The struggle for MySpace's future pitted East against West and North against South. Silicon Valley lost; Los Angeles and New York won. And all fired CEO Owen Van Natta could do was smile, shrug and crack open some cold ones.

OK, maybe Rupert Murdoch really is serious about charging for online newspaper content, after all: The News Corporation chairman has reportedly dispatched his lieutenant to form some kind of newspaper pay-wall gang.

Why does everything good have to come to an end? Sigh. According to Jeff Bercovici of Daily Finance, Hulu is poised to start charging people subscription fees to watch video on the site.

Former Facebook COO Owen Van Natta is the frontrunner to replace Chris DeWolfe as MySpace CEO. Blog lordling Jason Calacanis has been jokingly nominated for the News Corp. gig. Here's who should get it.

Sucking up to the CEO's wife is usually a wise move. But did it doom MySpace chief Chris DeWolfe?

• Mark Bowden's 11,000-word profile of Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. for the May issue of Vanity Fair is now online. And it ain't pretty. [VF]
• In other Times news, the paper is scrapping its "City" section and has shut down the International Herald Tribune website. [NYO, E&P]
• For the first time, CNN will finish March behind MSNBC and Fox News. [AP]
• He's only been on the air two months, but Glenn Beck's "conservative populist anger" has already put him right behind Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity. [NYT]
• Adweek, MediaWeek and Brandweek may be folded together. [NYP]
• News Corp. is hiring ex-AOL CEO Jon Miller to lead its digital division. [WSJ]
• The Huffington Post is launching an investigative journalism site. [AP]
• MTV is bringing back music videos! Sort of. [NYT]

Have you ever noticed that there are certain names in the newspaper day after day, industry "experts" whom reporters seem to constantly hit up for quotes? That journalists go back to the same well again and again is no surprise. Journalists are lazy. Why bother trying to squeeze a soundbite out of someone new when you have ten minutes to finish an article and there's already an eager pro who's given you his cell phone number and told you to call him day or night? Below, some of the most prolific quote-givers—who they are, the topics they're inevitably called to comment on, and how many times they got their "expert opinions" into newspapers for the first half of 2008.

In an entirely punctuated memo posted to Yahoo's corporate blog and the SEC, Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang — or his ghostwriters — declared that yesterday's agreement to give corporate raider Carl Icahn three board seats and avert a proxy fight allows Yahoo "to get back to the business at hand." But while Yahoo will soon enough be able to focus on doing what it does best — losing market share to Google and talent to startups — Yang and the board still have one more task at hand: filling out its expanded board with Icahn-approved nominees. Bet that one of the names will be fired AOL chairman and CEO Jon Miller. Though not included on Icahn's original slate of alternative directors, Yang mentioned Miller by name in his memo as a potential new board member.

The self-promoting president of real estate appraisal firm Miller Samuel, Miller is known for supplying media outlets with estimates of the value of commercial and residential real estate in New York City.

Venture capitalists sell themselves as friends to entrepreneurs, and talk about how they're going into business together. Isn't it useful to know how they treat the people they're actually in business with? The tale of the formation of Velocity Interactive Group is instructive in that regard. Former AOL CEO Jonathan Miller and ex-News Corp. executive Ross Levinsohn, who oversaw MySpace, raised eyebrows when they switched VC teams last December. The full story is even more cutthroat than we imagined.

While AOL's chief speaks at MIT,