It doesn’t. Except when it does.

Contrary to News Corp. (NWS) CEO Rupert Murdoch’s comments earlier in the week, Dow Jones will not be charging customers who subscribe to both its Web and print versions a weekly fee to read the paper on its iPhone or BlackBerry apps.

But if you’re only subscribing to one version? That’ll be a buck a week, starting Oct. 24. The Journal will also start charging mobile-only users $2 a week, which is essentially the same price as a Web-only subscription.

That second charge makes some sense to me. The Journal has always said that it would start charging for the apps it makes for Apple’s (AAPL) and Research in Motion’s (RIMM) handsets. Right now these apps are gratis, which means you can either pay the Journal to read it in print or on the Web, or read it on your iPhone and pay zilch. That had to change at some point.

But while I have to be a tiny bit delicate here–Dow Jones owns this Web site, and I still have some aversion to insulting my employers in public–I don’t see how dunking paying customers a second time makes sense.

I do understand some of the impulse. Publishers of all stripes seem to think that while charging for content on the Web is tough, people are happy to pay for something delivered wirelessly. I think that many publishers are going to be very disappointed when they try this out in practice, but that’s another story.

And I also know that News Corp. has steadily been pushing Dow Jones to raise its subscription prices for the WSJ since it acquired the company, and this strategy sort of dovetails with that.

But seems to me that if I am paying for information, I will expect to consume it wherever I am, at the same price. And you’re starting to hear some publishers say the same thing–see Variety’s comments about subscription plans today in PaidContent.

I don’t actually pay for my WSJ subscription; my employers, who, I should stress, are truly excellent people, have hooked me up–so maybe I’ve got this wrong. Or maybe it’s merely a marketing issue: If you jack up my WSJ subscription and tell me you’re throwing in access to the mobile app for free, I might be okay with it.

But tell me you’re charging me an additional fee to read it on the go and it will stick in my craw. Let’s see if the paper’s paying subscribers feel the same way.

So this one doesn’t even faze me: Swedish regulators are looking into insider trading charges at Global Gaming Factory X, which saw shares jump several days before it said it would buy The Pirate Bay.

From Wired (via PaidContent):

AktieTorget, a Swedish exchange listing some 116 public companies, suspended trading in Global Gaming a week before the announcement as trading volume and share prices jumped without public news to account for it.

“There are reasons to suspect that information was leaked,” said Peter Gönczi, executive vice president at AktieTorget.

Before the sale, average daily volume in Global Gaming was about 162,000 shares. From June 5 to June 18, there was little trading in the stock with an average price of about 9 cents. On June 22, shares nearly doubled to 18 cents with 1.2 million shares sold before trading was halted.

Trading resumed Tuesday, the day of the announced purchase, and shares closed at a high of 38 cents, with a heavy volume of 5.8 million shares traded. Trading closed at 25 cents Wednesday, down 13 cents, and the volume was nearly 7 million shares traded.

But I have a question: Why would anyone think that Global Gaming Factory X shares would be worth more once this news got out?

The company’s announced plan–to sell legal downloads to users who flock to the site for free downloads and to somehow resell bandwidth its users generate to the likes of Comcast (CMCSA) and AT&T (T)–is a nonstarter. If anything, you’d expect insiders to be dumping whatever shares they owned in advance of the news, right?

I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that Swedish penny stocks are like U.S. penny stocks–murky caveat-emptor things that widows and orphans want to avoid. So it’s hard to get too worked up about this or try to puzzle it out. Still, if anyone wants to explain it to me, I’m all ears.

You can get the link to the company’s 10-Q, filed this morning, over here. But here’s the nugget you want:

“Although the Company’s Board of Directors has not made any decision, the Company currently anticipates that it would initiate a process to spin off one or more parts of the businesses of AOL to Time Warner’s stockholders, in one or a series of transactions. Based on the results of the Company’s review, future market conditions or the availability of more favorable strategic opportunities that may arise before a transaction is completed, the Company may decide to pursue an alternative other than a spin-off with respect to either or both of AOL’s businesses.”

Yup, there’s a to-be-sure caveat there. But this is about as clear as a publicly traded company can get about this stuff. Time Warner (TWX) wants to cleave this thing off and that’s why it brought on Tim Armstrong.

Other good nuggets from the filing: Time Warner intends to buy back the five percent stake that Armstrong’s former employer, Google (GOOG), owns and wrote down earlier this year.

I missed the company’s earnings call this morning, but sounds like there weren’t lots of other details released. But PaidContent’s David Kaplan does have a breakdown of AOL’s (lousy) ad performance on a sector-by-sector basis:

• Display: Down 17 percent to $158 million
• Paid Search Down 12 percent to $152 million
• Third party Down 29 percent to $133 million

For weeks now, I’ve been hearing chatter that Disney was close to doing a distribution deal with Hulu. Disney would give Hulu exclusive access to at least some of its online video in exchange for an equity stake alongside GE’s (GE) NBC and News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox. And accompanying said chatter was this refrain: Why?

