The sports industry has been in the zone for quite some time, but even it won't escape the impact of the financial meltdown, Matthew Futterman reports. Who's going to fill those corporate skyboxes? How much will reconfigured companies be willing to pay for sponsorships? For decades, long-term television deals helped to insulate big-time professional sports from the economy's ups and downs but these days, teams rely increasingly on the money they collect by selling premium tickets to the sparkling new stadiums and arenas built during the past 15 years. "We're not just competing for people's entertainment dollars anymore," …

Under a seven-year distribution agreement, Universal Pictures will receive an 8% fee for releasing about six films a year produced by Steven Spielberg's reconstituted DreamWorks studio. But Spielberg's and partner Stacey Snider's ambitious plans to fund their venture have been slowed by the global credit crisis. India's Reliance ADA Group has agreed to invest $500 million to $550 million for a 50% equity stake. But the venture still needs to raise some $700 million to $750 million in debt, Claudia Eller writes. Lead bank JPMorgan Chase reportedly has suspended its plans to syndicate the debt until markets rebound, but …

As retailers trim their stock and staff this holiday season, shoppers will have fewer choices and salespeople to assist them. Meanwhile, many retailers are likely to follow Wal-Mart's and Neiman Marcus' lead and will have more and earlier promotions to try to lure people into their stores. But retailers say they'll try to cut costs without alienating customers. "Retailers are in it to sell merchandise and be profitable. They don't want to self-fulfill lower sales because they didn't have enough people on hand or the right products on the shelf," says Kevin Sterneckert, retail research director at AMR Research, …

I don't know about your media experiences over the weekend, but everywhere I looked I was being hit on the head with the message that the day of reckoning over our excesses occurred at some unspecified hour last week. Having willfully overextended ourselves and blithely consumed far more than we produced for far too long, we are all going to hell in an empty shopping cart along with the buy-now-pay-later society we created. Not good news for people who sell things, in other words, from overextended houses to electronic gimcracks and Christmas gewgaws. But let's start out with …

Brandweek takes the tack that bad times are good for certain brands, including the unlikely trio of McCormack spices, private labels and Wal-Mart. "If you're a brand you eat, drink, smoke or wash yourself with, you're going to be OK," says Marc Babej, partner at the strategy firm Reason. Ad Age , meanwhile, surmises that that the sometimes-but-not-always prescient Wal-Mart is ramping up its private-label program after a year of de-emphasizing it. It mostly pins its story on a new job description -- director-portfolio strategy, private brands - that's being shopped by a …

The Yuengling family has been producing beer in Pennsylvania since 1829, and claims to be America's oldest brewery . But that's nothing compared to the Antinori family, which has been producing wine in Tuscany for 600 years, Morley Safer reports.