social-networking champ. That sum implies that the privately held company's total worth is a staggering $15 billion.

An initial effort to realize Facebook's potential as an ad medium, with an ad program called Beacon, fell flat over users' privacy concerns. It suggests that Facebook and its rivals—whether other multimillion-member sites like News Corp.'s MySpace or small, narrowly focused networks like Woophy, which is for people interested in travel photography—have to find a way to deliver ads tailored to their members' interests without appearing to spy on the members themselves.

"There has to be a trust factor that people who go on these networks are not being compromised and that things not meant for general consumption are not being abused,"  says