James Altucher - who sold his StockPickr company to TheStreet.com (TSCM) less than a year after founding it - argues that investing in Internet stocks is a loser’s proposition, mainly because none of them really generate money:

Time Warner (TWC) would rather keep their legacy old-media businesses like People magazine than hold onto one of the biggest Internet companies out there, AOL. And News Corp. (NWS) is shaking up its MySpace business as it figures out its next steps. (News Corp. owns Dow Jones (DJ), publisher of this newswire.) Microsoft (MSFT) has spent billions on Internet strategy without a dime of profit. And even Google (GOOG) can’t seem to find any other business model other than the one they stumbled into when they bought Applied Semantics in 2001 that had a little piece of software called AdSense. And the new guys: Twitter and Facebook are still scrambling for profits despite blistering usage growth.

Long before the word frenemy hit the buzzword bingo board, the proverb of complex relations was “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” In the increasingly tangled melting pot that is online media and advertising, that sentiment is as true now as ever.

Today, competitors are often cooperative colleagues at the same time. Proof: Rivals Fox (News Corp) (NWS) and NBC/Universal jointly developed popular web video portal Hulu despite otherwise battling each other for prime time TV audiences. More proof: Microsoft (MSFT) is drawing competitors together to guide the development of its newest ad management tool, Pub Center.

That proposal is similar to one put forth for newspaper companies by API’s Newspaper Next project. Says managing director Stephen Gray:

Back in March 2007, I penned Stop the Newspaper Obituary, Please, commenting that in essence, yes the print business is shrinking, but that the main culprit was the price-to-sales and price-to-earnings multiples that print businesses were fetching.

In fact, back then (roughly 13 months ago), the companies’ revenues were higher:

America's two biggest newspapers managed to tread water, but just about everyone else showed signs of sinking in the most recent release of numbers from the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

USA Today and The Wall Street Journal, No. 1 and 2, respectively, in weekday circulation, were both up by less than 1 percent for the six months ending March 31. But after that, it gets ugly. Every other paper in the top 15 lost circulation, with the Dallas Morning News breaking the double-digit mark. (Its weekday average was 368,313, down 10.6 percent year-over-year.)

Only the very naive didn't expect Rupert Murdoch to find some sly way around the agreement he made to respect The Wall Street Journal's editorial independence once it was his.

Call off the speculation: Marcus Brauchli was pushed.

Stealth attack! While we've been on high alert for changes to The Wall Street Journal's Marketplace section, Rupert Murdoch has gone and revamped section A yet again, adding a third daily page of opinion content and a pair of familiar columnists. No wonder he's been coming in on Sundays.

Gordon Crovitz, the former Journal publisher who stepped down in December, is one of the new additions. His column, "Information Age," about the impact of digital technology on business, will appear on Mondays.

Huge congratulations to my friend Herb Greenberg for announcing something he and I have discussed many times in recent months: His desire to create an independent equity research boutique. It's now set to happen, and Herb is leaving traditional journalism for equity research.

I couldn't be happier for Herb. Truly. He is a smart, funny and -- this must be said -- generous guy, and he deserves the broadest possible playing field to display and, yes, benefit financially from his talents.

No wonder Rupert Murdoch's in no hurry to do away with The Wall Street Journal's online pay wall. Even with it still in place around large sections of the site, traffic is still growing at a most impressive rate.

Good newspaper jobs are hard to come by these days, but you wouldn't know it from the way people are ditching the ones they have at The Wall Street Journal -- and, in some cases, leaving behind journalism altogether.

In recent days, columnist Jonathan Clements, reporter Laurie P. Cohen and editor Paul Barrett have all resigned from the paper. They follow reporters Anita Raghavan, who jumped to Forbes as European bureau chief, and Sally Beatty, who has joined Pfizer's PR department. A Dow Jones spokesman declined to comment on the exits.

Remember the Tim Geithner speech last week? The wires covered it, dutifully enough, but it didn't get much traction beyond that, outside the wonkier end of the econoblogosphere. What makes me very happy, however, is that the wonkier end of the econoblogosphere turns out to be reasonably influential these days. Paul Krugman saw the speech at Economist's View, wrote a long blog entry on it, and helped contribute to some pretty high-level debate over the weekend from the likes of Steve Waldman, Yves Smith, and Brad DeLong.

Yesterday, Krugman upgraded his blog entry to fully-fledged NYT column, complete with hat-tip to Calculated Risk and an actual link to Interfluidity (which is more than there is to the Geithner speech). He describes Geithner's text as "the scariest thing I've read recently," and concludes with a call for the government to explicitly guarantee the debt of Fannie Mae (FNM) and Freddie Mac (FRE), which he says "really are too big to fail".

Irin Carmon gets some hard facts about the WSJ's new glossy magazine.

WSJ.'s circulation of 800,000 will be targeted to the 15 largest metro markets, including subscribers with a median household income of $300,000 (15 percent higher than the Journal's overall), plus a small amount of newsstand distribution. (For would-be readers shut out, all the material will be online.) Another 180,000 copies will be distributed in the Asian and European editions of the paper. As with Time magazine's Style & Design spin-off, the strategy hones the demographic profile while keeping production costs down.

The old saw about battles in academia being so vicious because so little is at stake is equally applicable to media squabbles. That, of course, in no way mitigates their entertainment value, so let’s get to the Columbia Journalism Review and Dean Starkman’s analysis of an imbroglio, triggered by Barron’s ‘Shorting Cramer’ cover story from Aug. 20 2007:

While the story didn’t make much of a splash at the time, it sparked a quiet but surprisingly fierce feud between the two business-news organizations, one that seems out of proportion to the story that caused it. Within days of publication, for instance, CNBC officials told Barron’s reporters who had appeared as on-air guests for years that their presence was no longer desired...

Financial and stock research sites like Yahoo (YHOO) Finance, Google (GOOG) Finance, Marketwatch, or CNNMoney have done a lot to democratize investment research by bringing reams of financial data for any publicly traded company to investors at the click of a button. But when it comes to financial metrics, much of the data they provide is the same for every company: revenues, earnings, PE ratios, market caps, assets, liabilities, analyst estimates, and so on. To really understand a company, this data is just a starting point. By the end of next week, Wikinvest is planning on introducing a new feature to help investors dig deeper. Says co-founder Michael Sha:

People have a thirst for information and data, but the traditional data available does not make much logical sense. They don’t help you understand the nuances of companies and industries.

An interesting conversation this morning: Paul Kedrosky, an ideas blogger who speaks stock-market, trying to talk to Jim Cramer about ideas, but getting answers overwhelmingly about stocks. Cramer's not stupid: he said right at the beginning that his "perspective is entirely upgrade/downgrade, which is very short-sighted". But he's trapped in that mindset, and it was incredibly difficult for Kedrosky to ask him a question without getting a stock pick as an answer.

Still, it did happen once, when Kedrosky said the magic word "Bloomberg". Cramer went off on a tear:

It's almost unfathomable to imagine Rupert Murdoch as half-pregnant (please...nooooooo), but that's the picture that seems to be emerging, at least as far as the WSJ.com (DJ) subscription issue is concerned. Yes, as a former colleague of mine liked to rant: Proof of Failure. Times Select made sense - on a white board - and it did pull in $10M, but it was fatally flawed.

That flaw looks to be the same that Rupert's Wall Street Journal is embracing.

Here’s how WSJ.com’s media kit describes the audience: