In your sincere Wednesday media column: Barry Diller has endlessly deep pockets, Fox gets an online paywall, Michael Hastings' book deal disappears, The Daily still, improbably, exists, and doing more with less is dead.

  • Barry Diller could not be more pleased with the amount of money he's losing on The Daily Beast. And he's positively overjoyed about the money he's lost on Newsweek! PaidContent reports that "The losses should be arrested within a year or a year-and-a-half, Diller said, at which point, the business is expected have lost about $60 million in total." Oh, he can make that up in no time hahahahaha. This is exactly how Barry Diller wanted this to go!
  • No more watching Fox TV shows for free on the internet right after they air, freeloaders; now, you'll have to either wait eight days, or pay a subscription fee to watch them online. Or, you know, watch TV.
  • Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings got a book deal off his big article about Gen. Stanley McChrystal last year, but now Keith Kelly says that Hastings' publisher has decided not to put out the book, for unexplained reasons. Well fuck it, McChrystal's already gone. This would be bad mainly because it would cost Hastings some money. And writers need and deserve more money, badly!
  • The NYO checks in on News Corp's last remaining property untainted by scandal, The Daily, and finds that it still exists, although Rupert Murdoch is its only known reader. Ipad! The shiny future!
  • Good to know: "Editors say doing more with less is no longer a newsroom mantra." We'll just go back to doing less with less.

[Photo: AP]