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Every year in newspapers is a year of crisis. It is true of what we report about the world and, increasingly in the last decade, true of what we live through within our own trade.
It would therefore be easy to look back over 2009 and catalogue month upon month of a continuing crisis for newspapers, and for the mainstream broadcasters of radio and television. If we talk, however, about the internet, the opposite has been the case.
The net sweeps all before it, dominating all discussions about the present and the future. No media story of the past year is without its digital angle, whether about privacy or politics, ethics or expenses, financial losses or libel awards.
So, in dealing with the overall gloom that has permeated this past 12 months, let me also accentuate the positive.
National newspaper sales have gone on declining, some much faster than others. But a close analysis suggests, albeit tentatively, that the fall is levelling out.
Meanwhile, the number of online users is growing and some websites have become enormously popular.
A similar picture has emerged of daily regional titles, where decline has been fought off with cost-cutting and retrenchment on one side and online investment on the other.
As for local weeklies, though about one title a week has closed down, they were almost all frees that did not leave communities entirely bereft of newspaper coverage.
Only one closure, that of the paid-for Neath Guardian in September, could arguably be said to be of real significance.
Meanwhile, the two overlapping controversies in regional and local journalism have centred on the growth of council-published papers and the argument that competition rules are too restrictive to allow owners to negotiate either cross-media deals or to consolidate.
It is possible that one of the year's genuine innovations, an Ofcom plan to create independently-funded news consortia to assume responsibility for ITV's regional news programming, might see the beginning of convergence between print and broadcasters.
That was proved last month with the foundation of of a consortium composed of newspaper publisher Trinity Mirror, the TV production company Ten Alps and Britain's major news agency, the Press Association (PA), to bid for the English pilot.
PA has also been involved in another initiative by trying to sew together a very different pilot scheme in order to overcome the problem of under-reported courts and councils.
Back in September, I reported that the agency's "public service reporting" plan was days away from receiving funding from a charitable institution. Sadly, talks broke down, but it remains a possibility.
It is also the case that my recent soundings among regional newspaper publishers suggest that the worst may be over. Advertising has reached its nadir. Cost-cutting has paid off.
"We can live with the current situation," one chief executive told me. Profit margins may never reach the absurd levels of four years ago, but 2009 marks the moment of changed fortunes.
Meanwhile, regional publishers, such as Johnston Press and Tindle Newspapers, are hoping to show publishers that people are prepared to pay for access to editorial content on their websites.
The controversy over publishers charging for content has been one of the main running stories since May when Rupert Murdoch announced that his News Corporation papers would start the process within a year. He has since delayed the deadline a little but appears determined on the course.
After a seven-month propaganda campaign, in which he and his lieutenants accused search engines of copyright theft and kleptomania, Google suddenly agreed at the beginning of this month to meet him halfway. It agreed to limit its users to no more than five free articles per news website.
That brings me naturally to the media organisation that creates as many headlines as it reports. I refer, of course, to the BBC.
The corporation's director-general, Mark Thompson, has had one tough year. In January, he was embroiled in a row after refusing to air a charity appeal on behalf of the people of Gaza.
At the same time he was still dealing with the fall-out from the previous year's Jonathan Ross-Russell Brand affair, which eventually led to Ofcom fining the BBC £150,000.
He was soon getting flak for the revelations of expense claims by his senior colleagues and then found himself defending the licence fee.
Should it be top-sliced to fund public service broadcasting by a cash-strapped Channel 4? Should it be abandoned altogether in favour of voluntary public subscriptions? Should it be reduced in order to cut down the size of the corporation?
The BBC came under attack for its profit-making commercial arm, Worldwide, for taking adverts on its non-British website, and for expanding its online coverage to proportions no newspaper could hope to match.
In August, Murdoch's son, James, lambasted the BBC in the annual MacTaggart lecture. Later, the Tory leadership took swipes at the BBC, though these have been somewhat muted more recently, indicating that Thompson may be winning some of the arguments. Instead, the new target is the overseer, the BBC Trust.
If things were bad for the BBC, they were a great deal worse for ITV. It lost Michael Grade, its chairman and chief executive and struggled to fill the roles. It also saw its profits fall.
Yet the channel enjoyed tremendous success with its programming, courtesy of the era's most impressive impresario, Simon Cowell.
Perhaps the most important media story of the year revolved around the age-old subject of press freedom and the public right to know.
The Daily Telegraph's revelations in June about MPs' expenses was a superb example of the press going about its duty despite parliamentary opposition. It was easy to defend the paper.
Papers have been struggling against the libel law (and the costs due to no-win-no-fee agreements), but the recent campaign for wholesale reform appears to have won backing from the government.
Running in parallel has been a growing concern about the development of a privacy law, based on judicial interpretations of the European convention of human rights.
If anything, the year's greatest legal travesty was the revelation of super-injunctions, those that not only prevent the publication of material but also prevent the publication of the reason that the material cannot be published.
It was symbolic of the freedoms we enjoy with the new media that its exposure was entirely due to the internet and to Twitter.
Roy Greenslade is Professor of Journalism, City University London
