Whispers emanating from the Journal's parent, News Corp., have the paper on track to lose $100 million this year, says one tipster. That's hard to believe, given the $59 million contribution that Journal publisher Dow Jones made to News Corp.'s bottom line as recently as the last quarter of 2008. But Dow Jones profits fell in both of the quarters reported since, according to public earnings reports. News Corp. didn't give precise figures for Dow Jones or the Journal, but did disclose that all News Corp. newspapers saw combined profits fall 97 percent January through April and revenue fall 24 percent in the three months after that.

The Journal could cut some costs by slicing its ridiculous video army down to one guy, plus a cameraman with a cheap recorder, and maybe a video editor. After all, as Current TV's Brett Erlich has show, it's possible to create some seriously fun financial programming with bare-bones production values. Or the Journal can just keep imitating cable news networks, even to the point of absurdly saying "we're running out of time," as the host did toward the end of today's "AM Report." After all, it's not like News Corp. owns a real financial net of its own, or anything.

UPDATE: Dow Jones says it uses "less than 10 staffers" to make the video, and Business Insider has updated its post to reflect that assertion, adding it got its earlier number from "people involved in the show."

Which only makes sense, since Wall Street doesn't seem to have much of a future. Since News Corp. bought the newspaper last year, it has been expanding coverage of general-interest subjects like politics and sports. Sure, Journal publicists are milking the market-meltdown story for everything it's worth. But in the long run, it can't be healthy for a business newspaper to see its core readership disappear.

So Thomson is set on stealing other newspapers' readers. At a recent media conference, he mentioned L.A. and Chicago as markets he'd like to take on, as those cities' dominant dailies shrink away to irrelevance. (The Huffington Post, too, has made plans to expand in Chicago. Who knew Chicago was so interesting?)

His plan for increased local coverage would seem more impressive if the Journal hadn't tried expanding regionally in the '90s and failed. But hey, he's only been on the job a year! Institutional memory is for oldtimers.

(Photo via PaidContent)

IAC CEO Barry Diller has a ghastly track record of launching projects in-house; almost every vaguely promising Internet property he owns, he bought from someone else: Ask.com, Match.com, CitySearch, and so on.

And personal finance sites are deadly. In trying to break the mold, FiLife managed to be even more condescending than most. Its introduction:

Most personal-finance sites are snooze-filled, sometimes schoolmarmish affairs. Save more money! Don't you dare go out to dinner! Suffer, scrimp, suffer, scrimp. We're kind of tired of that approach, and we reckon you are, too.

Watching Wall Street's meltdown, would you be surprised if 20somethings were uninterested in qualifying for a mortgage and investing in mutual funds? Personal-finance sites are usually more motivated by luring advertisers than readers. The former are now in scarce supply, too.

Unsurprisingly, there's already signs of trouble. MainStreet has lost its launch editor, Caroline Waxler, amid a change of editorial direction. FiLife has ratcheted back its once-lofty ambitions. And WalletPop? One of a bevy of websites launched by AOL, which is desperate to find readers who are not turned off by that once-magical, now-deadly three-letter brand. With few prospects for attracting an audience or advertisers, will they not soon need financial advice of their own?

News Corp. made a deal with Digg.com at the end of last year. Users who click through to a WSJ.com story from Digg get to bypass the pay wall entirely. Similarly, when users click through from sites like Google News and Drudge Report, the pay wall is skipped.

Why do this? By making it easier for casual readers to find Journal articles, Murdoch gets more readers. If they like what they see, they can get all the WSJ content they want for a modest fee — and it's likely cheaper than all the direct-mail come-ons the Journal's circulation department is used to mailing. Murdoch gets to have his cake and eat it too. The Financial Times did something similar last year when it allowed readers to get 30 articles a month free before forcing them to cough up some dough.

The scheme falls apart, though, if people just read WSJ.com for free because they can. Courtesy of Manjoo, here's how:

• Search for the headline of the story you want in Google News. Frequently the story will already be there and clicking the search result will get you to the full story.

• If you're using Firefox, download the refspoof add-on. It allows you to fake out the WSJ into thinking you've clicked a link on Google News or Digg. Last year, Digg and the Wall Street Journal formed a partnership where any WSJ story that gets linked on Digg bypasses the pay-wall. By spoofing WSJ's servers, you can access any story for free.

What about Salon.com, the outfit that pays Manjoo's salary? To read the deeper parts of Salon, readers must either pay a monthly fee or watch a brief full-page advertisement — known as an "interstitial" — every day. Everyone needs to make money, but it can be annoying to readers. Since Manjoo passed on telling readers how to bypass it, we'll oblige.

The quick and easy way: *bookmark this page. Hitting that link will give you a "SItePass" for the day, leaving you to browse Salon all you wish. Perfect! However you do it, there's one unanswered question: Why are you reading Salon in the first place?

*deleted:Immediately click "skip" in the top-right hand corner. You'll get a free day of Salon without dishing out anything except a few seconds of time. If even that annoys you, you can use the same techniques Manjoo recommends for the Journal's site: Search articles from Google News, or download a Firefox plugin.

I remember walking past a photographer's open car trunk and noticing that he carried a well-preserved but very dead bird among his cameras and lenses. The bird, he explained, was for feature shots on holidays like Memorial Day. He'd perch it on a gravestone or tree limb in a veterans' cemetery to get the right mood. Nowadays such a trick would get him fired, but in the 1950s, this guy said, there was no time to wait for a live bird to flutter into the frame.

