At MySpace headquarters in Beverly Hills, playbooks are stacked on desks as Rupert Murdoch's minions desperately try to make the numbers on a Yahoo deal work. Murdoch's News Corp. has joined forces with Microsoft in an effort to counter a deal with the mogul's old enemy, Time Warner. Google, which all old-line media companies fear, is approaching a bid with languorous rigor, running a small test of placing its ads on some Yahoo pages. It's all rather depressing.

As Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, AOL and News Corp. go at it tag team-style, PaidContent rounded up Wall Street's opinion on the proceedings. The bullet-list version, below.

News Corp. is now discussing a possible joint takeover bid for Yahoo with Microsoft, according to unnamed sources cited by the Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, Yahoo is now discussing combining Internet operations with Time Warner-owned America Online as part of a three-fold move to stave off the takeover bid that includes teaming up with AOL, buying back much of the company's stock and running search ads from Google. Analysts quoted in the Journal still suggest the sale to Microsoft is a fait accompli, and that Yahoo is just trying to get CEO Steve Ballmer and company to cough up a higher bid for shares.

When the reshuffled Yahoo Media Group in Santa Monica holds an all-hands on April 15, it's going to be awfully tempting for Adam Bain to send spies. He's the the head of Fox Interactive's new ad network and his unit moving into the "Yahoo Center," reports PaidContent. Talks over renaming the place are underway. We nominate: "Bill's place." (Photo by stevelyon)

Fox Interactive Media — the unit overseeing MySpace and other News Corp. online properties — will miss its fiscal-year revenue projections of $1 billion by more than 10 percent, or $100 million, the WSJ reports. As a result, Fox Interactive chief revenue officer Michael Barrett is out of a job. The big problem is making money off of MySpace. It has lots of users, but as MySpace advertising partner Google has discovered, brands don't want to put their product next to Tila Tequila. So now MySpace is going to try something we thought Facebook would do — create an ad network that targets MySpace members when they visit third-party sites. It'll be called the "Fox Interactive Media Audience Network," and Adam Bain will run it. PaidContent obtained a memo from Peter Levinsohn, president of Fox Interactive Media on the reshuffling and it's pasted below.

All he did was maybe help try to overthrow the government of ex-Soviet republic Georgia, and they took his broadcast rights away. "Georgia's pro-Western authorities have steered clear of publicly suggesting that Rupert Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive of the News Corporation, had any role in the coup plot, but have contacted him about the closing of Imedi." [Times]

Kevin Delaney, the Wall Street Journal's Google and Yahoo beat reporter, is decamping from the Valley to New York to take a deputy editor gig at WSJ.com, we hear. A perk of the job: Getting to disclose Google's business relationships with Journal parent company News Corp. in every story.

This weekend, L.A. Times writer Stephanie Simon, lived the Newsday dream and got Rupert Murdoch as a boss. The national reporter is leaving Sam Zell's fun factory Tribune Co. for the Wall Street Journal. Simon's decision is just one of the many depressing departures from the L.A. Times. After the jump, a few discouraging memos from her fellow ship-jumpers. [via LA Observed]

What a world: Rupert Murdoch has become the lesser of two evils. Newsday reporters are hoping that he will buy the Long Island tabloid from Sam Zell, the Tribune owner who is looking to unload it. Really? Despite his delightful sense of humor, since Zell took over the Tribune Co., the Newsday staff has dubbed their Melville headquarters "Hellville." Ha. "Hell" rhymes with "Mel." I've been to Melville, and it's just like every other suburban town: more of a purgatory than a hell. [NYO]

Whatever your feelings toward the New York Post, the feisty tab sure does have a way with headlines. And, of course, Page Six has no problem boasting about it-or cross-promoting tasty corporate products. Harper Entertainment, which, like the Post, is owned by monolithic News Corp., is publishing Headless Body in Topless Bar, a celebration of some of the paper's greatest hits. Page Six's top picks after the jump.

In an article on Salon's Machinist blog today, Farhad Manjoo gives tips for getting around the Wall Street Journal's paid-subscription barrier. WSJ.com allows some featured articles to be read for free, but puts much of its content behind what's known in the business as a "pay wall." The dirty secret Manjoo exposes: Many of the "hidden" articles can be easily accessed with a little technical know-how. What he doesn't stop to ask: Why has new Journal owner Rupert Murdoch made it so easy?

