Mark Zuckerberg’s company is working hard to win over heavyweight content distributors, hoping to convince them to link their sites up with Facebook, or to make their existing links deeper. The pitch: Connect your site to ours, and we’ll drive you eyeballs and help you hang on to them. And in return, we’d like to know more about your users.

Facebook has been headed in this direction for a while, and made a big move in April when it rolled out its “Like” button to outside sites. Some two million of them have now integrated the social network in some form.

But Facebook has made a point of wooing big media companies in the past few months. It has hired New York-based ambassadors specifically for the task, and is sending top executives out east for schmoozes. It might be working.

For instance: Facebook and Time Warner are now talking about using the social network’s login system to “authenticate” cable subscribers who want to watch online video from cable channels like TBS and HBO. Sources familiar with the companies’ plans say they are in early stages, but that the two companies are hoping to link up first with Verizon’s FiOS TV  service.

The upside for Time Warner and Verizon: It will be easy for customers to sign into Web video sites, and easy for them to tell their Facebook friends what they’re doing. That can drive more traffic and engagement, and ultimately more ad dollars or more subscribers.

And the upside for Facebook: It gets incredibly valuable data.

If that linkup goes through, it will be a big deal for pay TV operators, who have been wary about letting outsiders act as gatekeepers between their subscribers and their content. That’s why Facebook and Time Warner want to work with Verizon, a newcomer to the TV business, instead of established cable giants like Comcast.

The proposed Time Warner-Facebook linkup is a good example of what Facebook is trying to accomplish across the board. It wants to insert itself between media companies and their consumers–with “Share” buttons, “Like” buttons and Facebook Connect logins–but in a way that makes both groups happy about the arrangement.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Dan Rose, the company’s VP of partnerships, made a version of that pitch to senior Time Warner executives in a meeting last week. The pair also hosted a presentation and dinner for about 20 other big Web publishers, including executives from ESPN, the New York Times, Condé Nast, CBS and at least one media celebrity. “Tina Brown was actually there, which I thought was sort of hilarious,” says one attendee.

Facebook has also hired two New York-based executives tasked specifically with getting big media companies on board: Andy Mitchell, previously a VP of business development at the Daily Beast, and Nick Grudin, who held the same title at Newsweek.

Executives who’ve attended the meetings say media companies seem reasonably receptive to Facebook’s approach. In part, it seems, it’s because the company isn’t Apple or Google, two heavyweights that can make Web publishers wary.

“Facebook doesn’t attest to be perfect about being perfectly transparent about where they’re going. But they’re pretty predictable,” says one meeting participant. “It’s not like Apple, where they’re closed.”

Add another: “It was very friendly. It wasn’t like meetings we’ve had with Google, where everyone’s arms are crossed.”

But publishers are also realistic–they realize by trading user data for traffic and engagement, they’re helping to build up a company that is already competing with them for ad dollars. “In the end, they’re like the other big guys,” says another attendee. “They’re both friend and foe simultaneously.”

Gil Elbaz, the man who in 2003 sold a start-up called Applied Semantics (now known as AdSense) to Google, has what he thinks is the solution. His latest effort is Factual, and it attracted a $25 million round of funding from Andreessen Horowitz and Index Ventures with SV Angel and former Disney president Michael Ovitz participating. Ben Horowitz and Danny Rimer are joining Factual’s board of directors.

I caught up with Elbaz by phone yesterday to talk about the vision of Factual and his plans to grow the company.

NewEnterprise: So at a high level, what is Factual and what do you intend to do?

Gil Elbaz: We see this as an emerging category. We think of it as a data platform that offers data and data services to all sorts of developers, to build cooler, more innovative applications more quickly, especially when it comes to apps that are data-driven. Finding the right vendor for that data, and then integrating it, then managing and maintaining that data is costly and expensive. Developers can move that much more quickly by tapping into our knowledge base. We’re marketing certain verticals where our data is really good. We’re putting some extra marketing muscle behind our places database.

NE: Give me a use case. How might someone use the platform?

GE: Our places database is a good example where we’re getting quite a bit of traction. What we’ve done is built one of the most comprehensive databases of business listings and points of interest. This data is easy to browse, and it’s complete. It contains address and phone and contact info and latitude and longitude. If you want to a build a new service like Yelp or Foursquare, or something that relies on knowing what’s in close proximity, a mobile app can make a simple API call, send over the current GPS coordinate and fulfill the request very quickly. That’s just the tip of the iceberg of what we can do, but it’s making serious waves because it is very hard to get that data, especially if you’re going mobile. It’s very hard to get that good data for locations around the world.

