Able to use a computer? Check. High school diploma? Check. Work well with others? Check. Willing to strike a deal with Microsoft? Ummmm….

Indeed, in the hunt for the next top dog at Yahoo that last issue — whether the candidate can do a deal with Microsoft — may be the most pressing.

Since Yahoo’s announcement on Monday that Jerry Yang would step aside, the tech/media world has been abuzz with speculation about his replacement. Silicon Alley Insider is even running a terrific mock election — letting its readers vote among six candidates.

(News Corp’s Peter Chernin is one of them. Wouldn’t it be great if he got the job? It would let us spend some time chattering about what will happen over at Rupert Murdoch’s empire).

But as Anupreeta Das points out in the Reuters story, the only way Yahoo may be able to satisfy its investors is either a massive turnaround plan, which would be very difficult in this environment, or an M&A deal. And the best shot at a deal may be with Microsoft.

“Microsoft wants Yahoo’s search audience, the traffic, the clicks,” Needham & Co. analyst Mark May said. “They want to have as much as Google does. So it’s important for Microsoft to have a big presence in search and display.”

The upshot: Yahoo needs a CEO who is willing to negotiate. The trouble is that means it needs a CEO who would also be willing to possibly negotiate himself or herself right out of a job. Or go to work for Steve Ballmer. Hmmmm…

Keep an eye on:

• Dan Abrams, the former general manager of MSNBC, is launching a media-strategy firm, Abrams Research, to help business executives navigate public-relations challenges (WSJ.com)
• Procter & Gamble and Google are swapping some staffers — to help each other learn more about marketing (WSJ.com)
• Time Inc is expected to cut more than 250 from the payroll as part of an overall cost-cutting plan (NY Post)

(Photo: Reuters)

Everyone seems to have accepted (like it or not) that advertising spending will be in bad shape in the fourth quarter and well into next year. But just how bad is a matter of debate — every new piece of research marks another downward revision to the advertising outlook.

Case in point is Citi’s Catriona Fallon, who issued a new report saying that U.S. advertising spending would drop by 1.8 percent in 2008 and 3.6 percent in 2009. So what? Well, consider this: that would mark the first back-to-back annual declines since at the 1950s. The 1950s! We’re talking The Cold War, Fats Domino, Gidget, Cadillac Eldorado — you get the picture.

Here’s a bit from Fallon’s research report, where she discussed the thought behind cutting the 2008 outlook from growth of 0.2 percent to a decline of 1.8 percent :

Essentially, we made a dramatic reduction in our Internet advertising growth expectations and also see steeper declines in local ad-focused media categories, including newspapers, radio, and yellow pages. Internet advertising had been one of the few shining lights coming into 2008, but overall economic softness has lowered 2009 expected growth rates in this medium to the single digits. Meanwhile, Q3 results for publicly-traded newspaper, magazine and yellow pages companies, and CIR forecasts for the radio industry show that the ad revenue declines in these businesses have
sharpened over the course of the year.

Anyone seen my Elvis Presley albums?

Keep an eye on:

• More bad new for Sirius XM Radio — as if trading at 27 cents a share isn’t bad enough. The company posted a $4.8 billion write-down and made some more ominous comments about the auto industry (Reuters)
• A nine-car NASCAR pileup may have wrecked a vehicle sponsored by the Federal Communications Commission, but it gave the agency more mileage in advertising the imminent switch to digital TV signals (Reuters)
• Blu-ray backers are banking on falling prices, summer blockbusters and an ad blitz to get consumers to make the leap to high-definition (NY Post)
• Time Inc has asked for volunteers to get bought out from People, Time, Sports Illustrated, Fortune and Money, as it goes into job cutting mode (AdAge.com)

(Photo: Reuters)

Thanks Amazon! The online retailer put out a release this morning with some juicy details about Google’s new mobile phone — even as we’re still waiting for the official unveiling later today.

