Two sectors may be getting a new lease on life after the Wall Street Journal reported news that a handful of the top U.S. cable operators are exploring a joint venture with Sprint Nextel and Clearwire to create a national high-speed wireless network to fight off the telcos for subscribers.

Without a big infusion of cash, WiMax technology could be a non-starter in the U.S. So far, Sprint has planned to introduce the service in three markets.

Expanding beyond that may prove a tough sell for Sprint shareholders who had widely criticized its commitment last year to spend $5 billion on WiMax by 2010. Sprint is also struggling to keep its existing customers from leaving.

But with an estimated $3 billion in potential investment from Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Bright House Networks, Google and Intel, Sprint and Clearwire are poised to make life uncomfortable for AT&T, Verizon, DirecTV and EchoStar.

The cable industry has also dabbled in offering wireless services over the past few years, notably with Sprint. But with wireless penetration in the United States at over 80 percent, coming to market with a me-too offering won’t cut it anymore.

Is this the dawn of a new broadband arms race?

(WSJ)

Keep an eye on:

• Banks to Clear Channel: No way. (Reuters)
• Motorola to spin off handset division. (Reuters)
• Take-Two to Electronic Arts: Still NO. (Reuters)
• Fewer reporters on the U.S. presidential campaign trail? Blame the blood-letting in the newspaper industry. (NYT)

(Photo: Reuters)

Who needs competition when you have a nice big merger to complete? After 13 months of Congressional haggling that would have put John McCain to shame, Sirius chief Mel Karmazin won U.S. Department of Justice approval for his $5 billion marriage with XM Satellite Radio.
    
Sure they’re the only two subscription radio operators, but with all those iTunes downloads and Web radio personalities, there’s no need to think anyone will suffer with Howard Stern and Oprah Winfrey in their exclusive hands.   
    
Most expect the FCC will come through with the final green-light for XM and Sirius to close the deal, and then the real work on actually making money from satellite will begin.
    
We’re still a little stuck on the regulatory landscape that seems to err on the side of bigness, from Verizon and AT&T’s billion-dollar wireless spectrum wins, to a push from underdogs like Microsoft and Google to use the blank spaces of TV spectrum for mobile Internet and the ability to even contemplate a scenario in which Rupert Murdoch buys Newsday.
    
Let the games begin.

Reuters, Deal Journal, Silicon Alley Insider

Keep an eye on:

• Google unveiled plans for a new generation of wireless devices to operate on soon-to-be-vacant television airwaves, and sought to alleviate fears that this might interfere with TV broadcasts or wireless microphones.  (Reuters)
• Fox Broadcasting asked U.S. regulators to reconsider indecency fines the government imposed last month on 13 Fox television stations for airing episodes of a reality TV show in 2003.  (Reuters)
• Hulu video site looks great, but in terms of consistently good service, not so much. (Silicon Alley Insider)
• The CEO of Sony BMG Music Entertainment tells the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (in German!) that the company is developing an online music subscription service that would give users unlimited access to its music and be compatible with a host of digital music players.
  (Associated Press)

(Photo: Reuters / Mel Karmazin)

Tribune Co.’s new owner, billionaire and orator nonpareil Sam Zell, let Chicago Tribune intern Katie Hamilton know exactly what he thought about her recent prank on rival paper the Chicago Sun-Times — one that has produced its fair share of chatter in the Windy City.

Hamilton and her colleagues submitted a music video that they sent to the Sun-Times, which offered a cash prize to whomever could produce the best video protesting Zell’s plan to sell the naming rights to the city’s historic Wrigley Field.

Here’s the memo that Zell sent to Tribune employees and that we got hold of:

Partners,

I returned from out of the country this weekend to learn that one of our employees had entered a video in the Sun-Times contest designed to protest a name change of Wrigley Field.

Needless to say, I was shocked! Appalled! The video was a blatant disregard for Tribune Company policy. It demonstrated a glaring disrespect for your chairman and CEO. (I’m much better looking, clearly more agile, and I think whoever played me was singing off key.)

So, I immediately referred to the 11th commandment: Thou shalt not take oneself too seriously. And, then I shared the video with my family and friends.

Here’s the link if you didn’t catch it: http://www.chicagotribune.com/chi-suntim es-song-contest,0,1932877.htmlstory

It’s most definitely worth the watch, and it was a deft grab of the ball away from that other paper. What was their name again?

Maybe he’s laughing to keep from crying.

Exhibit No. 1 in how Craigslist rules the classified advertising business, courtesy of the Associated Press :

JACKSONVILLE, Ore. - A pair of hoax ads on Craigslist cost an Oregon man much of what he owned. The ads popped up Saturday afternoon, saying the owner of a Jacksonville home was forced to leave the area suddenly and his belongings, including a horse, were free for the taking, said Jackson County sheriff’s Detective Sgt. Colin Fagan. But Robert Salisbury had no plans to leave.