In 1979, one reporter got the idea of flying over refineries and tank fields to look for evidence of gasoline hoarding. As the editor running the coverage, I asked my bosses for approval to hire helicopters or small planes for a story. The answer: Go right ahead.

"I think Silicon Valley is the most exciting place in the world right now," says Murdoch, DeWolfe's boss for another two years.

"Looking back, it looks like you got a pretty good deal," observes Battelle. "What did you see?" he asks Murdoch. "Was it like, 'I hope this one works out,' or did you think you'd be sitting on a red couch at Web 2.0 two years out?"

"We thought there was a real opportunity, and [asked ourselves], 'What do we have to pay to shut the doors?'" replies Murdoch. "We never imagined it would do this well."

Murdoch says that Fox Interactive Media, the unit of which MySpace is the biggest part, could cross $750 to $800 million in revenues next year. And there's a hint, in the back-and-forth, that the rumored earnout provision in DeWolfe and Anderson's contract might be tied to MySpace and the rest of FIM hitting a target of $1 billion in revenues.

DeWolfe and Murdoch make nice-nice comments about Google, which has a $900 million contract to provide search and ads on MySpace. Battelle keeps probing them. It's almost like he wants Murdoch to call Google a "frenemy," but, alas, the wizened, megarich News Corp. mogul settles for "threat and friend." (Google executive Megan Smith, recently locked in negotiations with MySpace rival Facebook, sat next to DeWolfe at the dinner before the interview.)

Confirming Valleywag's scoop that the MySpace platform would not be ready for today, DeWolfe says that the company is, as we reported, compiling a directory of third-party widgets currently used on the site's profiles.

Battelle asks Murdoch, "What do you think of Facebook?" A pause. "I think it's pretty cool," says Murdoch. "It's more of a utility.... In spite of the hype, we seem to be growing faster."

"Is that a reference to the September ComScore numbers?" asks Battelle. (ComScore, controversially, showed a drop in Facebook's traffic last month.) "Yes," says Murdoch. A pause. "I love that Rupert Murdoch is referencing ComScore Internet numbers. I don't know why, but I love it."

Is MySpace a portal? "We're more like a connectivity engine," says DeWolfe. Apparently that's better than being a "utility."

Battelle asks Murdoch about the acquisition of Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal. "Well, I haven't paid for it yet," says Murdoch, alluding to the deal's expected closure in December. "Are you going to kill the New York Times?" asks Battelle. "That'd be nice," says Murdoch. Murdoch then says CNBC, rival to News Corp's newly launched Fox Business Network as "half-dead" — and then retracts the observation, noting that CNBC's still making hundreds of millions of dollars. As for FBN's future, "I'll stick with it for at least a few years."

Murdoch talks acquisitions for a bit, grousing that everything's too expensive and he doesn't want to pay 30 times earnings. He sounds like an old man complaining about the menu prices in a restaurant. DeWolfe talks a bit about the acquisition of SDC, an ad-targeting startup, and Photobucket, whose purchase Valleywag reported exclusively.

Intrepid special correspondent Paul Boutin steps up to the microphone and asks Murdoch, "With all the deals you do, how do you know when the price is right?"

"I don't," says Murdoch. "I just hope." More will be said, but for that, Murdoch deserves the last word.

By "promiscuity," Swisher just means ubiquity. The print Journal may not actually change that much — and it may not need to. But Journal-branded financial content needs to spread far and wide online. When it comes to distribution partners, in other words, Dow Jones needs to sleep around. Instead of just playing footsie, for example, as it's doing with Barry Diller's IAC, with which it has plans to create a financial-news website for the MySpace crowd, Dow Jones really needs to slut it up.

Larry Kramer, the founder of MarketWatch, has taken a break from advising venture capitalists to advise Murdoch, too. (Note to Kramer: I hear the VCs pay better.) He'd like to see his baby, which he sold to Dow Jones in 2004, become the Internet flagship of Murdoch's push into Internet journalism. It's true that MarketWatch has stagnated under Dow Jones; unlike previous partner CBS, MarketWatch's current owner has a minimal presence in TV and online video. Kramer would like News Corp.'s new Fox-branded business channel, a would-be CNBC competitor, to be named "Fox MarketWatch." That's a solution that would please many in the Journal newsroom, too, who don't want to see the newspaper's brand sullied by association with Fox TV practices. The San Francisco-based MarketWatch, by contrast, would be grateful just to have the free promotion from TV again.

And my advice? Well, I don't work for Murdoch for free. I'll just say this — as a gossip blog, it's hard to dislike a mogul who's as likely to make headlines as to write them.

• Wikipedia founder Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales (pictured, above) speaks to San Francisco's Commonwealth Club tonight at 6 p.m., on "the accuracy of Wiki posts" and Internet politics. [Commonwealth Club]

• Schmoozefest Stirr presents Founder's Hacks, its cutesy term for entrepreneurial tips and tricks. Ted Rheingold of Dogster, David Marks from Loomia, PBWiki's David Weekly, and Riya CEO (and offshoring opponent) Munjal Shah share the lessons they learned while beginning their companies. It's at Trader Vic's in Palo Alto, on the El Camino Real. This code for Valleywag readers will get you a $10 discount on your ticket: fhkrowt3n [STIRR]. (We hope that "fhk" is short for "Founder Hacks.")
• It's earnings call season! Yahoo kicked us off yesterday, eBay's call just wrapped up, and tomorrow is a big day for finance geeks as Dow Jones, Google, and Microsoft all release their figures.