Why won’t Rupert Murdoch and The Wall Street Journal gang come out and tell us they’re going to scrap subscriptions for WSJ.com instead of flirting with the idea? We could just come right out and interpret some of Murdoch’s previous remarks that way, but that’s not what you do at a wire service .

Still, it gets hard sometimes, especially with the latest episode of “Let’s Mess With the Media Reporters’ Heads” that we witnessed on the Dow Jones earnings conference call on Thursday.

Analyst: I guess my question is with Rupert suggesting that he’s going to make the Wall Street Journal.com free.

Dow Jones CEO Richard Zannino : As we’ve looked at the models over the years and we do constantly look at it, we have felt that for this moment in time, that we have had the right model. Now, times change and things change and the online space is rapidly evolving… and it’s up to us to continue to evolve ourselves.

Wall Street Journal Publisher Gordon Crovitz : So we’ve known with the online journal that we’ve had the best business site. We think we’ve had the best business model for it. The opportunity and the challenge now is can we be both the best and the largest… So is there a way to continue to expand our audience while maximizing the profitability of our online operations? We think there are some interesting opportunities to do that.

Far be it from the humble Media File to interpret words like “right model,” “evolve,” “expand” and “the best and the largest.” Still, the talk sounds suspiciously like that of another big publisher looking at the evolution of its Web site .