On the evening of Nov 2, about 70 people — new media upstarts and old media stalwarts, brand-name investors and top company executives — gathered at the Manhattan home of Strauss Zelnick to talk shop.

This was the third such gathering that Zelnick and his co-hosts organized, with the aim of bringing New York’s best media-focused minds under one roof to talk about the future of the business. In keeping the setting intimate and the number of invitations in the ballpark of about a hundred people, the organizers hope to turn the “New Media Dinner” into a recurring salon-of-sorts, where ideas, capital and expertise can mix and match.

In a half-hour chat before the guests started arriving, Zelnick and two of the co-hosts, drop.io founder Sam Lessin and Thrillist’s Ben Lerer explained to me how this all came about.

For Zelnick, chairman of video-game publisher Take-Two and co-founder of private equity firm ZelnickMedia Corp, the idea of organizing the event sprang from “a desire… to meet the next generation of leaders in the media business.” Naturally, he turned to Lessin and Lerer, who are now in their 20s but who have known Zelnick since they were in their teens and frequently turn to him for advice on their ventures.

“I suspect that between the organizers, we collectively know almost everybody doing the most interesting things in new media in New York,” Zelnick said. News Corp’s Jeremy Philips and venture capitalist Stuart Ellman of RRE Ventures were the other co-hosts for the evening.

And sure enough, they pulled in a power crowd that included veteran dealmaker Quincy Smith, CBS’s Internet chief who is quitting to start his own advisory firm, former Doubleclick CEO-turned-ex-Googler David Rosenblatt, and even Ron Conway, Silicon Valley’s star angel investor who was in town for meetings.

Over dirty martinis and mini lobster rolls, denizens of “Silicon Alley” such as Betaworks’ Andy Weissman and Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson rubbed shoulders with some of New York’s media elite including Journalism Online’s Gordon Crovitz and my own boss, Thomson Reuters CEO Tom Glocer.

Crovitz and I had planned to chat at the dinner but I missed the chance, so we followed up on Tuesday. The former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, who now invests in early-stage media and technology companies, gave me his take on e-mail: “Technology has led to a period of intense creative destruction for the media and information industries,” he said. “New York is the center for this transition, with an enormous amount of innovation and reinvention by new media entrepreneurs and the old-media executives who understand this period of fundamental change.”

Some new media entrepreneurs, like Lessin, have been privileged enough to seek the help and advice of traditional media power players in navigating this changing landscape. “I’ve always had access to people like Strauss who’ve helped me figure out the landscape and told me when my ideas were terrible,” said Lessin, who is 26 and the son of investment banker Bob Lessin.

But the new media get-togethers are about “introducing my best, brightest and smartest friends to some of Strauss’s friends,” he said, adding that the past two events — in February and July — have spawned many interesting discussions between people who met at the venue.

Later, I mingled with many of the guests, picking up stray bits of conversation: here a pitch from an entrepreneur to a venture capitalist, there a bit of M&A gossip, chatter about which start-ups are working and which aren’t doing too well, mentions of the recent pay-models-for-journalism panel at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, not to mention heated debates on the Yankees-Phillies game.

“It was a little bit of this and a little bit of that,” said Kenneth Lerer, chairman of The Huffington Post, when I followed up with him on Tuesday. “My guess is that a few investments and a few deals and a few hires will be made out of last night.”

“One of these (events) don’t mean much but if you have a series of them — and I think that’s what Strauss’s intention is — it’s smart, good business,” Lerer added.

Although most folks seemed to know each other already, I was happy to point out Fred Wilson and Tom Glocer to various entrepreneurs.

For many of New York’s young media entrepreneurs, it was also an opportunity to relax (not all of them were in ties) and catch up on industry chatter. The hosts made sure the booze didn’t run out, and there were few complaints about the first course of pappardelle with wild mushrooms, followed by entrees of prime rib roast and sea bass.

For dessert, the guests were treated to New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, whose boss David Remnick spoke at the first gathering in February and was also at this one. Gladwell infused his short speech with healthy skepticism about the power of technology to bring about social change and improve our collective well-being. The audience took the bait spiritedly, and a brief back-and-forth followed. Then it was almost midnight, and the party was over. I have to believe that not a few guests were already thinking about the next one.

Photo: Strauss Zelnick (Reuters)

Newspaper advertising is a joke, local TV stations are struggling to get ads of their own, journalists are losing their jobs and media executives are calling 25 percent revenue declines an improvement. It sounds like something might be amiss in the U.S. media world.

But don’t take our word for it if you’re the Federal Communications Commission, and you’re about to revisit media ownership regulations and see if they need some changing. See this item from Inside Radio:

[FCC] Chairman Julius Genachowski hires internet entrepreneur and journalist Steven Waldman to lead an agency-wide initiative assessing the state of media. Waldman will lead a team to conduct what’s promised to be an “open, fact-finding process” looking at how the economy is impacting media outlets and make recommendations for policy changes.

Waldman is the co-founder and former editor of the religious website Beliefnet.com, which was bought by News Corp. in 2007. … Waldman will join the Office of Strategic Planning and serve as senior advisor to the chairman. Genachowski says, “A strong consensus has developed that we’re at a pivotal moment in the history of the media and communications, because of game-changing new technologies as well as the economic downturn.”

Yes, but let’s make extra-special sure and hire a guy to check out the situation. You never know; everything might be just fine and we’re making a big mistake saying otherwise.

MySpace, the online social network (can we still call it that now that it has ducked out of the Facebook/Twitter competition?), appears to be pursuing what I’ll call the “two-pronged news strategy.” You get used to it when you cover media and technology. For those of you who don’t enjoy this privilege, it goes like this:

• Pick a news outlet that you like and whisper things to them about what you’re doing. It doesn’t have to be interesting, it just has to be exclusive. If you’re in public relations, you don’t even have to know that someone in your company is doing this. It works well for you.
• Let the rest of the press read the story and bombard your telephone and e-mail with messages demanding to know if it’s true. Score a big hit on the news cycle. Because you either decline to comment or only want to talk “on background,” it heightens the air of mystery — and newsworthiness.
• The official announcement of the news, which will always resemble 90 percent or more of what you read in the first round of anonymously sourced stories, will get just as much attention as that first round. It’s a 2-for-1 deal that is irresistible to many companies.

I don’t know that MySpace is doing this, and wouldn’t be able to confirm it if I asked. It could just be that the reporters who get the breaking news have great sources and the reporter asked smart questions that would yield good answers. I’ll let you judge.

The first example comes from Kara Swisher, tech blogger at AllThingsD, which is MySpace’s cousin in the News Corp family. She reports:

Microsoft’s MSN is in preliminary talks with MySpace about using the social networking site’s music service, MySpace Music, to help power music offerings on the giant portal. …

Sources said Microsoft execs don’t think they can do as good a job as MySpace is doing and don’t see the point in striking needed but complex deals with music labels, which the News Corp. (NWS) property already has.

MySpace, Swisher adds, would get a “gusher” of traffic. I asked MySpace whether we could talk about this. From spokeswoman: “Off the record I can’t comment.” OK.

The second example is this story in The Telegraph from Monday:

Facebook and MySpace are in talks about sharing content across both sites, according to senior figures at the two companies. The move could potentially see MySpace music and video footage being shared on Facebook via its Connect platform, which allows people to log into third party sites using their Facebook ID.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, told The Telegraph: “Facebook is focussing on building the best technology which helps people share content, while at MySpace they are focussing on more a content-led strategy. We would like to have their content, as we already do with many other sites, shared across our network because it is good for our users.

On this one, MySpace CEO and former Facebook executive Owen Van Natta confirmed the talks on the record. But I’m in the position of only being able to refer you to that article.

On the record, MySpace wouldn’t comment. I suspect that the comments will come later when we rewrite the Telegraph’s story along with the rest of the press corps.

It appears to be Music Wednesday on the Internet. On the same day that reports began circulating that Google and Facebook will launch a host of new music features, News Corp’s MySpace is turning up the volume on its own music offering.

