The numbers of readers signing up so far suggest that at many papers, “paywalls” aren’t about to reverse publishers’ deteriorating finances. Yet the results aren’t discouraging industry executives, who say their efforts are succeeding in shoring up the core print business after years of declines.

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The hire, while not final, would fill a position vacated six months ago when the previous CEO, Les Hinton, stepped down amid the phone-hacking scandal at News Corp.’s UK newspaper division. When he resigned, Mr. Hinton, who ran the division before he joined Dow Jones, said that he was “ignorant of what apparently happened” at one of the company’s tabloid newspapers earlier, but characterized his lack of knowledge as “irrelevant” and said it was “proper” for him to step down.

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The 66-year-old chief executive of Washington Post Co. also shares a lot more with one of those friends: Facebook Inc. founder Mark Zuckerberg.

The two men — separated by 39 years — have formed an unlikely relationship bridging two vastly different media worlds. Introduced through a college friend of Mr. Zuckerberg in 2005, each now serves as a mentor to the other.

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Ms. Lang’s hire, which could be announced as early as Wednesday, would put the head of one of the largest digital agencies in charge of the biggest U.S. magazine publisher at a time when Time Inc. and others grapple with a murky print-advertising picture and the migration of consumers to digital devices.

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Mr. Murdoch and his two sons, Lachlan and James, were re-elected to the company’s board, along with other directors, despite what was expected to be a significant protest vote. The company said full voting tallies will be released next week.

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Times Co. said total advertising revenue at its newspapers, which include the New York Times and Boston Globe, fell 7.3 percent in the latest quarter from a year earlier due to a double-digit rate of decline in print. That compared with a 2.5 percent drop in total advertising in the second quarter.

Digital ad revenue at Times Co.’s newspaper properties increased 6.2 percent to $50.3 million in the third quarter. However, overall ad revenue at the papers was dragged down by a 10.4 percent decline in revenue from more costly print ads.

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Youngest son James, 38 years old, has been groomed as heir apparent. But people close to the company say his future has been clouded by questions about his role in the scandal, which has shaken the media giant’s U.K. newspaper unit and led to the closure of the 168-year-old tabloid News of the World.

A U.K. parliamentary panel said Tuesday it has asked him to come back for a second round of testimony over events at News of the World, where voice mails were intercepted in the pursuit of scoops. His earlier appearance in July set off a crossfire of conflicting accounts over what he was told and when.

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Advisers including Chief Operating Officer Chase Carey are playing an increasingly important role in navigating the company’s efforts to contain the tabloid-reporting crisis. Mr. Carey has been joined at the table by Joel Klein, a former Justice Department lawyer and New York City schools chancellor, who wasn’t with the company a year ago and now finds himself at the center of its efforts to manage the fallout.

Lachlan Murdoch, the older of Rupert Murdoch’s two sons, who quit his job at the company in 2005, also has played a significant role advising his father, according to people familiar with the matter. Though a News Corp. board member still involved in company affairs, Lachlan, 39 years old, has kept his distance on many day-to-day management issues in recent years.

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One idea contemplated in recent weeks is an option Mr. Murdoch has long shot down: selling his other British newspapers. News Corp. has informally explored whether there were any potential buyers for its U.K. newspaper unit, News International, according to people familiar with the matter. The unit, which includes the Sun, the Times of London, the Sunday Times and—until this week’s closing—News of the World, was once one of Mr. Murdoch’s flagship divisions and one of his favorites.

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The result is a new ecosystem of pricing that turns aspects of the old model upside down. For many years, publications charged for print and gave away their digital content free.

Increasingly, publishers are charging premium prices for digital content, betting on a new breed of media consumer willing to pay for content on devices such as Apple Inc.’s iPad, and throwing in print at little or no additional cost.

Last week, for example, the New Yorker introduced a subscription that includes the magazine online and on the iPad for about $60 a year. For just $1 more a month, subscribers can get the magazine in print, too.

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Starting Monday, subscribers to Sports Illustrated, Time and Fortune magazines will be able to access the iPad editions via the apps, which will be able to authenticate them as subscribers. Time Inc.’s People magazine already had such an arrangement, but readers of most publications have had to pay separately for the iPad version regardless of their subscriber status.

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Under the agreement, announced by Lagardère early Monday, Hearst will pay €651 million ($885.9 million) for all or parts of 102 magazine editions in 15 countries, including the publishing rights to Elle magazine outside of France, as well as related digital assets.

Hearst’s cash offer is subject to regulatory approvals in some countries, so the deal won’t close before the third quarter of the year.

The agreement will make Hearst into the second-largest U.S. magazine publisher by circulation, behind only Time Inc., and make Hearst the largest publisher in the world by number of titles owned. The deal also could bolster Hearst’s reach in several key categories, namely fashion/beauty and women’s lifestyle, potentially putting it in a stronger position to compete for advertisers with companies like Conde Nast and Meredith Corp.