NE: Do you have other datasets?

GE: We’re being market driven and being focused on that because that’s what our customers have been asking for. But we do have others. We have data from other vertical segments like health and entertainment. In the area of education we built a database of high schools that Newsweek magazine uses in their fairly important annual ranking of high schools. They not only use the data that we were able to generate and build, but they were also able to benefit from our crowdsourcing API, so that their users get not only a more engaging experience but the great partnership comes back into our central database, so the information can be improved. That’s a nice virtuous circle that makes us confident that our data is going to keep getting better because of these partnerships.

NE: I’m trying to come up with a metaphor, and the closest thing I can think of is data–information–as a utility supplier of data. If I want to build an application that contains a lot of data, I can come to you for the data I want to use so I don’t have to go out and gather it myself. Is that fair?

GE: I think that’s a pretty good metaphor. It’s really the access that’s important. When you use our pipe you’re going to know that you’re getting good data, that’s up to date and that we stand behind it, and that other people are participating to make it better, and update it, and that you can get it quickly. Looking ahead, there’s going to be times when it’s not strictly our data. Sometimes it will be data that has been uploaded from other people or from people in the community who want to take advantage of the data platform. So it’s really the pipes and the platform that we’re building that make this kind of data and sharing possible.

NE: You sold your first company to Google. The issue came up that you don’t need the funds. You could fund this on your own. Explain why you sought funding.

GE: I did fund the company for a little while. But I knew that our mission is very audacious and in order to become the ubiquitous data layer for the Internet, to be the obvious place that a developer would go to first to get data into their application, it’s a huge, tall order, and something that’s going to take a lot of technology and marketing effort and strategic guidance. The types of people that we brought in on our angel round and then the people we’re bringing onto the board have a lot of operational experience. Also, you never know when an idea is so big that you want to raise money down the line. If you want to do that it makes sense to build bridges with the financial community as early as possible, in case it does become a more capital-intensive business. This is a new category and we feel like we have a good understanding of it, and things can change quickly, and if it does, we want to be positioned with a good team who can help us navigate the different opportunities that will certainly arise.

NE: So now that you’ve landed the funding, what’s the first order of business?

GE: The challenge is always scaling correctly and quickly. I think we’re positioned well for this. We have a humming machine here. The management team is in place and we’ve been working on this for a few years now. And we have a great culture in place with people who are really passionate about making data available. However, hiring the engineering talent is taking up a huge amount of time. That’s the number one thing on my priority list for the short term.

NE: How do you find the best engineers? Is there a trick to it?

GE: I’d have to say that having worked at Google for three and-a-half years was the perfect place to learn what a deep and strong engineering culture was all about. I also got a lot of hiring experience at Google’s Santa Monica office. I don’t think there’s one trick. I think there are signals that a person is not just looking for a job, but for an opportunity to make extremely important intellectual contributions. And also I’m looking for people who want to make contributions not just to a project but to the world. You look for quick thinking and passion, and a history of doing things beyond what the job requires. I love it when I see people who have contributed to open-source projects on their own time. That demonstrates that they’re trying to contribute to society but also that they like working on important tools that make a difference.

That’s because Apple and the publishing industry haven’t been able to come to terms over magazine app subscriptions: Publishers want the ability to sell the subscriptions themselves, or at least the opportunity to hang on to subscribers’ personal data. And Steve Jobs won’t let them.

Here’s what Apple is offering publishers, according to publishing sources:

• The ability to sell app subscriptions through iTunes.
• 70 percent of the revenue from each sale.
• The ability to offer an opt-in form for subscribers that would ask them for a limited amount of information: Name, mailing address, email address.

That offer has been on the table for a “couple months,” I’m told, and so far none of the big publishers have gone for it. They don’t like the 30 percent cut that Apple wants to take, but their real hang-up is lack of access to credit card data: It’s valuable to them for marketing, and without it they can’t offer print/digital bundles, either.

So for now, they’re hoping to get what they want from Google and Android, and assume Apple will come around eventually.

That doesn’t mean you won’t see any magazine subscription offerings on iTunes in the meantime.

Newsweek has chosen to sell its iPad magazine as a standalone subscription without getting any data at all. And Time Warner has chosen to give away People magazine’s digital version to any print subscriber. You could see more of both those options in the near future, for different titles.

