At a TVWeek conference in Manhattan, Bewkes repeated arguments he has made in the past: Chiefly, that big media mergers have a lousy track record and that he couldn’t see how Comcast (CMCSA) could unlock any value by buying a majority stake in NBC Universal from GE (GE).

“Somebody has finally noticed that these things don’t work out so well,” he said, adding “We love to see our competitors taking risks.”

But just to hammer that point home, Bewkes compared the proposed deal to the one his company made nine years ago when it embarked on an ill-fated merger with AOL. That deal (made when Bewkes was running Time Warner’s HBO unit)  “basically made no sense” at the time, he said.

The main talking point in favor of that transaction–that connecting Time Warner’s content with AOL’s Internet distribution would create synergy–was “nonsensical,” he said. But “these kind of arguments, you’ll hear some of them this week, in the other merger that we’ve been talking about,” Bewkes said.

Clear enough?

Wall Street, by the way, remains unimpressed with the proposed deal as well: Comcast shares are down about 10 percent since word got out.

In other reiteration news, Bewkes also said, again, that he doesn’t plan on selling his Time Inc. publishing unit. Though he left himself a tiny window of wiggling room by noting that “no public company can ever say that it wouldn’t consider restructuring some part, whether it’s Warner, HBO, whatever.”

But Bewkes insisted that Time Inc.’s best-known magazine brands, including “Time, People, Sports Illustrated, InStyle,” are holding their own as print products and that the challenge will be turning them into online successes.

“We have basically a healthy business in terms of our relationship with readers. These brands mean something and they’re evolving…,” he said. “If you can’t take the leading titles that people have known for decades, and use the new world to make them relevant, really, shame on us.”

Just ask the New York Times (NYT), which says Twitter is about to become one of the top 10 referral sources to the paper’s site.

Impressive. But what exactly does this mean?

There was a flurry of excitement this afternoon on Twitter–of course–when Simulmedia CEO Dave Morgan threw out a much more exciting data point: Reporting/Tweeting from an industry conference, Morgan said Times digital boss Martin Nisenholtz had announced that “Twitter now drives 10% of NYT digital distribution, up from 0 a year ago.”

Other attendees report hearing the same thing. But whether they were participating in a mass hallucination or Nisenholtz misspoke, here’s the Times’s official line, via spokeswoman Diane McNulty: “At its current growth rate, Twitter is, or will soon move into, the top 10 in terms of referrals to NYTimes.com.”

If that’s the case, then Twitter likely accounts for much less than 10 percent of the Times’s traffic. If you assume that Google (GOOG) is the paper’s largest external referral source and that it likely accounts for a third of the site’s traffic (these are semi-educated guesses, but I’m happy to adjust), then Twitter and other sources at the bottom of the top 10 are going to be in the low single digits.

Still! It is a lot of traffic, and a year ago it either didn’t exist or someone else was directing it to the Times. Now the trick for Twitter (and its investors) is to figure out a way to capitalize on this phenomenon.

That distinction popped up this morning after Politico detailed an “astonishing offer” by the paper’s business staff to lobbyists–a chance to underwrite “salons” with D.C. bigshots, hosted at the home of CEO Katharine Weymouth.

A promotional flier Politico got its hands on also promised that the Post’s editorial staff would be part of the events, including one scheduled for July 21. But that part isn’t true, a Post spokeswoman told me via email this morning:

The flier circulated this morning came out of a business division for conferences and events, and the newsroom was unaware of such communication. It went out before it was properly vetted, and this draft does not represent what the company’s vision for these dinners are, which is meant to be an independent, policy-oriented event for newsmakers.

As written, the newsroom could not participate in an event like this.

We do believe there is an opportunity to have a conferences and events business, and that The Post should be leading these conversations in Washington, big or small, while maintaining journalistic integrity. The newsroom will participate where appropriate.

OK, so that’s cleared up. But let me play devil’s advocate: What exactly would be so wrong about getting the paper’s reporters or editors to to participate in one of these?

