Rupert Murdoch, that sly old rascal, caused a minor Twitter-storm recently, with an interview in which he suggested that News Corp. (NWS) might remove its websites from Google (GOOG), which he has described in the past as a “thief” that takes content without asking (Google, for its part, said that it would be more than happy to oblige Rupert’s whims in this regard). As Mike Masnick at Techdirt also noted, Murdoch even went so far as to argue that “fair use” principles were likely illegal, and would eventually be proven so. You have to give the guy credit for knowing a soundbite when he sees one.

Mark Cuban, another crusty old billionaire (although just a pup compared to Rupe), used these remarks as a jumping-off point for his own flight of rhetorical fancy, in which he argued that social-recommendation networks such as Twitter and Facebook were far more important than Google, and that therefore Rupert was right and all the “information-must-be-free bigots” who criticized him must be wrong. But as Steve Rhodes (@tigerbeat) pointed out on Twitter after I posted a link to Cuban’s rant, all the social-recommendations in the world aren’t going to help Rupert if he insists on putting his content behind pay walls.

No matter how many times people like Clay Shirky or Mike Masnick try to pop the bubble of faith around micropayments as a cure for what ails the newspaper industry (or even the media industry as a whole), another believer emerges to argue that a secure and extensible micropayment system is a big part of the answer. The latest to make an impassioned plea is Jeff Reifman, the co-founder of NewsCloud, a “community-driven news aggregator” funded by the Knight Foundation.

In a recent blog post, Reifman outlines why he believes that micropayments can solve the newspaper industry’s problems. His post is a response to one by Steve Outing at Editor & Publisher, which carried the somewhat argumentative title “Your News Content Is Worth Zero To Digital Consumers,” and argued that charging people for news isn’t going to work unless that news is highly targeted to a specific niche. (Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt made a similar point recently about why The Wall Street Journal has been able to charge, and Paul Graham echoes that point as well.)

C.W. Anderson — @chanders on Twitter — has an update to his recent post at Nieman Journalism Lab, which tried to go beyond the binary “real journalists vs. bloggers” equation to look at online and traditional journalism entities on an axis related to how institutional/open they are and how fact-oriented / commentary-oriented they are.

In my last post, I spent a lot of time laying out a fairly abstract framework for how we can think intelligently about future kinds of news organizations. I argued they could be usefully evaluated and charted on four factors: the type of work they do, how institutionalized they are, how many resources they have, and how open they are to outsiders.

As many people probably know by now, Google (GOOG) came out with another of its Google Labs features on Monday: a Google News timeline view, which gives users the ability to see and scroll through headlines, photos and news excerpts by day / week / month / year. The sources of this data can also be customized to include not just traditional news sources but also Wikipedia, sports scores, blogs, etc. It’s a fascinating way of interpreting the news — not something that is likely going to replace a regular old Google News headline view, but an additional way of looking at things.

One question kept nagging at me as I was looking at this latest Google effort at delivering the news, and that was: Why couldn’t a news organization have done this? (I’m not the only one to wonder this). Why not a newspaper, or even a collective like Associated Press (which seems to prefer threats to creativity)? Isn’t delivering the news in creative and interesting ways that appeal to readers what we are supposed to be doing?

As the financial pressures on newspapers continue to increase, the chorus of voices calling out for a new kind of payment scheme grow louder and louder. Some, like New York Times (NYT) writer David Carr, have argued that newspapers should be able to concoct some form of “iTunes for news” that would allow them to pool their resources and charge users for their content (provided they get a waiver from the anti-trust authorities, of course). Others — including Carr’s boss Bill Keller, in a recent interview — have mused aloud about whether they couldn’t just re-erect the old pay wall and convince some people to pay for the news that way.

The latest voices to add themselves to this chorus are Stu Bykofsky of the Philadelphia Daily News and veteran journalist and author Walter Isaacson, writing in Time magazine. Bykofsky wrote a piece that managed to hit pretty much every highlight (or lowlight) of the crotchety old newspaperman genre: bloggers can’t replace journalists, every other outlet copies the news from newspapers, and if it wasn’t for the darn Internet we would all be a lot better off.

As everyone waits to find out how new Yahoo! (YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz plans to resuscitate the struggling Internet giant, in the meantime, the stress of watching Yahoo! bungle one thing after another — such as coming within inches of a merger with Microsoft (MSFT), only to blow the deal at the 11th hour — seems to have taken its toll on some otherwise perceptive stock analysts.