It gets worse:

On his way home he stopped a truck loaded down with his work ladders, lawn mower and weed eater. “I informed them I was the owner, but they refused to give the stuff back,” Salisbury said. “They showed me the Craigslist printout and told me they had the right to do what they did.” The driver sped away after rebuking Salisbury. On his way home he spotted other cars filled with his belongings. Once home he was greeted by close to 30 people rummaging through his barn and front porch.

If the hoaxers had placed the ads in the paper , maybe all this fuss could have been avoided.

(Photo: Reuters / Race horse Chiquitin rolls in sand in paddock during walkabout session ahead of the SIA Cup in Singapore in 2006.)

The Bear Stearns meltdown is providing new fodder for the war between Fox Business Channel and CNBC, with Fox taking out ads in the News Corp-owned Wall Street Journal to attack the credibility of CNBC star Jim Cramer.On March 11, Cramer proclaimed the brokerage was "fine" and "not in trouble": seemingly the perfect "gotcha" quote in the wake of the stock's collapse and subsequent takeover by JPMorgan.

Cramer has since argued -- rather convincingly, if you watch the video -- that he was referring to the safety of keeping money in Bear Stearns accounts and investments, not to the relative merits of buying Bear Stearns shares. But that didn't stop Fox Business Channel from running an ad in the Journal and other newspapers on Monday that listed Cramer's quotes under "famous last words" from the likes of UK Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. (President Bush's "Mission Accomplished" banner didn't make an appearance.)

This isn't the first time the News Corp empire has taken on the king of business TV booyah. Late in 2000, it settled a lawsuit against Cramer, after TheStreet.com, which Cramer helped to create, canceled a program on the network. Cramer was accused to touting shares in his own company, in which he owned a 13 percent stake. The fracas led to TheStreet.com pulling out of a TV deal with Fox News, and Fox News suing to try to force Cramer to continue appearing on the network.

The half-page ad in the Journal probably caught a lot more eyeballs than Fox Business did this morning. As of January, with only a few months of broadcasting under its belt, early estimates showed Fox Business Network drawing an estimated 6,000 average weekday viewers. Twenty-year old CNBC had 283,000 on an average weekday in the same period.

After JPMorgan raised its offer for Bear on Monday, Cramer opined that "the worst is over." Will the usually optimistic Fox Business Channel now counter with "the worst is yet to come?"

Photo: Actress Queen Latifah jokes around with CNBC analyst Jim Cramer during an interview at the NASDAQ Marketsite in New York.

Monday brings a fresh wave of despair to the newspaper world as sagacious authors in various media outlets let us know that the economy and the neglect of good citizens are threatening the survival of print journalism.

First up is media columnist David Carr in the New York Times, who wrote on Monday about Sam Zell, Brian Tierney and OhSang Kwon, all of whom bought into papers and have found out that the old devils aren’t what they used to be:

The industry may not be touching bottom any time soon. Last year, overall newspaper revenues dropped by about 7 percent, pushed along primarily by the secular change of readers and advertisers fleeing to the Web. And publishing, along with many other kinds of businesses, is now staring at a full-bore recession, led by the credit crisis that is fanning out across the economy.

Staple the secular and cyclical changes together and most newspapers will be staring at double-digit drops in revenue: one analyst I talked to put the figure at 15 percent. It’s clear from their rhetoric and recent moves that highly leveraged players like Mr. Tierney, the partners in Avista and Mr. Zell will have a tough time meeting their obligations.

Over at The New Yorker, Eric Alterman notes that Craigslist is creating a “palpable sense of doom” among newspaper publishers, and hauls out the usual hobgoblins (“prized journalistic possessions are suddenly looking like corporate millstones,” “the mood these days is funereal,” “Few believe that newspapers in their current form will survive,” “budget cuts, bureau closings, buyouts, layoffs and reductions in page size and column inches,” etc.) as a lengthy lead-in to a story about the Huffington Post and its revolutionary ways of presenting the news. As one of its co-founders says in the story, it’s a “shared enterprise between its producer and its consumer.”

There you have it, newspaper publishers, you’re just not as much of a “shared enterprise.” Survival is that simple.

(Photo: Reuters File)

Whatever it is that drives Rupert Murdoch’s offspring out of the businesses he owns may also bring them back.

Could Elisabeth Murdoch return to daddy’s fold? Sure, according to a glowing profile in the New York Times on Monday of Rupert Murdoch’s elder daughter from his second marriage.

Once ruled out as a possible heir to Murdoch’s News Corp global media empire after her 2000 departure from Murdoch-controlled BSkyB to strike out — quite successfully — on her own, she stirs speculation anew over a possible return … someday.

NYTimes: “Could I foresee a day going back to News Corp.?” she said. “Yes, I could. Do I know how, or when, or what shape that would take? No. I don’t really ever want to leave Shine. So I don’t know how it would happen one day, but it’s certainly not out of the cards.” 

Lachlan Murdoch, Murdoch’s elder son, also left his post as deputy chief operating officer of News Corp in 2005, and is also seeking out media investments.

Elisabeth explains why the apples never fall far from the tree: In growing up Murdoch, she said, “Media was never a choice. You either have it in your veins or you don’t have it in your veins. I couldn’t imagine why you would want to do anything else.”

