That's bad news not only for News Corp. chairman Murdoch but also for all the other old media barons hoping online paywalls will save their bacon. Even those who will pay can't decide if they want to buy individual articles via micropayments, subscribe to print-online bundles or subscribe to just the website:

Then there's the anecdotal evidence collected by Ad Age's Simon Dumenco, who surfed the comments section of Murdoch's websites and found that most of his own readers thought his paywall would fail. Some were downright mean, like Times of London reader Robin Stack: "It will reduce your wealth and influence; please do it."

So, in order to have any hope of weaning consumers off free content, the likes of Murdoch will have to offer a diverse array of payment plans and work like hell to change the thinking of the vast majority of his existing audience. For moguls used to exploiting their readers' and viewers' basest instincts, that sounds like an awful lot of persuading.

That's basically what he told his employee in a Sky News Interview, excerpted above:

Q: You could choose not to be on their search engine... so when someone runs a search your websites won't come up.


A: Well, I think we will... when we start charging.

This is certainly technically possible; all it takes is one correctly-placed text file to tell Google to ignore some or all of a website. And who knows, Murdoch's armies of lawyers and lobbyists might even succeed in effecting the other drastic change he mentioned: rolling back the entire doctrine of fair use, an interpretation of copyright law that allows the sort of quoting and selective reproduction of content that Murdoch's newspapers and TV networks engage in every day.

This isn't the first time Murdoch, 78, and his lieutenants have been made unfriendly noises about Google; they've recently attacked the search engine as a "parasite" with "promiscuous" users. This hostility must seem perfectly sensible if you're an old man who has your secretary find and print up Web pages on your behalf. But here's a pro tip, Rupert: Old media doesn't instant message those pages to your assistant's Twitter, via Blogger, on AOL. She just does what your newspaper reporters and Fox News producers and sales executives and tabloid editors and attack-dog flacks and mid-level accountants do all the time every day: Sticks a hot, throbbing search query into Google and gets busy with a bunch of strange website she doesn't subscribe to. Welcome to the internet.

Sterling's seemingly meandering and occasionally infuriating talk at the annual Reboot digital culture conference in Copenhagen, Denmark this year attracted some notice, originally, but deserves a wider hearing, if only for his contextualization of Steve Jobs and Nicolas Sarkozy as gothic figures and his advocacy on behalf of expensive beds. Luckily, protoblogger Dave Winer recently re-uploaded and linked the talk.

Observers of the social networking wars should listen to Sterling's rundown on "favela chic," excerpted above. Rupert Murdoch, familial overlord of MySpace parent News Corp., is cast as the "remote, distanct, old-school Brazilian tyrant," while MySpace accounts are likened to "huts." Who knows: Maybe when you lose your job, an anonymous space in News Corp.'s online hellscape might start sounding a lot more fun than the prim, proper — and all-too-accountable — playground that is Facebook.

(Sterling pic: Daniel Barradas)

MySpace CEO and would-be savior Owen Van Natta, the studmuffin hired away from Facebook, told the Financial Times he's not gunning for his ex employer any more:

"Facebook is not our competition," he said. "We're very focused on a different space."

Van Natta added that MySpace it will focus on its strength: Music. MySpace has become the default Web host for independent rock bands, and recently purchased music software company iLike.

MySpace wasn't always so blasé about social networking, the company used to have Facebook in its sights. It was barely two years ago that Van Natta's predecessor Chris DeWolfe got an urgent phone call from Peter Chernin at MySpace's parent company saying, "I need a plan for dealing with Facebook in two weeks." This led, according Julia Angwin's book Stealing Myspace, to a strategy for dealing with "the Facebook challenge head on," presented at a Merrill Lynch conference.

"I realize every person in tis room wants to ask me about Facebook, and, frankly, I want to talk about Facebook," [Fox Interactive Media president Peter] Levinsohn said.

But these days MySpace has just one third of Facebook's users. No wonder the company is singing a different tune.