And for publishers who are launching digital-only products, like the “Daily” don’t-call-it-a-newspaper that News Corp. is working on, Apple’s restrictions are far less problematic: Publishers don’t need to worry about upsetting their valuable print subscribers, because they don’t have any. (News Corp. also owns this Web site. It’s free!)

Speaking at Business Insider’s Ignition conference, News Corp. digital head Jon Miller said today that the Daily wouldn’t launch until the first quarter of 2011.* When it does, News Corp. officials expect it to showcase a new “push”  feature from Apple, where a new issue will arrive at subscribers’ iPads without asking them to request it.

*For the record, Miller insisted that the Daily was a “rumor.” But it seems undignified to type that in the main body of this story, given that News Corp. has hired dozens of people and earmarked a budget of more than $20 million for the project.

Fortune.com’s Dan Primack reports that Sequoia is leading a round that will add “between $25 million and $30 million” in funding at a valuation “in the ballpark of $135 million.”

Someone familiar with the transaction tells me that Primack’s numbers are “not a bad guess.” And it’s possible the numbers will end up somewhere higher than his report. Another source tells me that the round will end up bringing in between $20 million and $30 million, at a pre-money valuation of $120 million. That would put Tumblr’s value at $140 million or more.

In any case, it’s a lot of money. And as wise Om Malik says, “Investors are never the story.” (Except when they are. And what’s really relevant here is that at these prices, the list of potential Tumblr acquirers gets much smaller: Google, sure. Facebook, perhaps. Yahoo, theoretically, etc.)

The real story for Tumblr remains the one we’ve asked every other time the company has raised money ($4.5 million in 2008; $5 million earlier this year): How’s it going to make money? Founder David Karp has offered several different ideas in the past, but as far as I can tell, none of them have really taken off (the fact that big publishers like Newsweek now maintain Tumblr sites, which are free to set up, does not constitute a business).

Best I can tell, the real appeal for Tumblr is its go-go growth, and the fact that it’s doing it on a very light footprint. But don’t take my word for it: Ask Spark Capital’s Bijan Sabet and Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson, who have been the primary investors in the company to date and who both wrote glowingly about the company in recent days.

Presumably, the company’s pitch to investors went something like this: “Look at our hockey stick! Hockey sticks like this only come around a few times a lifetime–perhaps you’ve heard of Twitter?” That is: Buy now, and we’ll figure out money later.

And it looks like it worked.

Well, I managed to leave print journalism for all of four weeks.

Daily Beast media columnist Howard Kurtz, whose work used to appear in the Washington Post, and will now appear in Newsweek, now that the magazine is merging with his new employer.

Under the proposed agreement, expected to be disclosed on Friday, the two news organizations will be combined in a 50-50 joint venture called the Newsweek Daily Beast Company, the people said.

The two parties began exploring a merger late in the summer after Sidney Harman, the 92-year-old stereo-equipment tycoon, acquired Newsweek from the Washington Post Co. Initially, Mr. Harman sought to hire Ms. Brown as editor. The courtship sparked talks about combining the two news organizations under the editorial direction of Ms. Brown, who would report to an independent board.

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These come from mobile ad start-up Medialets, which put together a highlight reel at my request. The video doesn’t quite do these things justice, because you really have to see them on Apple’s tablet to appreciate them. But take a look, anyway–it’s probably best if you view these in full-screen mode–and I’ll try to tease them out for you afterward:

Here’s what you just saw:

• FedEx ad, designed for Newsweek app.
• Visa ad, designed for NPR app with help from AKQA, Visa’s regular digital agency. Features e-commerce possibilities, without leaving the app, via Fandango.com and Broadway.com
• Toyota Prius ad, designed for Weather Channel Max app; allows users to “draw” images incorporated into video.

Again, the market for this stuff is so new that shops like Medialets are essentially starting from scratch each time they put together a tablet ad. And that means there’s no reason for these things not to be interesting–you’ve never seen them before.

But eventually some of this stuff will become more standardized, just as most Web ads are. And that will make it harder to stand out.

The key question hanging over talks is whether a merged operation would be big enough for the three outsize personalities that such a deal would bring together, according to people familiar with the discussions.

A deal would make Daily Beast co-founder and co-owner Tina Brown the editor of Newsweek on top of her existing editorial duties at the website, answering to two bosses who are heavily invested, both emotionally and financially, in their respective properties.

