I wasn’t born yet when World War II was fought.   Yet I’ve seen plenty of newsreels and movies about the lives of terrified Europeans who fled into bomb shelters when the sirens began wailing.

That was the atmosphere I expected to encounter in New Orleans this week when editors, publishers, webmasters and other online staffers from the financially battered news industry gathered for the annual Interactive Media conference.

The American Society of Newspaper Editors and the Magazine Publishers of America each canceled their 2009 gatherings due to industry layoffs, cuts to T&E budgets and corporate travel bans.  Nielsen Events, however, bravely marched forward and allowed its Editor & Publisher and Mediaweek brands to hold their shared conference, a decidedly scaled-down affair punctuated by the EPpy Awards honors for best media-affiliated Web sites.

While nothing can match the terror suffered by the poor souls huddled in the dank, underground caverns beneath London, Paris and Rotterdam in the 1930s and ’40s, the somber mood exhibited by a good number of attendees at the New Orleans conference nonetheless conjured up images of people who know their professional lives are under attack — and that their careers may not survive.

Some takeaways, listed in no particular order:

Politico is providing very creative cash, barter or ad sales alternatives to news organizations that want to close their DC bureaus while still maintaining coverage of their state or specific Congressional districts.  This is also big competition for AP.  Despite its public image as a disruptive new model, Politico biz dev VP Roy  Schwartz admits the company makes more money from its 33,000-circ printed newspaper than from online.

Newspapers owners who think their dailies’ Web sites will maintain their influence and traffic after shuttering the print product are wrong.  SeattlePI.com traffic has tanked since the Post-Intelligencer ceased publishing.  The Detroit Free Press experiment — stopping home delivery on some days — has not yet been rated a success or failure, though VP Paul Anger admitted advertisers are not yet making Web-only buys.

AP lacked any transformational news that the market seemed to be craving.  Other than a pitch for its mobile product and talking about ways the agency is trying to reduce its cost base — like scaling back to four regional news centers in Philadelphia, Atlanta, Chicago and Phoenix — the hottest revelation was that subscribers should be salivating to see a new AP county-by-county interactive graphic to track federal stimulus spending.

ThomsonReuters flew in from Germany MD Christoph Pleitgen to show a video montage of Reuters images and to take a few verbal stabs at AP’s Kate Butler by saying Reuters is “relaxed” about unpaid use of its content by third parties.  Pleitgen acknowledged that Reuters.com will continue to be a competitor to its subscribers because it sells ads and competes for audience with its public site.

Freda Yarbrough, new media director for 2theadvocate.com, made everyone in the audience chat with their table mates about their favorite New Orleans restaurants and talked about growing up in a state that perenially showed up as No. 49 on every list.  Her only solace was that Mississippi was last.

Digg’s reminded those who planned to erect pay walls around their content that their brand would be absent from sites like Digg, Google and Twitter if each click results in a “sign up now” box.  VP Bob Buch pointed to a WSJ.com policy of making the first click free, so Wall Street Journal articles on Digg are fully readable.

Andrew Sollinger of Financial Times gave new meeting to CPM (Colluding on the Price of Media) while on a panel with CNNmoney.com GM Jonathan Shar.  “Stick to pricing. We have to hold firm,” were the exact words.  Time for a sit-down with the general counsel when he gets back to New York.

Scant English-language foreign news coverage from certain regions — Indonesia and Brazil, for example  — is the niche globalpost wants to own, said Executive Editor and VP Charlie Sennott.  He described a paid content model in which subscribers would get professionally written news from veteran foreign correspondents who know longer work for major U.S. news organizations.  A $200 annual “Passport” will also allow subscribers to interact with the writers and to suggest story ideas, which will be voted on in a form of controlled crowd-sourcing.

The man who used to launched WSJ Online and, more recently, ran Yahoo! News has resurfaced at a personalized news startup called DailyMe.  Neil Budde differentiated from the conference antichrist, Newser’s Michael Wolff, by saying DailyMe would license content rather than simply scraping and linking.

Perhaps the saddest part of the conference should have been the most joyous.  During the EPpy Awards ceremony, it felt like more than half of the winners weren’t in the room to accept the trophies, and some had been laid off.  They hadn’t made it to the fallout shelter in time.

An unfortunate truth is that many kids’ breakfast food choices are based on the appeal of cartoon rabbits, toucans and elephants touting sugary cereals.

But we grow out of that kind of consumerism, right?

Similar marketing seems to be working well on grown men and women. Advertising the solutions to solve some of the human body’s most repulsive maladies now is done with the help of comical animated characters.

Digger, the sharp-clawed enemy of toe nails, spread faster than athlete’s foot when introduced by Novartis as the cartoon personification of its Lamisil brand. I am sure Digger’s face is being used as an avatar by more than a few teens.

Reckitt Benckiser Inc.’s over-the-counter line of expectorants, Mucinex, has a whole family of green phlegm characters to illustrate how fast a booger can move when the right medicine arrives on the scene.

Outside of pharma, the Düsseldorf, Germany, office of BBDO recently introduced a tiny blue cartoon being, in the form of a single calorie, for PepsiCo’s Pepsi Max diet cola. Print ads were posted on the European ad-gallery site adgoodness.com, prompting plenty of controversy over the fact that the calorie commits suicide because it’s lonely. AdAge has since written on the campaign and subsequent outcry from those arguing the issue of suicide is sacrosanct.

I recall one B2B company in the investor relations industry that successfully linked its brand to a cartoonist’s creation. an online database of fund managers and other financial industry contacts, used the image of a baby, dressed in a top hat, throwing around cash. At one memorable conference for the National Investor Relations Institute, Big Dough startled more than a few of normally staid IR officers when it employed a Disneyesque costumed character – a seven-foot-tall baby – to walk around the exhibition hall. Whether the non-traditional marketing approached helped I don’t know, but Big Dough captured plenty of market share among corporate users before being rebranded as part of a larger suite of Ipreo’s services.

I’m guessing we don’t see more B2B businesses tied to fictional characters or cartoon imagery because so much of an organization’s success rides on the credibility and message of the CEO. Marketing officers at B2B firms spend their time making sure the CEO succeeds as chief storyteller and cheerleader for the brand and its heritage.

But given the global crisis of confidence regarding the integrity of executives leading businesses of all sizes, I can’t actually see the downside of making a B2B firm’s CEO sharing the limelight with someone a bit more believable and, yes, fun.  The “Why is Dora Crying?” ad in major newspapers last week was a damn effective way for Viacom to pressure Time Warner to cut a better deal to keep Nick Jr. on its cable systems.

Granted, most specialty chemical companies, makers of superconductors and developers of enterprise accounting software do not have the corporate culture or desire to support borrowing from the consumer marketing toolbox.

But many of the customers and employees of those same conservative organizations privately cheer for the underdog breakout firms who occasionally pop onto the scene and take our breath away because they refuse to conform to conventional wisdom.

Assuming we ever get the steel industry going again in the United States, I’d love to see a fire-breathing dragon conduct the quarterly results conference call.