It's just not a well advised one. Instead of competing with a money-losing internet company headed by a twentysomething college dropout, MySpace will now be taking on Apple (cash hoard: $30 billion) and Google (annual profits: $5 billion, operator of YouTube and soon to be a retailer of MP3s). Sounds like a great plan.

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."

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!

Today in the Washington Post, Howard Kurtz writes that there's an "emerging consensus" that Murdoch and Brill are leading the way to the future, in which people pay to read news on the Web. The only trouble: Whichever publishers are first to charge for content will be first to see their Web traffic drop — like 90% — if they wall off everything to just subscribers. Especially if their competitors don't also erect their own paywalls. It could be catastrophic for smaller brands who wall off their content while everyone stays free.

Antitrust law prohibits the dying newspaper industry from coordinating pricing, so publishers must trust one another's public pronouncements on payment policies. Right now that means taking Murdoch and Brill at their word, a prospect that should send chills up publishers' spines. We'll be no more surprised when Murdoch reverses himself on this than we were when he broke his promises to the Bancroft family after taking over their Wall Street Journal.

You can still use Facebook dating apps, as AllFacebook.com points out, but those usually want to make you pay money eventually. Of course, it's not like random profile searches are the best avenue to a romantic liaison. But the prim change to Facebook's search system fits neatly into the social network's uptight culture: First it was only for Harvard students, then Ivy Leaguers, then college kids; to this day, your profile is, by default, shielded from the general public and even most other Facebook users. (We asked the company's flacks for comment and have yet to hear back.)

While Facebook has been defined by the nerdy engineering culture of Silicon Valley, and of founder Mark Zuckerberg, competitor MySpace was started by a spam and spyware company, promoted itself in seedy nightclubs, hosted events for aspiring models and eagerly recruited Tila Tequila away from Friendster as an early member. Though owner News Corp. is struggling to turn the site around, it must take some comfort in the fact that Facebook is as prudish as ever.

(Pic: Helgasm on Flickr)

A deal with Google is about to shrivel, and now MySpace is facing layoffs and needs a new sales chief, sources "close to" Van Natta and fellow News Corp. newcomer Jon Miller tell Business Insider.

Expectations for MySpace's future were pretty low to begin with; the company's new leaders and their associates have now pushed them so low that the barest gains will make them look like heroes.

(Pic via All Things D)

Jill Sobule's dig at Glenn Beck was fun. And one can only marvel at the singer-songwiter's fortitude in conjuring a detailed fantasy date with Murdoch.

It turns out she was prodded into the tune, per her own account, by D co-host Kara Swisher. You have to hand it to Swisher and her D partner Walt Mossberg: This is certainly one of the more creative ways to re-secure your job in a recession.

[All Things D]

Friedman is set to meet tomorrow with Fox News chief Roger Ailes and John Moody, the news network's executive vice president for editorial, the source said. Friedman will have a chance to plead his case, but the meeting could well end with the columnist losing his job.

Friedman is in hot water for posting to FoxNews.com Thursday a review of the forthcoming movie Wolverine. The freelance columnist based his comments on an unfinished version of the movie that leaked onto the internet last week. "It's so much easier than going out in the rain!" he wrote. "I was completely riveted to my desk chair in front of my computer."

You can imagine how this went over at Wolverine producer 20th Century Fox, which last week called in the FBI to find out who leaked the film. The studio complained corporate sibling Fox News, according to Nikki Finke, and parent company News Corp. publicly condemned the review and requested its removal. Fox News promptly deleted the piece.

Finke wrote that Ailes then fired Friedman, a development seemingly confirmed by a statement News Corp. supplied to the New York Times, reading, "Fox News… terminated Mr. Friedman."

But Fox News' only statement on the affair (also given to the Times) is that "This is an internal matter that we aren't prepared to discuss at this time."

And in fact Friedman has not been fired, according to the Fox News source, although he could well be terminated during tomorrow's meeting. The delay in firing Friedman (despite News Corp.'s announcement) could be read as a play by Ailes to assert the news division's independence from film studio 20th within the News Corp. empire.