Stereo tycoon Sidney Harman, who recently acquired Newsweek from Washington Post Co., has said he didn’t buy the magazine to make money. He bought it because he was drawn to the challenge of turning it around and has strong convictions about how that can happen.

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Awesome! So says Tina Brown, in an “interview” her site is running with her today, to mark the Beast’s two-year anniversary: five million uniques, “ahead of projections” on advertising, etc. “A romping, vibrant, 2-year-old animal bursting with rude health.” (No mention of Howard Kurtz, though.)

In fact, it’s doing so great, Brown says, that Diller may end up pawning the thing off to Newsweek and new owner Sidney Harman.

Well, she doesn’t say that exactly. But she does acknowledge, out loud, for the first time, that the two sides are chatting:

We hear something is going on with Newsweek.

How clever of you to notice! Yes, there have been some interesting discussions going on, as we have with potential partners large and small all the time.

Cheeky!

Here’s a more fleshed-out version of that discussion, via the NYT:

Mr. Harman and Ms. Brown met as recently as last week and are keen on working together. But whether The Daily Beast, which is financed by the billionaire investor Barry Diller, and Mr. Harman can reach a deal that is agreeable to all parties is still unknown, this person said, speaking anonymously to reveal privileged information.

Ms. Brown has gone as far as submitting a memorandum to Mr. Harman outlining how she would run Newsweek, but Mr. Harman was also interviewing other people for the job, this person added.

A few things:

• It’s astonishing, and also true, that Harman bought Newsweek from the Washington Post (WPO) without knowing who he would hire to run the operation.
• This also means that no one is really running things there now.
• Brown would be a pretty good choice, all things considered.
• And picking up the Beast wouldn’t be a terrible idea for Harman, assuming Diller can do it at the right price: Newsweek’s Web operations are okay, but not nearly as good as they look on paper. That’s because the site is largely dependent on MSNBC.com for its traffic, and that’s not a healthy affair. Say what you will about Brown’s start-up, but it hasn’t had the crutch of a big distribution partner.

The video is pretty self-explanatory, but if you don’t want to put in the 13 minutes, here are some takeaways:

• He looks and sounds pretty good! I know many people who aren’t close to 91 years old, and they’d be very happy to have Harman’s vigor.
• “I’m not here to make money,” Harman says, but he would like the magazine to break even someday.
• How might that happen? He’s vague, but does say, “I believe that there is a new equilibrium developing…among mobile, print, and digital. This is very close, in my conviction, to a significant inflection point in the history of journalism.”
• Harman is a big fan of 20th century American writer Maxwell Anderson, who is new to me but whom Wikipedia describes as an accomplished playwright. Harman spends the last couple of minutes reciting an excerpt from the Anderson essay “Our Best Hope.”

Make that some of the liabilities. Here’s the Post’s official description of the price: “The Washington Post Company retains the pension assets and liabilities and certain employee obligations arising prior to the sale. The resulting gain or loss at closing is not expected to be material…”

The official release is at the bottom of this post.

As Ad Age’s Michael Learmonth reminds us, the $1 + debt price point is the new standard for dying print pubs: That’s what the current owner of TV Guide paid for that pub, while Bloomberg paid a comparatively rich $5 million plus liabilities for BusinessWeek. (Sorry about lowballing the Bizweek price in a previous edit.) Serious question: What does Allen & Co. get for brokering the Newsweek deal?

The magazine’s employees have an all-hands meeting at 4:30 Eastern to hear about their fate. But here’s the quick and dirty version:

The good news: Their new owner apparently impressed Washington Post (WPO) Chairman Donald Graham with his pledge not to carve up the magazine, as most buyers would have done. So many of them are likely not to lose their jobs in the near-term–or even undergo the kind of wrenching overhaul that Bloomberg has put BusinessWeek through.

The bad news: It’s hard to see how Harman or his heirs (he’s 91 years old) will be able to avoid doing that, eventually. The reason that Graham gave away Newsweek is that he couldn’t figure out how to make it stop bleeding red ink. And Graham ran a big media company that could, theoretically, offer lots of assistance to a struggling magazine. Harman is just going to own Newsweek, which has lost lots of money for many years.

Good luck to everyone there.

WASHINGTON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–The Washington Post Company (NYSE: WPO – News) announced today that it has signed a contract to sell Newsweek to Dr. Sidney Harman.

