Some thoroughly depressing news to start Monday morning: the founder of UK media research agency Enders expects the number of media jobs in the UK industry to halve between now and 2013. The last couple of months has seen urgent and accelerated downsizing from a glut of publishers, TV and other groups. Claire Enders (via Reuters): “We calculated the total jobs in the media in the UK at about 400,000 ... at the end of 2007. Between the beginning of 2008 and 2013 we’re expecting half of those jobs to go. The big employers are the regional press, magazines, local advertising sales. Real numbers are in print.”

That kind of decimation might seem an unlikely apocalypse, but other analysts (via Reuters) are pessimistic, too… Numis’ Paul Richards: “In terms of the really tough trading we’ve only had two months, maybe three” ... Screen Digest’s Vincent Letang: “I see a long slowdown before a potential recovery in 2012. I don’t expect, following that period of crisis, we’ll have a strong rebound as we had after the dot-com crash.”

Meanwhile, Rafat appeared on Bloomberg’s TV channel in London on Friday morning, with his forecast for media and the economy in the next few months. It boils down to: layoffs, consolidation and pay-back time for social media. Here’s the video, and also embedded after the jump…