Operating income could be a problem, though: Factoring out foreign exchange swings and a one-time charge, Amazon delivered pro forma operating income of $240 million, and Wall Street was looking for something like $260 million.

As Henry Blodget points out, Amazon’s North America media sales (books, CDs, DVDs, etc.) have flat-lined in the last year. This is what that looks like in graph form (click to enlarge):

Now listening to the stultifying earnings call, which does not feature Jeff Bezos. Assuming there’ll be questions about the Zappos deal; I also assume that Amazon (AMZN) won’t have much to say about it beyond the announcement it put out yesterday. But I’ll add in any highlights below.

Q. Mary Meeker wants to know if Amazon is seeing a slowdown in media sales due to the transition to digital. She’s also interested in the possibility that mobile could be a big deal.

A. Media is slow, but it doesn’t seem to be related to digital. Still very early, and Amazon is seeing good unit growth there (Kindle, MP3 store, movie service). Not much to say about mobile.

Q. Any plans to take Kindle overseas?

A. Nonanswer.

He’s right. But Stelter’s piece doesn’t mention one of the publishers that has been increasingly vocal about aggregators–his bosses at the New York Times.

Over the past few months, the paper has reached out several times to aggregators for a variety of offenses, and asked them to cut it out. To date, the Times hasn’t done anything more threatening than mailing a formal letter. But some other publishers, who see the Times as a leading voice for “old media” institutions on the Web, are hoping they might.

• In November, Times officials angrily complained to executives at the Huffington Post after that site republished a complicated graphic the paper had created for its coverage of the 2008 elections. HuffPo CEO Betsy Morgan says the issue was resolved, and that she considers the paper an “important partner.”

• The paper has also complained to Silicon Alley Insider editor Henry Blodget this year after he excerpted one of its stories at length. Blodget refers to the incident in a post he wrote today about the site’s excerpting policy: “We have been publishing for 20 months now–more than 25,000 posts–and we have been asked to shorten excerpts only twice. (We did so immediately.)” (Disclosure: I am a former employee of the site’s parent company, Silicon Alley Media, and own a small number of shares in the company.)

• In February, the Times complained to Michael Wolff’s Newser aggregator about the site’s use of a Times photo and its continued use of the paper’s iconic “T” to identify Times stories it summarizes. Wolff says he’ll stop using the logo if the paper insists.

Does any of this represent a concerted effort by the Times to dissuade sites from linking to and excerpting its copy? I asked spokeswoman Catherine Mathis this last week, and she demurred: “We are not taking a different stance toward aggregators,” she said, via email.

That hasn’t stopped other Web publishers from wishing the paper would do so. They’re hoping that the Times, which publishes the world’s best-read online newspaper, will somehow lead a charge to make it harder for aggregators to use their work.

Keep dreaming. Even if the Times wanted to do bottle up its content, it couldn’t–like it or not, information really does want to be free on the Web, no matter how much it costs to create it. And I get the impression that the paper’s executives, who are frequently lampooned as clueless dinosaurs who “don’t get” the complexities of the Web, understand that.

You can, however, effectively control how quickly the bulk of your proprietary stuff gets released to the public, if you really want to. That’s what The Wall Street Journal (owned by Dow Jones, the News Corp. property that also owns this site) has effectively done so far with its free/pay hybrid model. And the Times may one day try a version of that–again–itself.

Back story: Hirschorn, a former Viacom executive (and general NYC media star–New York Magazine, Inside.com, etc.) published a widely noticed column this month that took a gander at the New York Times’s troubled finances and concluded that it was “plausible” that the paper could go out of business in May.

This week, the Times responded with a lengthy letter tut-tutting Hirschorn for breaches of protocol–”It’s not unusual that a journalist calls the subject of a piece before actually publishing the article or column. In fact, in some areas of journalism that’s standard practice.”–and arguing that he’d overstated his case.

Today, Hirschorn responds with a mea-sorta-culpa of his own, which you can see at the The Atlantic’s site (which is really good these days). Part of the problem, he says: The Times didn’t release some details about its financials until his article had gone to press.

Verdict: Both sides are correct! The New York Times (NYT) will not fold in May, when its $400 million credit revolver closes up. And the New York Times is in serious financial trouble. More details on the latter from my former employer, Henry Blodget, who did a nice job of explaining the Times’s credit crunch yesterday.

The big picture: This debate–will the New York Times exist by the end of 2009?–would have been inconceivable a year ago. That fact that it’s happening now underscores just how quickly the industry’s fortunes have declined.