Murdoch's "Chief Digital Officer" (gag) Jonathan Miller is trying to put together a "consortium that would charge for news distributed online," the Los Angeles Times reports. Read: A content cartel. Miller is trying to recruit the New York Times Company, Washington Post Comany, Hearst and Tribune as charter members. So if Murdoch is bluffing about paid content, as we've speculated, trying to get his competitors to make the leap while his own free websites poach their readers, Miller doesn't know about it.

Which is probably just as well: Legitimate Businessmen with reason to think they might get hassled by the feds have to be careful what they tell one another. Need to know basis only!

Reports Bercovici:

Speaking last night at an Internet Week event sponsored by The Hollywood Reporter, Jonathan Miller, News Corp.'s newly-installed chief digital officer, said he envisions a future where at least some of the TV shows and movies on Hulu, the premium video site co-owned by News Corp. (NWS), NBC Universal and Disney (DIS), are available only to subscribers.

Bercovici also quoted Miller as saying that the issue could come up as soon as Monday at a Hulu board meeting, though it's not not on the agenda at present. He also closed by saying, "I don't see why over time that shouldn't happen."

Oh well, we suppose that moderately web savvy people will be forced to find ways to illegally circumvent paying for Hulu's content on the internet, just like they always do with everything else they don't feel like paying for.

Soon, You'll Have to Pay For Hulu [Daily Finance]

Van Natta, who has long aspired to run a consumer Internet startup, is an obvious choice. Having fallen out of favor with Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's fickle 24-year-old CEO, he is spending his exile running a music startup, called Project Playlist, out of an office building shared with Facebook. While Van Natta has managed to extricate Playlist from some of its legal troubles with the music labels, it hardly seems like a gig that encompasses his ambitions. Having worked for Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos as well as Zuckerberg, Van Natta seems capable of dealing with a testy owner-CEO like Rupert Murdoch.

Calacanis, meanwhile, has no qualifications for the job. He tanked his first media company, then sold his second one, Weblogs Inc., for $25 million to AOL, where he accomplished nothing of note after the acquisition. He's since raised far too much money for Mahalo, a Web 2.0 rehash of Yahoo's 1995-era Web directory. Silicon Alley Insider thinks he should be MySpace's new CEO because he worships Jon Miller, the former AOL CEO who played mentor to him before Miller was fired and Calacanis quit. Ever the clever fameball, Calacanis is playing coy and saying "No comment" as loudly as possible.

Miller now runs News Corp.'s Internet operations, so he's the one to pick DeWolfe's successor. We have a suggestion: Hire both! Van Natta can do the hard work of fixing MySpace. While he's affable enough, he hardly seems to crave attention.

Tom Anderson, DeWolfe's sleazy sidekick at MySpace, is every MySpace user's first friend when they sign up. He needs a replacement, too. Why not replace him with Calacanis, the ultimate Web fameball, who seems to measure his self-worth by his number of Twitter followers? He doesn't need any other responsibilities. And as MySpace's Chief Ego Officer, he can still claim to be CEO.

The official story will be that Jon Miller, the new broom from AOL, has swept aside MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe and his team. But as always, Murdoch alone rules News Corp. And the decision must have been his.

Murdoch's wife, Wendi Deng, is the chair of MySpace China, and that professional relationship has spurred dangerous gossip which can't have helped DeWolfe's standing.

Four years after he bought MySpace, Murdoch has finally rid MySpace of the spammers and scammers who launched it. It is far past time — and yet probably the right moment. Wall Street Journal reporter Julia Angwin's book, Stealing MySpace, has exposed MySpace's roots in porn, spam, and hacking. As the economic tide that boosted MySpace's advertising sales has receded, DeWolfe has been shown to be swimming naked. And Miller, as News Corp.'s newest Internet executive and the latest to have won Murdoch's ear, is in prime position to push out DeWolfe, whose contract expires this fall. (Just one question: If DeWolfe sidekick Tom Anderson is ousted, who will become every MySpace user's default first friend?)

DeWolfe always seemed more interested in throwing parties and dating celebrities than solving MySpace's hard problems. Growth has stagnated for the past year as Facebook has surged. The site's interface remains a shambolic wreck which fails at the most basic tasks, like remembering a user's login. Talented engineers, including COO Amit Kapur, have defected. Slingshot Labs, a MySpace spinoff meant to foster Silicon Valley-style innovation, is an industry laughingstock for launching a me-too celebrity gossip site rather than chasing genuinely new technologies. Given all this, it's possible that DeWolfe's friendship with Deng was the only thing that helped him last so long.

What now for the site? News Corp. is reportedly recruiting a new CEO already. Former Facebook COO Owen Van Natta would be an excellent choice, if he can be wrested away from the music startup he's currently running. Or the company might place an internal candidate from the News Corp. empire, to provide the closer eye MySpace has long needed.

Ah, but those are tiresomely sensible choices. Here are two that would maximize the Murdoch family drama everyone loves: Install prodigal son Lachlan Murdoch. Or put Deng in charge.

When Microsoft set Facebook's value at $15 billion last fall, Miller and Levinsohn's plans to acquire four startups and roll them into one blog publishing company suddenly got a lot more expensive. Too expensive. So much so that funding partner General Atlantic dropped out. That turn of events left Miller and Levinsohn ready to listen to ComVentures cofounder Roland Van der Meer. Van der Meer offered them spots on a five-man team leading a new venture capital firm focused on digital media. Miller and Levinsohn agreed to join. Problem was: There were already five ComVentures partners. Two would have to go. Van der Meer decided to ax Michael Rolnick and Jeb Miller.

On the morning of December 17, the ComVentures partners gathered for their usual Monday morning meeting. Rolnick and Miller took their seats, coffees in hand, according to PEHub. Then Van der Meer told them they were out.

"They were blindsided," one VC told PEHub. "There was no reason to treat people that way... Rolnick had been there nine years. This isn't a giant company doing layoffs, it's a small partnership. It was simply wrong."

That's just business, right? Well, according to PEHub, investors aren't happy about how the shakeup went down either. They feel it makes the firm seem unstable.

One investor said:

Levinsohn and Miller are impressive guys, but it's tough for me even if I want to invest with them. To do so, I have to believe that this entire team is going to still be together in five years, and I just can't trust that. Either Levinsohn and Miller will decide to leave because they aren't VCs at heart, or Roland will fire them for some reason or another. Either way, it's too risky.

(Photo by ahhhh)

three plucky AOLers prove him right.