Will James Murdoch, anointed the heir apparent after his return to News Corp last year to run its Asia and Europe operations, have competition?

(NYTimes)

Keep an eye on:  

• MySpace close to a deal with major record labels like Sony BMG and Warner over a digital music joint venture. (NYPost)
• CBS has nuked “Jericho,” the low-rated post-Armageddon drama that was briefly brought back from the dead by fan demand. (Hollywood Reporter/Reuters)
• The Wall Street Journal’s transition to more breaking news and shorter articles will continue in the coming weeks with a makeover of its Marketplace section. (NYTimes)
• Traditional media companies jumps on the vertical ad network bandwagon.(AP)

In the war of words between CNET and its biggest shareholder, a group led by hedge fund Jana Partners, the two sides might as well be speaking in different tongues.

Jana proclaims that its motives are driven by a desire to rescue CNET -- best known for tech-news site News.com, which has been hit by stiff competition from blogs -- from irrelevance.

CNET prefers to speak the language of corporate bylaws that it believes will protect the company from unwanted attention, despite a recent legal setback that it plans to appeal.

But Jana seems to have understood perfectly CNET chief Neil Ashe's recent letter to employees, where he called the dissidents "opportunistic shareholders" and labeled the proxy fight a chess match. As blogger Michael Arrington -- whose TechCrunch is a big thorn in CNET's side, according to Dealbook -- reported, Jana would rather get rid of Ashe.

If you want to know the latest developments in the shredding of Bear Stearns, you turn to breaking news sites. If you want to know the wider cultural implications of what’s happening on Wall Street, check the Urban Dictionary.

One of the most recent entries, less than a week after Bear’s problems were reported in the press, is “Bear Stearned .”

Definition:

to crash, to collapse, to plummit, to fail

1. I can’t believe it, I completely bear stearned that test.

2. For the third time this week, my computer bear stearned on me.

I plan to use this term at least 50 times this weekend.

Most everybody in the U.S. newspaper publishing world knows Philip Falcone’s name nowadays, but it’s not entirely clear that he knows theirs. The Harbinger Capital Partners hedge fund manager’s notoriety comes from bankrolling efforts to secure large positions in the New York Times Co and Media General Inc, and then shake up the publishers by trying to get his own nominees elected to their boards.

At Media General, this has generated rancor not just for what the Richmond Times-Dispatch publisher sees as an unwanted assault, but for Falcone’s full schedule making him too busy to even meet the top executives whose strategy he’s trashing. Instead of responding to their overtures, he sent his colleague Joseph Cleverdon as his proxy.

We were unsuccessful in reaching Falcone as well, and Harbinger was too busy working on other projects to respond to Media General Chief Executive Marshall Morton’s letter to shareholders explaining why Harbinger’s bid to elect rival directors to the board was something only slightly better thought out than the Bay of Pigs operation.

The Wall Street Journal reported on what Falcone might have been doing that took up so much time while Harbinger was busy buying up Times and Media General shares. In two words: Bear Stearns .

Large hedge funds — including Harbinger Capital Partners, Greenlight Capital, Tremblant Capital Group and Paulson & Co. — made millions of dollars as Bear Stearns’s shares tumbled and various bearish positions rose in value, according to securities filings and people close to the firms.

Harbinger Capital, the $19 billion hedge-fund firm run by Philip Falcone, a former head of high-yield trading at Barclays Capital*, had a short position on Bear from the summer of 2007 until Monday, according to a person familiar with the matter. The stock fell to $5 from $150 in that time period. In a short position, an investor borrows shares and sells them, hoping to replace them at a later date at a lower price, pocketing the difference in the shares as profit.

To be fair, CEO Morton and Falcone are supposed to address institutional investors on Media General at a forum hosted by investor Mario Gabelli early next month — assuming Falcone’s dance card is still free by then.

* Random conspiracy theory: While we don’t know if large Times shareholders were lining up for or against the company before its annual meeting, it’s worth noting that Falcone’s former employer is part of the Barclays empire, which also has a substantial stake in the New York Times. With friends like these…

Keep an eye on:

- Companies already committed to spending millions to advertise at the Beijing Olympics would find it hard to pull their ads if they felt the situation in Tibet was hurting their images. (Reuters)

- There is confusion over whether Clear Channel Communications Inc’s buyout will close, 16 months after the deal was announced, prompting a nearly 9 percent drop in the company’s shares to $32.60. If the deal doesn’t close by a marketing period that ends next week, Clear Channel could go to court to force the banks and private equity firms to try harder. (Wall Street Journal )

-Investment bank UBS is shopping around the Sundance Channel, has a few potential buyers lined up and could wrap things up in a few weeks. (New York Post)

- Tribune Co’s South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper and Miami-based WSFL-TV are merging their operations, giving advertisers “a single point of contact” for reaching the South Florida market via print, broadcast and the Internet. It’s the kind of “synergy” that Tribune has been pushing for years, and has the added benefit of saving a whole lot of money as everyone watches to see if new owner Sam Zell can keep the company solvent. (Los Angeles Times)

(Photo: Reuters)