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Google is trying to drum up publishers’ support for a new Google-operated digital newsstand for users of devices that run its Android software. With the effort, it is chasing Apple, which already sells digital versions of many major magazines and newspapers through its iTunes store.

The e-newsstand would include apps from media companies offering versions of their publications for smartphones or tablets running Android, say people familiar with the matter. Google hopes to launch it in part to provide a more consistent experience for consumers who want to read periodicals on Android devices, and to help publishers collect payment for their apps, these people say.

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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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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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New York Times Co. (NYT) and News Corp.’s (NWS) Wall Street Journal will offer software applications for Samsung’s Galaxy Tab, which goes on sale later this year, according to people familiar with the matter. Gannett Co.’s USA Today also is developing a software application, the publisher said.

The device, announced in September, is one of the most highly anticipated tablet launches since the iPad in part because it is built on Google’s Android operating system, which is expected to psprower a wave of new tablets. Publishers are hoping that the applications they are building for the Galaxy can be easily adapted to other forthcoming Android devices, say people familiar with the matter.

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The company, called Ongo, filed a trademark registration in April. In the filing, Ongo describes itself as providing “computer and telecommunications software for use in aggregating and viewing news and syndication feeds.”

The reason for the Times’s investment in Ongo was unclear. As news organizations have grappled with how to deliver their content to digital devices and make money off of those readers, there have emerged a number of efforts to collaborate on packaging and selling content. News Corp. (NWS), which owns the Wall Street Journal, has been talking to media companies about creating a cable TV-type business for news, allowing consumers to set up one bill to access digital content from multiple media companies.

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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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Tablet editions of Time and Popular Science magazines–each priced at $4.99–were among the most popular paid downloads for the iPad over the weekend. The thousands of iPad applications available so far also include editions from GQ, Outside magazine, USA Today, the New York Times (NYT) and The Wall Street Journal.

The majority of magazines and newspapers for the iPad are downloaded through iTunes, the channel to purchase music, movies, books and other entertainment for the iPhone and iPad. The more than 125 million iTunes account holders can order iPad periodicals with just a few taps on a screen, instead of pulling out their credit cards and signing into multiple Web accounts.

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Advertisers’ exposure in the iPad editions of Condé Nast titles will reflect the level of their investment in the print edition.

All advertisers in the print edition will appear similarly in the iPad’s “landscape” format, which is a replica of the print edition. A select group of advertisers who buy the most pages in that issue of the magazine will get “premium” placement in the iPad edition, meaning their ads will have added features like video and links to the Web. Those ads will appear in the apps’ “portrait” mode, the version of the magazine that includes extra functions like video and slideshows.

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The AP and Google have been negotiating a new licensing agreement to continue the publication of AP content on Google News, but the AP’s efforts to more closely monitor the flow of articles to and through Google and other Web portals have hampered progress. The AP recently reached a new licensing agreement with Yahoo, though people familiar with the matter said the agreement did not include all the protections the AP was seeking.

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In an interview Wednesday to discuss plans to charge readers for full access to nytimes.com, Mr. Sulzberger was cagey in his responses to questions about Apple. Times Co. executives said subscriptions to the Times online likely would include access to the paper on e-readers.

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Its next challenge: Help fashion bible Vogue magazine cash in on its far-reaching influence at a time when advertising dollars are bleeding out of print.

Vogue has hired Blue State Digital to help analyze the Conde Nast publication’s audience as part of a broader, revenue-generating push that ultimately will involve implementing paid subscriptions on Vogue.com, said Tom Florio, publishing director for Vogue and several other Conde Nast magazines.

The collaboration between magazine publisher and Web strategist began several months ago when Diego Scotti, Vogue’s executive director of marketing, emailed Blue State Digital co-founder Joe Rospars. Vogue executives, keenly aware that the monthly magazine is just one of many ways people connect with the publication, had been looking for ways to capitalize on its influence.

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For the Post, the mobile launch reflects a broader strategy by the paper to magnify its focus on Washington. Like a lot of major metro papers, the Post was able to be more ambitious and comprehensive in its coverage of news when it enjoyed a virtual monopoly on local advertising.

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Seven months after scrapping its iconic oversized format, the biweekly publication will enter the video game business with the May 26 release of Rolling Stone: Drum King, produced by 505 Games for the Nintendo Wii.

Drum King, a rhythm-action game in the same vein as Guitar Hero, is part of an effort by the biweekly magazine to hitch its brand to a growing medium at a time when print is contracting. In the first quarter magazines tracked by Publishers Information Bureau sold nearly 26 percent fewer ad pages than the same period last year. Rolling Stone’s pages fell 22.5 percent for the period.

Lately the Wenner Media title has been pushing its name elsewhere to offset declines in revenue from the magazine. After Barack Obama was elected, the publisher sold some 300,000 “bookazines,” glossy compilations of its coverage of the Presidential race, at $9.95 apiece.

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