When you’re trying to figure out the future of your entire business model, there’s one thing you could without: impatient creditors.

Publishers are still dealing with vast debt piles accumulated before the recession, and are having to pull off some inventive deals and torturous negotiations with lenders and investors to keep afloat. Here are three examples…

—INM: The Indie publisher has, yet again, extended the deadline for a €300 million loan repayment, this time to December 23 (release). It’s now offering bondholders a complex and hopeful deal where they would write off almost half that debt in return for new shares representing 46 percent of INM—a decision is due at a bondholder meeting on November 10, though creditors representing 39 percent of the debt have already agreed.

—Yell Group: Its longstanding plans to “comprehensively refinance” itself are well underway: the company has 95 percent shareholder backing for an equity rights issue, designed to raise £500 million, as part of a complex series of measures to alleviate its £4.3 billion debt. The company has asked more 1,000 lending institutions to extend loan repayments to 2014. Yell’s own broker PwC warned in June that the company would breach its debt covenants if nothing was done.

—Emap: The GMG- and Apax- owned B2B publisher is in talks to relax its debt-to-profit ratio agreement with lenders to allow more room for investment, according to an unsourced report in the Sunday Times. The group was bought in 2008 for £1.3 billion and CEO David Gilbertson told us this week that the timeframe for the owners’ exit could be delayed because of the recession.

Debt is a fine way to grow your business in a growing economy: bigger growth attracts investors, a healthier cashflow and share price means more investment in on-going operations and as (long as profits are made and debts repaid) it’s champers and cigars all round.

But as Incisive Media found out, a debt burden quickly becomes an unwelcome weight in a shrinking economy where refinancing is hard work and investors are shy.

These battles to right balance sheets could be distracting execs from the real business of returning to revenue growth as soon as possible…

When advertising and subscription revenues suffer, businesses are unable to innovate their way out of a hole—many can’t afford the investment needed to research and launch the online products which they will need over the next few years to compete with new online-only entrants and capture business share in an emerging market: Google (NSDQ: GOOG) doesn’t have these problems and its earnings are consistently growing.

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• Debt Could Mean Cuts And Sell-Offs For Media Companies In 2009
• Up Against It: ITV, Yell, IN&M Seek Financial Lifelines