The online social network will offer the following new features:

• You already can buy music on MySpace through Amazon, but now you can also get it through Apple’s iTunes.
• All music videos will now be available through a “hub” on MySpace Music. This includes music video recommendations based on what your friends are watching, along with a video player with a link to buy the ones you like, and an A-Z browser to find what you’re looking for.
• An artist’s dashboard (pictured in this blog post). This is not something that fans would see. Instead, it is reserved for artists and bands that want to track their popularity among MySpace users. This is one of the more interesting things that we’ve seen on MySpace. It offers charts, graphs and snapshots of MySpace music data, including where fans are, song plays, profile views, friend count and profile visitors.

MySpace Chief Executive Owen Van Natta says that these moves give the service’s users a “more integrated and comprehensive experience — not just audio in one place and band interaction somewhere else.”

On a deeper level, they are part of a reconstruction of MySpace and its goals that started when News Corp earlier this year replaced top management and brought in Van Natta, formerly of Facebook. Recall that MySpace has not had a great go of things lately, having fallen behind Facebook in the few years since News Corp bought it for $580 million.

As a prelude to talking about music, I asked Van Natta about the big picture and what it was that he saw at MySpace that needed fixing. Some of what we talked about is ground already covered in plenty of previous stories. Here is something else he shared that I thought I should pass along to you:

“Candidly, when I looked at the product road map and plan, there was no better way to describe it than,… it was a mile wide and an inch deep. It was not focused to let the company execute well. We clearly defined the company mission and focused the product roadmap, and reduced the number of initiatives.”

MySpace closed some of the projects that it was working on, including services dealing with weather reports, classified advertising and others. At the same time, Van Natta said, it’s important to mess around and come up with products that might be a hit — but it’s also important to not let them go indefinitely. “If we’re doing a good job, we’re going to invent a lot of things that people don’t like, and that’s ok, and those things cease to exist.”

UPDATE: I neglected to mention this aspect that will be a benefit for MySpace. Here’s how the AP said it:

Social-networking site MySpace is launching a music video service that will pop into millions of profiles at rival Facebook as well. Starting Wednesday, music videos that MySpace has licensed for its site will run as well on the iLike music recommendation application, which the News Corp. unit acquired this month for $20 million.

(Photo courtesy of MySpace. For what it’s worth, the numbers have been falsified so you don’t actually get to see how the Black Eyed Peas are doing on MySpace Music)

The Wall Street Journal, ever on the hunt for new ways to please its readers and new ways to make money (and what, we ask, is wrong with that?), will launch a new, pricier version this November. Called “The Wall Street Journal Professional Edition,” it is designed for business readers who want more than what the daily newspaper and website provide on their own.

Essentially, it is the Journal’s daily offering, with reports from Dow Jones Newswires and a reservoir of news and information from Factiva, the news archive that Dow Jones owns — and a bunch more stuff:

• Information from more than 17,000 global sources, some of which are not available to the public.
• A one-year archive of Factiva’s global business sources and a two-year archive of wsj.com content.
• More than 30 industry pages, managed by Dow Jones editors
• Six industry sections managed by Journal editors who select news and information for readers on pharmaceuticals, healthcare, energy, media and marketing, telecommunications and technology.
• Personalized homepages and news alerts for when things break.

Dow Jones plans to sell the edition to businesses, which would make it available to employees through “site licenses” (ie, your business buys a license that makes the professional edition available to X number of people for a price to be determined). In January, it will be available to people for $49 a month, or just under $600 a year, said Clare Hart, head of Dow Jones’s Enterprise Media Group, which oversees Dow Jones Newswires, Factiva and Dow Jones Indexes.

So why have a professional edition for a paper that is arguably already for professionals? According to Hart, it is an attempt to recognize the middle ground between “regular” readers (like my mom) and financial clients who use the super-charged “terminals” from Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg that provide news along with sophisticated and deep financial information.

“It’s a response to what customers are driving us toward. Customers want the simplicity of a consumer application with the sophistication of an enterprise application,” Hart said.

Robert Thomson, who edits the Journal and oversees Dow Jones’s editorial operations, offered a hypothetical example of an oil service company employee in Boise who might not be in the market for a Bloomberg or Thomson Reuters computer, but needs more information than he or she would get in the paper.

“You’re interested in oil import prices, you’re interested in currencies,” Thomson said. “To be honest, it would be hard to find you as a client on the professional end.” With WSJ’s professional edition, he said, that employee could customize a feed that would send an alert when something happens in China that affects oil prices.