The meeting also gives Fox News time to reconcile its own definition of journalistic ethics with 20th Century Fox's. The film studio says Friedman shouldn't have broken the law in the service of a story. But Fox News seems more comfortable with such mischief. Network anchor Shep Smith wasn't fired after he was arrested for running over a competing reporter with his car so he could snag parking space, even though the incident resulted in felony battery charges (later apparently dropped without explanation).

When Bill O'Reilly's former producer accused the Fox News host of sexual harassment, producing lengthy conversation transcripts O'Reilly never denied, sibling publication the New York Post slammed her in a story headlined "'Lunatic' O'Reilly Gal Went Nuts in Bar." O'Reilly settled the suit and, of course, retains his job.

And Fox is unrepentant about stalking a liberal blogger, sending a camera crew to tail her from her apartment across state lines to Virginia.

1. Publishing economics. The New York Post's new size, 12 inches high, down from 13½ inches, will make it the size of the Wall Street Journal, folded in two. I'm told this will allow both Murdoch-owned papers to be produced on the same presses. If Murdoch's rumored $580m bid for Long Island's Newsday goes through, News Corporation will achieve even greater savings. A person familiar with the deal said the deal, by combining printing and distribution of the New York Post with another title in the same metropolitan market, would wipe out the $50m in annual losses that the Australian media titan still bears on his beloved New York tabloid. This move would be straight out of News Corporation's UK playbook: there, the media conglomerate transformed the profitability of its UK titles in 1986 by breaking the print trade unions and moving production of The Times, The Sun and other London papers to a heavily fortified print works in Wapping.

2. Influence. Rupert Murdoch may be the personification of the press baron, but he's never had anything like the influence in the US that his array of newspapers and television networks brought in the UK. His solitary US newspaper title, the New York Post, has given Murdoch influence over New York City and State politics, but precious little juice in Washington, DC. Murdoch has never had the access to the White House, even under George Bush, that he had to Number 10 Downing Street during Tony Blair's tenure as UK prime minister. Fox News is powerful, of course, but the cable news network is too reflexively conservative to provide any real influence over the liberals who are likely to run national politics, and appoint regulators, over the next political cycle. By creating a national title in the Wall Street Journal, and taking control of about half the New York newspaper market, Murdoch or his successor should be able to withstand any political effort to break up his empire. Look at the UK: the Labour party, which long sought to curtail News Corporation's media power, has entirely given up; about a decade ago, Murdoch passed the critical threshold beyond which he became untouchable. By creating a similarly interlocking network of television and newspaper operations in the US, he can achieve a similar result on a grander scale—if competition authorities allow.

3. Mortality. Last month, the Australian media mogul turned 77 years old. His motives are hard to divine, but one has to presume that the nightmare would be the breakup of an empire he has spent a lifetime in building, the fate which awaits Time Warner and Sumner Redstone's holdings. News Corporation is the one media conglomerate which makes some sense: the profits are made on sports and entertainment broadcasting; tabloids and quality newspapers provide political protection. That's the formula in the UK, at least. In the US, the richest media market, Murdoch bought New York Post in 1976 and has gradually accumulated television stations over the three decades since, launched a fourth entertainment network and a surprisingly successful cable news channel, Fox News. But it is only now, as proprietors such as the Bancroft family and Sam Zell lose hope in the future of newspaper publishing, that Murdoch has been given the scope in the US to achieve the same concentration he has in the UK. And it is no wonder that Murdoch is in such a rush. These newly available newspapers need a dramatic intervention if they are to make the transition to the internet. Potentially hostile Democrats are about to take control of executive and legislative branches of government. And Murdoch, the last great media mogul, is mortal. The aging press magnate can deny the reality by wearing black polo-neck sweaters on the urging of his much younger wife, but he doesn't have much time to conclude his legacy.

(Citizen Kane's desolate mansion, in the Orson Welles movie based loosely on the life of William Randolph Hearst, the pre-eminent press baron of an earlier age.)