“In seeking a buyer for Newsweek, we wanted someone who feels as strongly as we do about the importance of quality journalism. We found that person in Sidney Harman,” said Donald E. Graham, chairman and chief executive officer of The Washington Post Company. “He has pledged not only to continue to produce a lively, compelling and first-rate news magazine, but also an equally dynamic Newsweek.com – and he intends to keep a majority of Newsweek’s very talented staff.”

Dr. Harman said, “Newsweek is a national treasure. I am enormously pleased to be succeeding The Washington Post Company and the Graham family and look forward to this great journalistic, business and technological challenge.”

The terms of the asset purchase agreement were not announced; however, The Washington Post Company retains the pension assets and liabilities and certain employee obligations arising prior to the sale. The resulting gain or loss at closing is not expected to be material to the financial position of The Washington Post Company.

Allen & Company advised The Washington Post Company on the transaction. Dr. Harman was advised by Guggenheim Securities, LLC. Covington & Burling LLP served as lead counsel for The Washington Post Company, and Williams & Connolly LLP represented Dr. Harman.

Dr. Harman’s biography is attached.

Dr. Sidney Harman

Sidney Harman, one of the pioneers who began the audio industry, is Founder and Chairman Emeritus of Harman International. He served as the U.S. Deputy Secretary of Commerce from 1977-78; founded the Program on Technology, Public Policy and Human Development at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government; and was President of Friends World College, a worldwide experimental Quaker college, from 1970-73. He is the author of Mind Your Own Business (2003) and, with Daniel Yankelovich, co-author of Starting With The People (1988).

Dr. Harman holds a Presidential Chair at the University of Southern California and is the first Isaiah W. Hellman Professor of Polymathy. The Chair is named for one of the three founders of the university. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; a member of the Executive, Program Strategy and Trustee Affairs Committees of The Aspen Institute; Trustee Emeritus of the Board of Trustees of the Carter Center of Emory University; and a member of the Board of Trustees of Freedom House. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations; President of the Harman Family Foundation; a member of the Board of the Leadership Institute of USC; and former Chair, Executive Committee of the Board of Directors of Public Agenda. He is the founder of The Harman Center for the Arts and of Sidney Harman Hall in Washington, DC, and a member of the Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees of The Shakespeare Theatre Company. For many years he served as Chair of the Executive Committee of the Board of Business Executives for National Security and on the Corporate Fund Board of The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

There is the site’s (deservedly) much discussed Tumblr, of course. And yesterday, up popped this bit of weirdness: For some reason, entering the “Konami Code” on your keyboard–up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, enter–turns the site’s homepage into, um, something else (click images to enlarge).

And it goes on in that vein for a while:

No idea who or what is behind this. But I do like it quite a bit.

The aforementioned Newsweek Tumblr tells us that “we just want you all to know that this isn’t some sort of commentary on our current ownerless limbo.” So that means…what?

Newsweek isn’t the first big media site to feature an inscrutable Konami Code hack/tweak/Easter Egg. ESPN’s flagship site had a particularly colorful one last year.

For those of a certain age and/or those of you with a life, see Wikipedia’s Konami Code page. Alas, in true Wikipedia fashion, it explains the what, but not the why. Can anyone else try?

From the release:

“The losses at Newsweek in 2007-2009 are a matter of record. Despite heroic efforts on the part of Newsweek’s management and staff, we expect it to still lose money in 2010. We are exploring all options to fix that problem,” said Donald E. Graham, chairman of The Washington Post Company. “Newsweek is a lively, important magazine and website, and in the current climate, it might be a better fit elsewhere.”

In corporatespeak, this is equivalent to hastily scrawling out a “Going Out of Business–Name Your Price” sign and plastering it on the front window.

Anyone want to make a bid? Newsweek saw revenue decline 29 percent last year and ended up losing $29.3 million on sales of $184 million.

Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that things are comparatively awesome for rival Time Magazine: Owner Time Warner’s (TWX) Time Inc. just reported that ad sales are up (unit-wide) for the first time in two years.

Ah. Here’s Time’s grave-dancing statement right now, via a press release: “TIME continues to be healthy and profitable, and a trusted source of news, reporting and analysis for millions of people in America and around the world in print, online and on the iPad. We had a highly profitable year last year and will have an even more profitable one this year.”