On another level, the Journal is trying to capture readers for whom paper is not enough, while financial professional-grade data feeds offer too much at too high a price, and don’t look all that pleasing to the eye. The information that readers get would be more sophisticated, but presented in an easy-to-view way, just like the Journal or the Times or most other news outlets present it to readers on their Web pages now.

It sounds like a promising introduction and an effective way to give readers a more comprehensive look at Dow Jones’s information offerings than they might have gotten before. But how will it play? Company officials won’t share projections.

It might be that Dow Jones, now part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, already has a bunch of happy customers who don’t need to be made happier. It’s hard to say how many untapped readers there might be for this new service, either through business licenses or through individual subscriptions. If nothing else, it’s an experiment done at a time when news outlets need to experiment even more than they are.

(Photo: Reuters)

Earlier this week I brought you the brewing circulation tussle between USA Today and The Wall Street Journal, and which paper will be able to claim to be the largest one in terms of circulation. You can read that here, but for the recap, here are the main points:

• Editor & Publisher reports: USA Today was set to report that circulation fell “17% to 1.88 million for the six months ending September 2009, a drop of about 390,000 copies. The decline could also threaten USA Today’s position as the No. 1 newspaper in the country by circulation.”
• The Wall Street Journal and The Associated Press report that the Journal would be the largest paper by circulation, according to the Journal.
• USA Today responds, “We are confident that even with this latest economic impact, USA TODAY will remain the nation’s number one newspaper in total print circulation when the ABC statements are released October 26th.”

As I wrote at the time, it seems that the Journal is counting print and online subscriptions together, and why not? Both are made up of paying subscribers. USA Today, of course, is counting printed newspapers.

We won’t know until their circulation numbers are published on October 26 what the final, comparable figures would be. But today, the Journal revealed its latest numbers:

Circulation was 2,024,269 as of the six-month period ending in September 2009, compared with 2,011,999 in the same period a year ago. Individually paid circulation, a number that advertisers like to watch, grew to 1,437,853. That’s impressive, having any growth at all.

As to how it stacks up to USA Today, and who will be able to claim to be the No. 1 newspaper publisher by circulation, we’re going to have to wait until the 26th.

(Photo: Reuters)

USA Today and The Wall Street Journal aren’t waiting for Oct. 26, the day North American newspapers report their latest circulation numbers, to begin tussling over which one has the biggest paper.

Editor & Publisher made the first move on Friday when Jennifer Saba reported that USA Today was set to report that circulation fell “17% to 1.88 million for the six months ending September 2009, a drop of about 390,000 copies. The decline could also threaten USA Today’s position as the No. 1 newspaper in the country by circulation.” The news came in a memo from USA Today Publisher, David Hunke, to his workers.

Spicy stuff, considering that when we write about its owner, Gannett, we say it is the largest U.S. newspaper publisher that publishes USA Today, the largest newspaper by circulation.

The Wall Street Journal’s Shira Ovide wrote up the news too, adding this: “After USA Today’s memo, the Journal said it is now the largest U.S. newspaper by weekday circulation.” Andrew Vanacore at The Associated Press, featured the Jornal echoing that statement: “Dow Jones, the Journal’s parent company, declined to give out the newspaper’s circulation figures for the period, but spokesman Robert Christie said, ‘The Journal is now the largest newspaper by circulation.’”

We wrote up the story too, going along the same lines. The next day, however, we got this statement from USA Today’s communications vp Ed Cassidy – a bit too late to run it as an update to our old story. Still, it piqued my interest in a big way because it doesn’t go along with the lines of what we reported earlier:

We are confident that even with this latest economic impact, USA TODAY will remain the nation’s number one newpsaper in total print circulation when the ABC statements are released October 26th.

So how do we figure this? It’s hard to conclude when the numbers haven’t come out yet. I suspect that both papers can make the claim to be No. 1 because the Journal is counting copies to subscribers who get only the online edition as adding to the total number of print subscribers. Newspaper publishers argue over whether those copies “count,” but it seems like they should considering that people pay for Web access in the same way that they do for print.