Take Gene Munster from Piper Jaffray, for example. As described by Barron’s blogger Eric Savitz, Munster recently wrote yet another “open letter” to Bartz (man, she must be getting sick of those) in which he suggested that Yahoo! buy the New York Times (NYT). And maybe Gawker Media as well. Oh yes, and Twitter too. And maybe FriendFeed. And maybe some other stuff.

It’s going to take some time to think through the implications of the settlement (PDF link) announced today between the New York Times Co. (NYT) and GateHouse Media (GHS), over the issue of NYT’s Boston.com site aggregating content from local sites belonging to GateHouse, but my first instinct is that it is almost unrelentingly bad. Why? Because while the settlement is not a legally-binding precedent — the one piece of what might be called good news — it still involves the New York Times voluntarily refraining from what many would argue is perfectly defensible behavior. As Joshua Benton notes in his post at the Nieman Journalism Lab, that could well embolden other publications to launch similar cases, on the assumption that if the NYT caved then someone else might too.

The Times tries to argue that this settlement does nothing to change the way it approaches linking to or even quoting from external sources on its websites, but that clearly isn’t the case at all. It completely changes the way the paper does that, but only when the content involves a GateHouse website. The NYT claims that it will continue to link to and quote from external sources whenever it wants, but will no longer do so with GateHouse content (under the agreement it can continue to link, but can no longer aggregate content in an automated way, and has agreed not to quote from a GateHouse site).

Amid all the doom and gloom about newspapers laying off staff and closing bureaus and even — as in the case of Tribune Co., parent company of the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and Baltimore Sun — filing for bankruptcy, there has been very little attention paid to one of the main reasons for those cutbacks and business failures. And I’m not talking about a decline in journalistic principles or the sudden departure of advertisers for other online properties, or anything as apocalyptic as that. One of the main reasons has very little to do with journalism and everything to do with the world of mergers and acquisitions.

That reason, as several astute observers have pointed out (including former newspaper exec Alan Mutter at his blog Reflections of a Newsosaur, and most recently a commenter at the political blog Talking Points Memo) is debt. In the case of Tribune Co. — acquired by corporate raider Sam “Grave Dancer” Zell — and several other major newspapers as well, acquisitions and corporate financing have created the conditions that led to much of the pain they have inflicted on the papers they own.

There have been — and will no doubt continue to be — plenty of blog posts, magazine articles and even (irony of ironies) the occasional newspaper story written about the death of the newspaper. It’s become almost a cottage industry, poring over the imminent failure of giants such as the New York Times (NYT), the Tribune Co. (TRB) empire and even the Wall Street Journal. Some pieces (mostly by journalists) bemoan the changes the media industry is going through, like one I wrote about recently, in which a columnist wrote about how bloggers were killing the industry. Others (thankfully) are a little more optimistic about the evolution of online media.

One of the best pieces I’ve come across in a while comes from Michael Hirschorn, a former editor for New York magazine, Spin and Esquire and a former executive with VH1 who writes regularly for Atlantic Monthly. His piece, entitled End Times, starts out with a bang:

For some time now, there has been speculation that Steve Jobs was sicker than either he or Apple (AAPL) wanted to admit. At first, the company said that he simply had “a bug,” and then when the company announced that he would not be doing his usual keynote speech at Macworld — a speech so associated with him that it has come to be known as a “Stevenote” — the company denied it had anything to do with his health. Now, we know that this was untrue. Steve himself has confirmed that he is unwell as a result of a “hormone imbalance,” and that he is working on getting better.

Before anyone flames me for not caring about the man or his family, or for prying into what should be personal affairs, or for being “ghoulish” — as someone accused me of being the last time I wrote about the Apple founder’s health — let me just say that I have nothing but respect and admiration for Steve Jobs and what he has done for Apple, and I hope that he gets over his recent health problems and lives a long and happy life. But that doesn’t mean his health, or lack thereof, isn’t of public interest.

With David Carr’s argument that newspapers should ignore the Web only a few days old — not to mention Joel Brinkley’s suggestion that anti-trust violations are a viable business model — I thought the market for stupid newspaper-related activity was pretty well saturated. But apparently I was wrong. It seems that GateHouse Media, which owns a number of regional papers in the U.S., is suing the New York Times (NYT) for linking to its content. Yes, you read that correctly — it is suing to stop the NYT from linking.