Mr. Snyder is coming to Newsweek on the eve of the relaunch of Newsweek.com. In a memo to Newsweek’s staff, Newsweek editors Jon Meacham and Mark Miller credited Mr. Snyder for transforming Gawker from “what was a guilty pleasure for a Manhattan-centric audience to a source of real news and information, doubling Gawker’s audience.” Mr. Snyder starts on May 3 and will be responsible for helping to grow the audience of Newsweek.com and the magazine’s other digital offerings, Messrs. Meacham and Miller wrote.

Mr. Snyder held the top editorial post at Gawker for 18 months until February, when Gawker Media acquired Cityfile and offered Mr. Snyder’s old job to Cityfile founder Remy Stern. Mr. Snyder was offered another job at Gawker that he declined.

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The survey found optimism among Chinese respondents and pessimism among the Americans. Some 63 percent of Chinese believe their country will overtake the United States in technology innovation over the next 30 years. Only one-third of Americans believed the U.S. would still lead over that period.

Justin Rattner, Intel’s chief technology officer, agrees that China will reduce the innovation gap with America. But that doesn’t mean that surpassing the U.S. is inevitable. “Speaking personally, there’s no reason for that to happen,” he said.

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Former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is certainly giving her Facebook fan page a workout this week, as she nears one million fans.

Using the site to flack her new book, “Going Rogue,” which comes out officially today, it got a big boost from her interview today with Oprah Winfrey, clocking in at close to 995,000 fans last night.

Posts include info on her multipart interview with Barbara Walters, her unhappiness with the recent cover of her in running clothes in Newsweek magazine (“The out-of-context Newsweek approach is sexist and oh-so-expected by now.”) and, of course, how the media were unfairly attacking her.

Interestingly, Palin’s followers for the book in Twitter (#SarahPalinUSA) number a paltry 17,624.

Still, Palin has other Twitter accounts, such as when she was governor of Alaska (153,432), but this is still a very small audience.

(By the way, President Barack Obama is closing in on seven million fans on Facebook and 2.7 million followers on Twitter.)

As the media onslaught gains steam, here is some video of Palin’s television interview on “Oprah” yesterday:

The publisher said newspaper revenue dropped 20 percent in the third quarter, and print ads dropped by 28 percent; both of these numbers are worse than Q2, which saw revenue drop by 14 percent and print ads by 20 percent.

No relief from Web ads, either: Internet revenue dropped 18 percent, a decline from the nine percent drop in Q2. And online display ads, which had been more or less flat for the last few quarters, fell off a cliff, dropping 14 percent.

Don’t be duped by headlines reporting a drop in the newspaper division’s losses, by the way. That’s due to one-time accounting charges the previous year. If you look at operating revenue and expenses via a less formal, but more practical, lens, the results are very unpleasant: Losses increased by 55 percent (see summary below; click to enlarge).

Want more bad news? Okay: The company’s magazine group says revenue dropped 33 percent, driven by a staggering 48 percent drop in ad sales at Newsweek.

If you’re at, say, Time Warner’s (TWX) Time Inc. and want to whistle past the graveyard, you can try blaming the drop on the title’s unsuccessful overhaul. But I find it hard to believe that Newsweek’s woes don’t reflect a larger magazine malaise. We’ll see next week.

The good news, as always: The big difference between the Post and many other publishers is that its parent company doesn’t depend on print media. The company’ core education business, which is what has sustained it for many years, continues to do well.

BusinessWeek’s Ron Grover says Geffen “doesn’t so much see this as a business venture, but rather as a civic investment.” Newsweek’s Johnnie L. Roberts goes further, suggesting that Geffen would literally turn the Times into a nonprofit if he bought it.

Both Grover and Roberts are longtime media reporting pros, so when they cite sources with knowledge of Geffen’s thinking, I believe them. What I still don’t understand, and what observers and investors I’ve talked to are still puzzled about: How does Geffen plan to do that?

To reiterate: Geffen has reportedly tried to buy the 20 percent stake in the Times now owned by Harbinger Capital, though the two sides couldn’t agree on price. But even if they did, the transaction would only bail out Harbinger, not the Times.

And because the Times has a dual-class stock structure that keeps control of the company in the hands of the Ochs-Sulzberger family, taking on Harbinger’s stake doesn’t give Geffen a foot in the door to the company. It gives him the right to appoint two representatives to the company’s 14-member board of directors, but nothing else. Just ask the Harbinger folks.

