Bob Iger, CEO of the Walt Disney Company (DIS), was the kickoff interview onstage at Fortune magazine’s Brainstorm Tech conference, which is taking place over the next three days in Pasadena, Calif.

The event is packed full of Web and media luminaries.

So, BoomTown will be sitting in the front row and liveblogging some of the sessions here, including this one, titled, “Digital Kingdom: New Business Models for a Media Giant.”

Translation: When you Twitter upon a star, makes a–big–difference what you earn.

Which, right now, is not a whole lot, as Iger and others in the media business know all too well.

But let’s set the scene: Iger looks like a very typical old-media mogul you might order from an online catalog–handsome, suave and sophisticated, a perfect mix of Hollywood and New York.

Thank goodness, then, that he never seems to have acquired that other irksome characteristic of some of his peers–a full-bored panic over the Internet.

In fact, Iger–whom I also interviewed onstage at the fourth D: All Things Digital conference in 2006–has been unusually fast-forward among many of the big media companies in facing the digital music and dancing.

Fortune writer Richard Siklos asked him about a mishmash of subjects, from subscription services to authentication to cable providers, all of which center around a basic question:

How the heck is Disney going to be paid for its wares–because someday those agelessly lucrative “kids” from “High School Musical” are not going to agree to yet another reunion?

“This is the beginning of the beginning,” said Iger, who noted that it would be folly to guess what’s coming next in the digital arena.

A most excellent point that he made several times, adding that it was important for companies like Disney to keep trying out all sorts of things digitally, until they got it right.

“This notion of protecting the present is something that I talk a lot about [with employees],” said Iger, who wants them not to do that so much.

He noted that running a modern media company meant you had to have “one hand in the present and one hand in the future.”

Iger forgot about the hand that you might need to protect yourself from partners of the present–like big-box retailers, television affiliates, cable networks–who are going to come at you with a cudgel for giving the stuff you sell them away free on, say, Hulu.

Hulu, of course, is the popular, tiny-money-making premium online video service, which is a joint partnership of News Corp. (NWS), GE’s (GE) NBC Universal and now Disney.

“We believe in Hulu,” said Iger, who thinks its business model–currently just online advertising–might evolve over time.

But, he added, he was “somewhat skeptical” of any one answer to what is ahead.

As in: Iger just does not know, which is probably the best thing a media mogul can say right now.

Except for one thing he said is always mindful of–to follow, “where the consumer is going.”

Consumers are going online, of course, which is certainly going to require all-hands-on-deck at Disney in the years ahead.

[Update: It seems Disney was keeping its hand in the present for today, as it apparently had YouTube take down a trailer for its new "Alice in Wonderland" movie, which was set to debut at Comic-Con International in San Diego tomorrow.]

David Geffen, who had previously tried to buy the Los Angeles Times, has been trying to buy a chunk of the New York Times (NYT). So says Fortune magazine, which says that Geffen offered to buy the stake owned by Harbinger Capital, and so says TheWrap.com and Reuters.

None of the stories cite an on-the-record source. But my assumption is that, in all cases, the authors talked to Geffen, who has been known to chat up a reporter or two, and always with a very specific agenda.

In this case, Geffen–or whoever is talking to Fortune, TheWrap.com and Reuters–wants to make it clear that the billionaire media mogul is willing to buy a 19 percent chunk of the paper for a lot less than Harbinger did in 2007. The investment group paid some $500 million for its stake back then, and it is worth less than $200 million now.

Exactly why Geffen is so interested is unclear since it’s not like buying 19 percent of a run-of-the-mill public company where shareholders have real clout. The Times’s dual-class stock structure means it is, for all intents and purposes, a private company owned by the Ochs-Sulzberger family. The only real way to exercise influence over the company would be to lend it a good deal of money–which is exactly what billionaire Carlos Slim did earlier this year.

Also unclear: Why Google (GOOG) would have “looked seriously” at the opportunity to buy the Times in the last few weeks, as Fortune’s Richard Siklos reports in the same story.

The part that sounds right to me is that Harbinger approached co-founder Larry Page about a deal. That’s because Page is the Googler most concerned about the declining state of the newspaper business and has pushed the company to think about ways it could assist the industry.

Presumably that could be through commercial innovations like the new search feature the company is reportedly working on or perhaps even via Google.org, the company’s nonprofit foundation.

But I’m told that while Google execs have brought up the notion of snapping up distressed newspapers using its huge cash hoard within the past year, those talks have never gotten serious. It’s hard to see how they could: Google has emphatically stayed out of the content business so far, and it’s unclear why it would change direction now–and invest in a shrinking industry at the same time.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt himself declared that Google wasn’t in the newspaper-buying business a few months ago, in an interview with… Fortune:

“Fortune: How about just buying [newspapers]?

Schmidt: The good news is we could purchase them. We have the cash. But I don’t think our purchasing a newspaper would solve the business problems. It would help solidify the ownership structure, but it doesn’t solve the underlying problem in the business. Until we can answer that question, we’re in this uncomfortable conversation.

I think the solution is tighter integration. In other words, we can do this without making an acquisition. The term I’ve been using is ‘merge without merging.’ The Web allows you to do that, where you can get the Web systems of both organizations fairly well integrated, and you don’t have to do it on exclusive basis.”

That sounds an awful lot like someone who wants to advertise on newspaper sites, not buy them.