When we heard that Merrill Lynch wasn’t ruling out a sale of its stake in newswire and financial information service Bloomberg LP, we had to wonder who would want it. More to the point, we had to wonder who wouldn’t. As our story explained, Bloomberg probably (though we can’t say for sure) is a lucrative enterprise that any investor would want to profit from.

As it turns out, wanting something is fine, but just because you want something doesn’t mean you’re going to get it. Here’s the problem: at an estimated $6 billion, Merrill’s Bloomberg stake is way too expensive for most media companies. Not only that, the companies who could afford it — private equity and sovereign wealth funds — are unlikely to raise the cash to take a shot at it. The reason? They like the control that money brings, and with Bloomberg that’s not going to happen.

I spent some time with a high-level (and of course anonymous) source who knows how things work at Bloomberg, and here’s what that source had to say about it:

We’re talking about taking a minority position in a privately held country company that is completely controlled by the mayor of New York City who gets to do whatever he wants. You have less say than you would have if you were the owner of 10 shares of General Motors.

If Merrill wants to sell, the easiest deal is to call Mike and come to a deal, my guess is, he’d do the deal.

Well, Bloomberg did say he wasn’t interested in newspapers.

What would a combined InBev/Anheuser-Busch do with advertising? It’s one of the questions already being tossed around in the wake of InBev’s $46 billion bid for the brewer of Bud and Bud Light.

One obvious problem for Anheuser-Busch, which spends about $475 million each year on advertising, is that their marketing focuses heavily on the idea of being an All-American beer and company.

That may not play so well when you’re owned by a company based in Belgium, we reported.

As Ted Parrack, chief strategic officer of Colangelo, a Connecticut-based marketing agency, told us: “How do Americans think about beer? Guys make beer. Corporations don’t make beer. Something called InBev makes Budweiser? And there’s nobody named Busch around? What?”

The Wall Street Journal brought up Anheuser-Busch’s big sports marketing efforts, writing that they could be cut back.

One area that is potentially vulnerable is sports marketing. Anheuser, one of the largest sports marketers in the world, spent about $300 million last year for sports sponsorships, up 11% from the year earlier, according to IEG, a Chicago-based research unit of WPP Group that tracks sponsorships.

Anheuser is affiliated with dozens of sports, from baseball to equestrian competitions. It sponsors sports leagues big and small, including Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association and Major League Lacrosse, and even the U.S. polo team. This summer, the company is one of the official beers of the Beijing Olympic Games.

But we think the best headline about the deal goes to The Nashua Telegraph, which splashed “This Bud’s for vous” across its business pages. The New Hampshire paper talked to Nashua resident Rob Masek.

“(He) envisions the Belgian takeover of an American beer having the same affect as when German auto manufacturer bought out the U.S.-based Chrysler. People stopped buying Chrysler cars because of the perception it was a weaker product, he said.

Masek can see people attending a NASCAR event questioning those who would dare drink a Belgian beer. ” ‘What are you doing? It’s un-American,’ ” Masek imagines the conversation going.

We’ll see how this one plays out. In the meantime, sit back. Have a cold one.

Keep an eye on:

• The head of Tribune Co’s publishing division and publisher of the Chicago Tribune is retiring, a week after the company’s new leaders said they would overhaul their newspapers to cut costs and try to attract more readers as they struggle with dismal advertising sales and falling circulation (Reuters)
• A controversial push by the Screen Actors Guild to defeat a recent accord negotiated by a rival union has touched off an open rebellion within Hollywood’s largest actors guild (Los Angeles Times)
• News and information company Bloomberg LP could be a hotly contested asset if a stake went on the block, although the most likely buyer was seen by some as founder and billionaire Michael Bloomberg himself (Reuters)
• News Corp’s MySpace plans to launch a global redesign next week in an attempt to widen its demographic and boost user engagement on the site (Reuters)

(Photo: Reuters)

It looks like Norman Pearlstine couldn’t resist the glamorous life of journalism. After two years in the private equity business at the Blackstone Group Carlyle Group (D’oh!), Pearlstine is joining Bloomberg LP as “chief content officer,” where, as Bloomberg said in a press release, he will work with “Editor-in-Chief Matthew Winkler to seek growth opportunities for its
television, radio, magazine and online products and to make the most of the
existing Bloomberg News operations.”

Pearlstine used to be the editor-in-chief of Time Inc for 11 years, and before that spent 23 years at The Wall Street Journal. More details on his CV, directly from the release :

He was the paper’s top news executive for nine years, serving as Managing Editor and then Executive Editor. He previously worked as the founding editor and publisher of The Wall Street Journal/Europe, the first Managing Editor of The Asian Wall Street Journal, and the Tokyo bureau chief.

Pearlstine was founder of Smart Money magazine and worked as an Executive Editor of Forbes. He is the author of OFF THE RECORD: The Press, the Government, and the War over Anonymous Sources , published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2007.

We don’t know what to make of this. Our immediate questions:

- Will he succeed Winkler, with whom he worked at the Journal?

- Will he put Bloomberg into M&A mode?

- Will he work on an effort to take Bloomberg LP public? (This idea has come up at least once before)

Pearlstine wasn’t available for comment, so we’ll just publish our questions here and invite comments, but Bloomberg’s top editorial executive, Matt Winkler, did  call. Here’s a bit of what we talked about:

Q: Why Pearlstine?

A: Nobody brings as much experience in so many different ways as Norm does… Our hope is that Norm can give us a lot more awareness and guidance on ways we can deliver [our news] well beyond the Bloomberg.

Q: When did you first meet him?

A: The meet-and-greet was probably in the halls of Dow Jones & Co when I arrived in 1980, and he was the national news editor at The Wall Street Journal. People would point him out to me as a really important person you ought to know, so maybe on the way to the men’s room I was able to introduce myself. (They started working closely together in 1982 when Pearlstine was planning the European edition of the WSJ and asked Winkler to go to London)

Q: What do you think of him?

A: I would say that everything that I know that’s worth anything in this business, the news business, I can attribute to Norm.

Q: Does his new job at Bloomberg mean that you will retire?

A: I would hope that I’m just getting started, actually.  The first 18 or so years went by really fast. I think the biggest opportunities are ahead of us. I can’t wait to go at them with Norm at my side.

Q: By the way, is there a hiring freeze at Bloomberg?

A: Not exactly. The management committee at Bloomberg… saw what was unfolding with the financial world — they could see what was coming last July — and said, ‘what we want to do for the coming year is effectively freeze the headcount.’ (This does not mean that they are not hiring as people leave, however) We’re determined to find and identify and bring to Bloomberg the most talented, skilled journalists we can.

(Reuters photo shows Pearlstine on the left in his role as president of the American Academy in Berlin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel in the middle and former U.S. ambassador to Germany Richard Holbrooke on the right.)

(Disclaimer that you’ve probably read before: Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters are competitors in providing financial news and data.)