Every private equity panel at each of these conferences has to start off with the obligatory discussion of the economy. So just in case you hadn’t been paying attention: Yes, it’s harder to get credit than it was six months ago and deal terms have become more strict. Moving on: at the DeSilva + Phillips Media Dealmakers Summit, NYT’s DealBook editor Andrew Ross Sorkin led a panel on the state of play in the private equity world, and the kinds of things media PE investors are now looking at. Not surprisingly, Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo and how it affects media dealmaking was an important topic, as speculation about it, what it means, seems to invade most conversations in this kind of crowd. As Strauss Zelnick, principal of ZelnickMedia, put it: “In a nutshell, everyone knows that in a situation like this, something trades.” Basically, there’s no chance that Yahoo will be independent when this all shakes out. There’s a slight chance that a white knight will emerge, but, in Zelnick’s view, it’ll probably end up being Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT). Later on, Peter Ezersky, Managing Principal of the Quadrangle Group, was asked about rumors that he had had a discussion with NBCU’s Jeff Zucker about making some sort of bid for Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO). In a roundabout way, he basically said “no comment”.

-- PE vs. corporate buyers: The Microsoft bid for Yahoo highlights another issue effecting this industry: the corporate buyer is re-energized, or at least not as battered as the PE buyer. Corporate earnings remain solid and for the most part they’re rather under-leveraged compared to PE buyers (Microsoft is an extreme example of this). As such, said Zelnick: “Privates have been paying more… (now) corporates can pay more.” These things move in a balance.

-- What they like: Zelnick wouldn’t go into specifics (of course) but said that big media firms were starting to get very cheap, so we might see some interesting deals happen on that front. Newspapers, specifically, could be approaching a level where they have value to PE buyers, though Ezersky disputed this, basically saying that you can’t see the bottom yet. Quadrangle is more interested in TV and cable assets, noting that investors historically have an extreme love-hate relationship with cable and that right now it’s at one of those extremes (hate). The one area Zelnick emphatically isn’t interested in: the music business.

-- The digital brush: Zelnick: The real opportunity to score is in buying traditional media brands at depressed multiples and turning them into successful digital brands. Doing this is another story.

-- Mobile: Mobile content came up during the Q&A. The general agreement: tough for PE investors to get into, since most of the opportunities are at the venture level, with lower capital demands. Quadrangle is interested in mobile, but more from the carrier perspective.