I am not making this up. If this sounds like a court case that might have occurred in the early 1990s, when sites of all kinds were just getting used to the Intarwebs, that’s because it is virtually a carbon copy of some of those early cases. The argument in a nutshell is that GateHouse is mad because the Times (or rather, the Boston Globe, which is owned by the same company) is “scraping” its headlines and the first paragraph of stories, and then “deep-linking” to the stories themselves, thereby copying the site’s content and stealing its traffic (as Mike Masnick at TechDirt points out, GateHouse is also apparently suing for breach of contract, because its articles are Creative Commons-licensed, but with a non-commercial license).

As a number of people have already noted, Microsoft’s (MSFT) release of Seadragon for the iPhone — an image-viewing app based on the deep-zoom technology behind the software giant’s Photosynth project — doesn’t just seem like an admission that the iPhone is better than any other mobile out there: Microsoft product manager Alex Daley comes right out and says as much in an interview with Todd Bishop of the blog Tech Flash:

"The iPhone is the most widely distributed phone with a (graphics processing unit),” Daley explained. “Most phones out today don’t have accelerated graphics in them. The iPhone does and so it enabled us to do something that has been previously difficult to do. I couldn’t just pick up a Blackberry or a Nokia off the shelf and build Seadragon for it."

I just can’t resist saying something about the ridiculous “study” that a consulting firm called Precursor did of the bandwidth that Google (GOOG) supposedly uses but doesn’t pay for. The headline on the email I got — which I assume was sent to tens of thousands of others as well — was sensational and gripping, in the same way that supermarket tabloid headlines are often sensational and gripping (”Elvis clone lands on the moon!”). The email trumpeted the fact that “Google uses 21 times the bandwidth that it pays for.” Bound to get a reaction, right? And it certainly did, with the scholarly-sounding Precursor study being cited holus-bolus by a number of websites.

The fact is, however, that the study has about as much basis in fact as the News of the World headline about Elvis’s clone landing on the moon. As far as I can tell, Precursor took some numbers about market share, extrapolated from that to produce a wildly-inflated bandwidth estimate, and then multiplied that figure by some imaginary number from telecom-lobbyist land to come up with its shocker of a headline, and a press release about how the company “used 16.5 per cent of all U.S. consumer Internet traffic in 2008″ (it makes no sense to say that Google “used” traffic, of course, but that’s the level of argument we’re dealing with). Precursor said that Google only pays $355-million for bandwidth, or 0.8 per cent of the total amount Americans pay for Internet access, which is where the 21 comes from.

Kara Swisher at All Things Digital always gives me grief when I do this, but I’m going to do it anyway: Namely, point to a rumour — in this case, a rumour in the Times of London about Microsoft MSFT) making some kind of convoluted deal to proceed with what amounts to a creeping takeover of Yahoo (YHOO) (Update: Kara says that sources tell her it is “total fiction”).

According to the report, the deal would involve Ross Levinsohn (formerly of Fox Interactive Media) and Jonathan Miller (formerly of Yahoo) raising $5-billion and Microsoft putting in another $5-billion, and the two groups acquiring a 30-per-cent stake in the troubled Web giant, which Levinsohn and Miller would run. Microsoft would manage the search business and would have a call option on buying the whole enchilada for $20-billion.

Seth Godin, marketing guru extraordinaire, has an interesting post about how the New York Times has missed the boat and is fighting the wrong war (to mix a couple of metaphors). In it, he puts his finger on one of the biggest factors that make it hard for newspapers in general — the one I work for included — to make the transition from paper to digital. It’s not a technical issue, or at least not solely a technical issue, but more of a conceptual shift. There are no limits any more, or at least not the usual ones that have worked for the past century or so, and that’s a difficult thing to grasp.

“All the News That’s Fit to Print” is the heart of the problem. It was never that, of course. It was “All the News That Fits.” The entire mindset of (every) newspaper has been driven by the cost of paper, the finite nature of paper, the cost of delivery and the cycle of a daily paper. You run enough articles to fit as many ads as you can sell.These are artifacts of a different age, one that today’s consumer doesn’t care a whit about.”