This certainly wouldn’t be the first time that the Post has been at the nexus of power, money and influence. In fact, Weymouth’s grandmother, Katharine Graham, was famous for hosting gatherings much like these at her house. And publications of all stripes, including this one, as well as Dow Jones, which owns this site, frequently charge fees to attend networking events where their editorial staffs participate.

And you’re likely to see more of this stuff, not less, as publishers search for revenue streams besides advertising to stay afloat. Any tempest you see about this today is going to look quaint in a couple of years.

UPDATE: The ensuing uproar has forced the Post to cancel the events altogether. Post execs are now busy pointing fingers at each other, although it seems clear a lot of the blame is going to be laid at the feet of the paper’s conference group and/or marketing team.

But note Howard Kurtz’s report on his employers’ reactions to the reaction: Weymouth (or her proxies) say she was OK with the idea, but not the marketing; Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli says he was OK with the concept, but not this version:

Weymouth knew of the plans to host small dinners at her home and to charge lobbying and trade organizations for participation. But, one of the executives said, she believed that there would be multiple sponsors, to minimize any appearance of charging for access, and that the newsroom would be in charge of the scope and content of any dinners in which Post reporters and editors participated.

Brauchli said he had been involved in discussions, stretching back to last year, about newsroom participation in conferences of the sort commonly staged by major news organizations.

But he said he made clear to the company’s marketing officials that Post journalists would participate only if they could substantially control the nature of any such conference. Brauchli said he was blindsided by the wording of these fliers and that they are an embarrassment to the newspaper.

In the old days, the fact that this story broke just before the long holiday weekend would help the Post. But this story will now have legs, egged on by stuff like this:

And now, via the aggregators’ best practices playbook: Links! Pick your reality:

Glass half-empty? The ad market is so bad that no one can attend the ad industry’s biggest conference.

Or glass half-full? The ad market isn’t that bad: Just ask the people who run high-end restaurants.

[Image credit: thrig]

The only real surprise here is that the BlogHer founders–Lisa Stone, Elisa Camahort Page and Jory Des Jardins–don’t blame the economy for the cuts. Rather, they say that they have to reduce payments because they’re so successful:

When BlogHer’s network was created in 2006, we began with 35 blogs, a few advertisers and a small number of staff members to sell and manage the entire network. Today, BlogHer’s network is more than 2,500 blogs strong, and we’re working with dozens of advertisers each quarter. We have had to grow our technology infrastructure and staff dramatically to keep pace with network growth. Because many of these costs are fixed, expanding our network to compete for Fortune 500 advertisers has been a major investment.”

BlogHer was founded in 2005, and has received funding from Venrock, the Rockefeller family’s VC arm, and Peacock Equity, the JV between GE’s (GE) NBC and GE Commercial Finance.

Here’s the full text of the email from the BlogHer founders to their blog partners:

December 10, 2008
Hi everyone,

Elisa, Jory and Lisa

There was just a glimmer of news at the event, though it wasn’t surprising or pleasant: The Times’s Web business is falling away, day by day.

Digital head Martin Nisenholtz said revenue at his unit had been OK until the last two months of the year, but that there had been “softness in November, accelerating into December…next year is going to be a different year, by a fairly profound margin.”

Bear in mind that the Times’s digital performance pre-November was grim to begin with–digital revenue grew just 4.3 percent in October–and it becomes possible to imagine that digital revenue will decrease for at least part of 2009.

Nisenholtz didn’t do anything rash like attach any numbers to his comments, but he did add a little bit of color: His About.com unit, which is boosted by cost-per-click/search ads, is still doing OK-ish. But the business of selling display ads to Times Web sites is getting pummeled, and could be “under great stress” next year, he says.

So if About.com is doing (comparatively) well, why not sell that asset to help the paper escape its cash crunch? I asked CEO Janet Robinson that question after the event. She did everything but insist that the paper would never part with About.com, and praised it up and down–“an extremely important part of our digital future,” etc.