Again, there are two plausible ways to acquire the Times:

1. Buy the super-voting shares outright from the Ochs-Sulzbergers, who have said they have no intention of selling. But then again, that’s what the Bancroft family said about Dow Jones, which owns the Wall Street Journal and this Web site. And News Corp.’s (NWS) Rupert Murdoch was able to overcome their objections by offering a 60 percent premium to the company’s share price. Maybe Geffen could try that.
2. Establish a large debt position with the company and exercise the power that comes along with that in the event of a restructuring. The problem: Billionaire Carlos Slim has already done that.

So. Anyone close to David Geffen want to explain what he’s really thinking? I’m all ears.

Then you’re in the minority: Most folks are choosing Amazon’s (AMZN) device, even though Sony’s (SNE) sells for $60 less. Sony’s newest gambit to change that: A tie-up with Google (GOOG) that will add half a million free titles to the Sony’s book catalog.

The deal, announced this morning, will give Sony a catalog with some 600,000 titles — more than twice the number that Kindle sells. But given that these are public domain titles that anyone can sell, I’m not sure that this will do much for Sony. From the release:

“Books from Google will feature an extensive list of traditional favorites, including “The Awakening,” “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” and “Black Beauty,” as well as a number of items that can be more difficult for people to access. For example, literature lovers can find and read The Letters of Jane Austen in addition to “Sense and Sensibility” and “Emma.” Also included are a number of titles in French, German, Italian, Spanish and other languages. People can search the full text of the collection, or they can browse by subject, author, or featured titles.

Give Sony props for rolling out an e-book reader well before Amazon did. But the Kindle has a huge marketing advantage over the Reader — the Sony product has yet to appear on the cover of Newsweek or The Daily Show, and it’s doubtful it ever will. More important, the Kindle has features the Reader can’t match — namely, the ability to download books and other stuff wirelessly.

All of which makes it hard to see the upside in Sony continuing to plow resources into this one — especially when it has more important battles to fight.

But that won’t work for the company’s fourth-quarter results since those show yet more weakness in its print businesses. So here’s some upside: At least the paper’s online business didn’t fall off a cliff in Q4–which is more than you can say about the New York Times.

The numbers:

• Newspaper division revenue was down 13 percent; the previous quarter it declined a mere seven percent.
• Print advertising declined 21 percent; that’s worse than the 14 percent decline the previous quarter.
• Revenues at the company’s magazine group were down 18 percent; in Q3 they were down a mere four percent. Newsweek’s revenue dropped 22 percent, and that decline will continue as the company pares back its circulation base.
• The good news I promised? Online revenue was up five percent, and display ads were up 10 percent. Both of those numbers represent decelerations from Q3, when overall online revenue was up 13 percent and display was up 32 percent. But that’s better than the folks over at the Times, who saw online ads shrink altogether in Q4.

Why would the Times see online revenue fall off a cliff while the Post only saw growth slow? I’m open to suggestions: The most obvious one is that the Times has much more national exposure than the Post (both companies also have regional papers in the mix, and the Times’s results include its About.com unit). But if anything, you’d think that disparity would benefit the Times. Anyone else want to weigh in?

It’s hard to see how the Washington Post Co. (WPO), the magazine’s owner, could do anything else. Newsweek loses money, and ad revenue at the magazine has been in free-fall throughout the year: Down 13 percent in Q3, 21 percent in Q2 and 15 percent in Q1. The Wall Street Journal has details:

Newsweek magazine is planning staff cuts as part of a major makeover that is likely to result in a slimmer publication with fewer subscribers and more photos and opinion inside its pages, according to people close to the magazine.

The Washington Post Co. business is expected to outline the cuts Thursday in two companywide meetings. They will come from an extension of voluntary buyouts offered in the spring, when Newsweek shed 111 jobs.”

Also on tap: A move to reduce the magazine’s circulation, which is supposed to make its remaining readers more appealing to advertisers, and a continued effort to “focus…less on costly news gathering than on driving discussion of the day’s issues.”

That’s not a terrible strategy for the Internet era, and most weekly publications are headed that way–including Time Warner’s (TWX) Time, which just drastically cut back its international news operations. At some point, though, someone’s going to have to make sure that there’s at least one media company employing actual reporters to go find out what happened–citizen journalists and Twitterers aren’t going to cut it.

Note to Newsweek staffers: If you want to report details about your own workplace, you have a forum here. You can reach me directly at peter@allthingsd.com. If you want to be completely anonymous, which is understandable but less useful to me (I won’t have any way of reaching you for follow-up) you can use the blind tip box here.