Or am I wrong? Should circulation — a key measure for businesses of whether and how much to spend on advertising in newspapers — not count online subscriptions? I’m all ears.

(Reuters photo: The Wall Street Journal)

Lest anyone doubt the thrust of Rupert Murdoch’s speech on Thursday (or was it Friday? I’m losing track of time zones) at the World Media Summit in Beijing, it was all about paying for news — as in: You’re going to pay for news, and if you think it shouldn’t cost you anything, you’re a “flat-earther” and a “kleptomaniac.”

For those of you accustomed to the News Corp CEO’s occasional verbal ramblings and hints of ghosts of suggestions, this was a departure. He has gone on the record in great detail about his thoughts regarding paid news, but this is the first time that I recall him using fightin’ words like “flat-earther.”

Murdoch also “urged the Chinese government to take full advantage of the country’s creative potential by opening the door to media competition and ensuring that intellectual property is protected,” according to the speech and the press release, but let’s be clear — the message that resonated was: “You’re going to pay for news as long as we need to pay people to report it.”

Here’s the Reuters take, “leding” on China.

The New York Times’s David Carr throws in some similar comments from the head of The Associated Press, and says that it and News Corp are “cocking the gun” on free news. Pungent!

And here is the AP’s take on its own story.

Finally, here’s the speech itself. There’s plenty to digest.

Rupert Murdochs Speech at the World Media Summit

(Reuters Photo: Rupert Murdoch on the left, China’s president Hu Jintao on the right. Behind them is David Schlesinger, who runs Reuters News)

Big media executives are developing a new Olympic sport — hedging. Two of the best contenders are NBC-Universal Chief Executive Jeff Zucker and News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch.

Attendees at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference in New York City asked both executives on Tuesday if they were interested in bidding for rights to broadcast the 2014 Winter Olympics and the 2016 Summer Olympics. Both answered the question in ways that sound different until you realize that they actually sound… the same.

Murdoch said “We haven’t thought about it” and concluded with “I wouldn’t think so.” Zucker said, “We’ll have to see what happens. We’re not going to make any decision that doesn’t make business sense. …. The Olympics are an important part of the company and something we’d would like to be involved with if it makes business sense.”

Murdoch pointed out what would make business sense for both companies: holding the summer games in Chicago. If the Windy City gets the spot, expect the executives to firm up their answers quickly, and come back saying “yes.” That would make a good advertising opportunity for whoever gets those broadcast rights.

However (there’s always a however), the International Olympics Committee doesn’t plan to award broadcast rights until it votes for the city that will host the games. That will be either Chicago, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo or Madrid. No sane U.S. network executive is going to show how much they want the broadcast rights before that vote, because they don’t want to make Chicago-sized bids for a Madrid-sized spectacle. So until the IOC votes, expect to hear little more than tepid interest in the games.

(Reuters Photo: Jeff Zucker, très sportif.)

MySpace is looking to buy Web music service iLike for around $20 million according to several blogs. iLike co-founder Hadi Partovi declined to comment when we asked him and MySpace’s PR team also declined to share details.

All Things Digital has the latest details of the deal which they say is around $13.5 million in cash, with a $6 million earn out for the founders which include Hadi’s twin brother Ali who is CEO. Official confirmation of an agreement is being held up by “thorny tax issues” according to All Things Digital’s sources.

The news makes some sense because as MySpace is fast losing ground to Facebook in the social networking arena. MySpace’s owner, News Corp, has indicated that it sees the site becoming more of an entertainment portal.

In fact according to our sources MySpace Music, the joint venture between MySpace and the major music companies, is one of the few parts of MySpace that’s doing well — at least in terms of popularity and usage.

iLike, which was once the darling of the the digital music start-up world, has ended up struggling like many others, as the industry tries to find a new profitable model for the distribution of recorded music over the Web. iLike has one huge advantage — it is default music application/platform on Facebook. It also has corporate backing from Ticketmaster.

But rather like its host Facebook, iLike’s popularity has yet to translate into meaningful dollars leading to what some of the blogs are terming a ‘fire sale’ of its assets.

AllThingsD also had details of other potential bidders which the blog said included Activision and Microsoft.

(Photo: News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch and MySpace founder Chris DeWolfe in 2007/Reuters)