ComScore tells us Google is trouncing its competitors in the online-video market. In January 2008, one in three online videos viewed in the U.S. were watched on YouTube — totaling 3.4 billion videos. The next closest competitor, Fox Interactive — mostly MySpace — had a mere 6 percent share, with just under 600 million videos watched.

Even more astounding are the average minutes per viewer. A typical YouTube visitor spent almost two hours a month on the site, watching 41.4 videos each. Now if only Google could find a way to make money off all of those screen-glued eyeballs. Until then, we won't know if YouTube at $1.65 billion was really a steal.

Ever since TMZ.com ran its infamous "firecrotch" video — the one in which an oil-heir pal of Paris Hilton slagged Lindsay Lohan — the Time Warner-owned Hollywood gossip site has been on a pageviews tear. TMZ.com slaps News Corp.'s PageSix.com around every which way when it comes to visitor traffic. But TMZ doesn't have video of the walking, talking, leaning sensation that is Ashley Alexandra Dupré, now do they?

Before agreeing to sell to AOL for $850 million, Bebo president Joanna Shields tried to sell the company to News Corp., Google, Yahoo and CBS. Didn't happen. Bebo gets too little traffic in the U.S., sources from those companies told BoomTown. Microscopic revenues probably didn't help Bebo reach its hoped-for $1 billion pricetag, either. In 2006, Bebo revenues were $7 million, with just $3 million in EBITDA — Wall Street's favored measure of operating profit. Last year, total revenues climbed to $20 million, $5 million in EBITDA. So that's a price-to-earnings ratio of 160. Oh, maybe AOL CEO Randy Falco's valuing it on growth, you say? Let's run those numbers.

"In his first visit to the Wall Street Journal's D.C. bureau, Rupert Murdoch told staffers Friday that he would put more resources into Washington coverage and take on the New York Times, while reassuring them that he is not a 'conservative' pushing an agenda in the news pages." Moral judgment: are well-intentioned lies okay? [Politico]

Tomorrow, Hulu will finally open its doors to the wider public. Rumor has it Time Warner and Viacom soon plan to join the site, which is backed by NBC and News Corp., through nonexclusive distribution deals. CBS digital guru Quincy Smith, however, remains pessimistic: "If the Web is just another way to watch TV, I think I'm going to slit my wrists." Below, the best friend of former Yahoo CEO Terry Semel's daughter in the kind of short form clip Hulu hopes the public will take to.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is reportedly considering changing the offer to buy Yahoo from half-cash and half-stock to all-cash, effectively raising the bid from $28.87 a share to the its original $31. That would up Yahoo's price tag from $41.5 billion back to $44.6 billion. Credit Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang for negotiating without really trying. Word has it his dalliances with Time Warner and News Corp. inspired the idea.

Despite early promises that Rupert Murdoch didn't want to "cheapen" the Wall Street Journal by associating it with other News Corp. brands, vendors were doing exactly that at City Hall today, selling the Post and the Journal together for $1, devaluing the Wall Street Journal's street value and its brand 30 percent. [via Alex Balk]

News Corp. overlord Rupert Murdoch may be getting a bit slow in his dotage, but he still knows a good story. Is it a coincidence that three arms of his media empire — the Times of London, Fox News, and the New York Post — have belatedly picked up on Jimmy Wales's bizarre breakup with Rachel Marsden? Marsden was, until last fall, a Fox News commentator, which can only make the tale more delicious for Murdoch: The prodigal daughter welcomed back as grist for the gossip mill. Beyond that, why the onslaught?

Judith Regan, former high-powered publisher with News Corp.'s HaperCollins, who notoriously carried on a gross affair with disgraced criminal former top cop Bernie Kerik in a Ground Zero apartment, and who was fired for, among other things, embarrassing the company with her O.J. Simpson book (and some alleged anti-Semitic comments), and who settled a wrongful dismissal suit with News Corp. for a rumored $20m–$25m (or maybe $10m) will need that money to pay off her old lawyers, whom she dismissed in favor of showbiz law legend Bert Fields. Regan's old lawyers at Dreier LLP say they worked 1,200 hours and received only $125,000. Fields says the suit brought by the old attorneys is without merit. And it was reported in Page Six, a happy part of the News Corp. cabal family. [NYP]