So, here’s what they say about the phone…

“The T-Mobile G1 is the world’s first Android-powered mobile phone in an exclusive partnership with Google. The T-Mobile G1 combines full touch-screen functionality and a QWERTY keyboard with a mobile Web experience that includes the popular Google services that millions have enjoyed on the desktop, including Google Maps with StreetView, Gmail, YouTube and others. ”

Amazon, which has a deal with Google related to the phone, also says that the phone will have “one-touch access” to Google Search and will allow access to Android Market, “where customers can find and download unique applications to expand and personalize their phone to fit their lifestyle.”

More details will be coming, including pictures. So stay tuned. While you do, read why some experts say the phone won’t be a game changer.

Keep an eye on:

• NBC Universal will present a sweeping new study this week showing that audiences recall advertisements far more clearly when they are run on both TV and the Internet, findings that could change the way commercial time is bought (Reuters)
• Online movie rental company Netflix has signed agreements with the CBS Corp and Walt Disney Co’s Disney Channel that will allow current season episodes of a number of TV shows to be streamed at Netflix (Reuters)
• Time Inc’s “Life” magazine is being brought back as part of a joint venture that will launch a Web site offering photos (NY Post)

(Photo: Reuters)

It looks like Norman Pearlstine couldn’t resist the glamorous life of journalism. After two years in the private equity business at the Blackstone Group Carlyle Group (D’oh!), Pearlstine is joining Bloomberg LP as “chief content officer,” where, as Bloomberg said in a press release, he will work with “Editor-in-Chief Matthew Winkler to seek growth opportunities for its
television, radio, magazine and online products and to make the most of the
existing Bloomberg News operations.”

Pearlstine used to be the editor-in-chief of Time Inc for 11 years, and before that spent 23 years at The Wall Street Journal. More details on his CV, directly from the release :

He was the paper’s top news executive for nine years, serving as Managing Editor and then Executive Editor. He previously worked as the founding editor and publisher of The Wall Street Journal/Europe, the first Managing Editor of The Asian Wall Street Journal, and the Tokyo bureau chief.

Pearlstine was founder of Smart Money magazine and worked as an Executive Editor of Forbes. He is the author of OFF THE RECORD: The Press, the Government, and the War over Anonymous Sources , published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2007.

We don’t know what to make of this. Our immediate questions:

- Will he succeed Winkler, with whom he worked at the Journal?

- Will he put Bloomberg into M&A mode?

- Will he work on an effort to take Bloomberg LP public? (This idea has come up at least once before)

Pearlstine wasn’t available for comment, so we’ll just publish our questions here and invite comments, but Bloomberg’s top editorial executive, Matt Winkler, did  call. Here’s a bit of what we talked about:

Q: Why Pearlstine?

A: Nobody brings as much experience in so many different ways as Norm does… Our hope is that Norm can give us a lot more awareness and guidance on ways we can deliver [our news] well beyond the Bloomberg.

Q: When did you first meet him?

A: The meet-and-greet was probably in the halls of Dow Jones & Co when I arrived in 1980, and he was the national news editor at The Wall Street Journal. People would point him out to me as a really important person you ought to know, so maybe on the way to the men’s room I was able to introduce myself. (They started working closely together in 1982 when Pearlstine was planning the European edition of the WSJ and asked Winkler to go to London)

Q: What do you think of him?

A: I would say that everything that I know that’s worth anything in this business, the news business, I can attribute to Norm.

Q: Does his new job at Bloomberg mean that you will retire?

A: I would hope that I’m just getting started, actually.  The first 18 or so years went by really fast. I think the biggest opportunities are ahead of us. I can’t wait to go at them with Norm at my side.

Q: By the way, is there a hiring freeze at Bloomberg?

A: Not exactly. The management committee at Bloomberg… saw what was unfolding with the financial world — they could see what was coming last July — and said, ‘what we want to do for the coming year is effectively freeze the headcount.’ (This does not mean that they are not hiring as people leave, however) We’re determined to find and identify and bring to Bloomberg the most talented, skilled journalists we can.

(Reuters photo shows Pearlstine on the left in his role as president of the American Academy in Berlin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel in the middle and former U.S. ambassador to Germany Richard Holbrooke on the right.)

(Disclaimer that you’ve probably read before: Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters are competitors in providing financial news and data.)