Earlier this week it was the turn of British Telecom, Vodafone and Virgin Media to announce either major redundancy programmes or raise the likely possibility of such.
 
Business journalism therefore is going to undergo its usual recessionary makeover in the coming months, and probably for most of 2009.
 
Put simply, bad news becomes routine. And good news, because of its rarity, becomes the new sexy.
 
The normal order of things is turned on its head. Those who buck the trend with rare shafts of corporate sunlight amid the gloom will get more column inches.
 
Vast swathes of corporate results will come accompanied by the increasingly obligatory partner of jobs-cutting.
 
Business models will be looked at. Expect a lot more on stretched corporate bank facilities. Also a lot more on battered share prices.
 
It happens every time major downturns strike: the dotcom bust, the 1990-92 recession, early Eighties recession, mid-Seventies recession. The business pages become a gloom-fest.
 
At first, as now, the redundancies’ rain falls on newspapers’ home news pages because it is such a raw shock that quite rightly papers want the maximum possible readership for what is highly disturbing news.
 
But as costcutting becomes the norm, as the months pass by and the gloom fades to grey, it is very likely that increasingly corporate reorganisation and retrenchment will again move back to its normal home of the industry's business pages.
 
It is no different, really, than coverage of foreign political turmoil. Wars are dramatic when they start: ie Iraq, the Afghanistan invasion...
 
But then the sheer longevity of the story kicks in, and less column inches are spent on it.
 
We are not at that stage with the global recession. But we will get there in terms of media coverage.
 
Of course, many readers will welcome journalists hunting out good-news business stories.
 
As a trade, we are routinely thought of as doomsters because interesting news tends towards the dramatic, the uncertain, the contentious. It can make journalism look cynical.
 
But in this climate, however, when unsettling business drama and woe will gradually become mundane in news terms even if deeply painful in human terms, the jobs-cutting in particular will gradually evoke reader gloom-fatigue.
 
Business journalists will react to that. A frayed and torn silver lining, perhaps, but my prediction is we are going to see next year a gradually increasing media premium on ‘buckers of the recession trend’ stories.