But given a couple chances to do so, she never explicitly ruled out a sale. Given the paper’s position, I don’t think she can.

[Image Credit: 1962 NYC Newspaper Strike photo from Life/Google archive)

Attention New York publishers and advertisers!!!

Those people pestering you to vote for “Roi Asap” today? They’re not working for a real candidate!

This warning comes to you from a MySpace worker bee, who is up in arms about a promotional stunt from the MySpace ad sales team.

“Roi,” you see, is a semi-clever pun based on a term MySpace ad chief Jeff Berman used in a press release promoting the targeting technology last month (as in, “Return On Investment”).

MySpace is supposed to hire dozens of fake campaign workers to push Roi/advertising targeting today at midtown offices in Manhattan.

I don’t see the problem here. But the MySpace employee thinks the fake vote-soliciting is “ridiculous” and wants it “exposed.” Okay, done.

More interesting will be quarterly earnings call from MySpace owner, News Corp., on Wednesday afternoon, and what CEO Rupert Murdoch has to say about his prize Web property’s recent performance.

News Corp. (NWS) earnings calls are always entertaining, but Wednesday’s call should be more intriguing than most. It will be the first time Murdoch has sounded off in a public forum, since the economy went into free-fall.

Murdoch had already sounded the alarm bells last spring. And, at the D: All Things Digital conference in May, he predicted that the U.S. would be in an 18-month recession.

More recently, during the company’s August earnings call, he said that local television ads had fallen off a cliff. (News Corp., owner of Dow Jones, is also the owner of this Web site.)

But even as Murdoch has predicted gloomy times for some of his company’s assets, he and his execs have talked up the prospects of MySpace. During the last call, News Corp. COO Peter Chernin said Fox Interactive Media, the News Corp. Web unit dominated by MySpace, would be able to increase revenues by 30 percent during the coming year.

Predicting FIM revenues has proved tricky for News Corp., which had to publicly back down last spring from a promise it had made in the summer of 2007. And now that Web advertisers are finally admitting that they’re seeing weakness, that 30 percent may be difficult to achieve too.

Given that the year-ago quarter was underwhelming, and that the last quarter covers the July to September period–most of which was catastrophe-free–there’s a good chance FIM will report in-line ad sales on Wednesday.

But pay attention to whether Murdoch and Chernin are able to reiterate past projections for the rest of the year.

I’m told that the ad-targeting technology MySpace is pushing is indeed boosting revenue at the site. And the video plans the company announced yesterday are interesting as well: An automated ID program will let publishers like Viacom (VIA) unit MTV Networks automatically place ads on user-uploaded content that they own.

Google’s (GOOG) YouTube announced something similar earlier this year.

But those programs only work at the margins of MySpace’s business, and are long-term plays. The most important part is getting big advertisers to buy big campaigns on MySpace’s prime real estate.

Such as its homepage, where a one-day campaign was going for an average of $500,000 earlier this year, and where particularly intrusive campaigns could garner $1,000,000 for 24 hours.

If those rates are softening, then it won’t matter how innovative the company is in the near term: It’s going to have to reset expectations.

Last year MediaMemo made some intemperate comments about paidContent’s “Future Of Business Media” conference.

But I am happy to say that I don’t have any complaints about this year’s event. (OK, I do–the Wi-Fi’s been a bit spotty.)

But lots of good speakers and thoughtful questions. I look forward to checking out Rafat Ali’s paidContent reporting to catch up on the sessions I missed from this morning.

But I can tell you about an amazing event I saw this afternoon–an optimistic magazine publishing executive, who didn’t appear visibly drunk or otherwise intoxicated.

Here’s the quote, in its entirety, from Condé Nast publisher David Carey, who was part of a panel on business magazines: “We’ve talked to a lot of clients who are surprisingly bullish about their ad spend next year.”

“Who’s that”? Forbes.com publisher Jim Spanfeller immediately asked. But David just smiled.

Remind me to follow up with Carey on that next spring.