The puzzlement comes from video players who don’t work at NBC, Fox or Hulu, and who can’t see the upside in Disney CEO Bob Iger throwing in his lot with Hulu.

After all, the argument goes, Hulu videos are popular, but the site makes little if any money, and it’s unclear how much the equity stake in the joint venture would ever be worth. When Providence Equity Partners kicked in $100 million for a 10 percent stake in 2007, it valued the company at $1 billion. I’m sure a charismatic banker could argue that it’s worth more now, even in the midst of a recession. But no matter what the valuation is, Disney’s portion would still be illiquid, and present tense cash counts for a lot these days.

Just as important, an exclusive deal with Hulu would be sure to anger Disney’s current and future partners, who range from cable giant Comcast (CMCSA) to Google (GOOG), and who either already pay Disney large sums of money or might be able to do so. So what is Iger thinking?

Now comes the answer: He’s playing the field.

PaidContent reports that at the same time Disney is talking about a tie-up with Hulu, it is also talking about a deal to stream full episodes of its shows on Google’s YouTube (GOOG). (Staci Kramer also says Disney is close to doing a deal to put Disney clips on YouTube, but that’s much less important).

There isn’t much in the way of detail in the report, but the gist is clear: Iger is putting Disney’s video assets in play. Who wants to step up?

I’m told that executives from Google, Comcast and CBS (CBS), have all tried to convince Iger–either directly or through intermediaries–not to lock up exclusively with Hulu. Now it’s time to for them to offer a compelling alternative.

Comcast, for instance, already pays Disney a huge sum for the right to show ESPN and other cable programming. And it also wants Disney to offer its stuff through the cable giant’s Fancast video portal. How much is it willing to give up for that?

As Staci points out, this is big turn from the walled-garden approach Disney/ABC has taken in the past couple years: Right now, if you want to watch, say, “Lost” on the Web (legally), you pretty much have to watch it at ABC.com.

The fact that Iger seems to have moved on from this approach and is willing to port his stuff to Hulu, YouTube or anywhere else, doesn’t bode well for Albert Cheng, the Disney digital executive who championed that strategy.

Happy coincidence: Iger will be speaking at the cable industry’s annual convention in Washington, D.C. on Thursday. This is guaranteed to be topic A.

Makes sense, given that the ad-supported model the paper has been depending on isn’t working. Figuring out a paid model that will work will be challenging, but it’s certainly worth experimenting with. For more details, see PaidContent’s useful summary.

One other related point: Keller reiterates that the Times has a small but extant business on its hands via Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle: For $14 a month, e-book readers can get a digital version of the paper delivered daily to their device.

I played with the Kindle for some time last fall and while I appreciate a lot about it, I can’t see why you’d pay $168 a year to read the Times on it: For one thing, the version that Kindle owners see is facsimile of the daily paper, which means it’s not updated with breaking news, even though the device has a wireless connection. Another negative–you can get the “live,” updated version of the online paper for free via the Kindle’s (admittedly crude) Web browser.

But people do like it, Keller says. How many? He won’t say, just that the business is “modest” (this also applies to the paper’s very, very niche Times Reader product). One hint: It’s generating much less than $10 million a year, which Keller describes wistfully as “real money” that the paper’s previous attempt at a subscription service generated.

Maybe those numbers get more significant as the Kindle becomes more popular: Citigroup (C) predicts the device will be a $1.2 billion business by next year alone. But I think the paper is going to have to find something more compelling to offer than a digitized version of last night’s news if it wants to charge a premium. I’m just not sure that offer should be.

Meanwhile Keller himself has a good perspective on it: “So some people are paying for The Times online. Just not enough of them. So far.”

That stat, courtesy of PaidContent’s David Kaplan, is staggering even by today’s end-times standards. We won’t be shocked, for instance, if Time Warner (TWX) tells us that AOL’s ad business has dropped 18 percent when it reports its earnings tomorrow. And IAC (IACI) had already reported a 19 percent drop in its fourth-quarter media and advertising revenue earlier this morning.

But 50 percent? That’s not supposed to happen to Web advertising at this point. Local TV ads? Sure. But not Internet ad dollars, which were supposed to be here to stay–and, according to some bulls, were set to thrive during a recession.

And that’s still happening in some pockets of the Web: Google (GOOG) reported decent results last month, for instance. And some niche players say they’re doing fine, too: I just got off the phone with Vibrant Media CEO Doug Stevenson, who tells me his business is up nearly 100 percent over the last year.

Vibrant sells those “in-text” links–basically highlighted text in a Web story that leads to an ad–which were controversial at the beginning of this decade but are now ho-hum. So that’s promising, I guess. But we content creators are going to need a whole lot more than paid search and in-text ads to keep ourselves afloat. Hope someone figures that part out, quickly.

Brothers Blake and Jason Krikorian, CEO and SVP-business development, are out, effective immediately. Jason Hirschhorn, who runs the company’s Sling Media Entertainment unit, plans on staying through the end of February; Ben White, chief creative officer at the entertainment group, will stay on through Feb. 1.

Some background from paidContent’s Staci Kramer, who had the story first:

Also leaving: Greg Wilkes, VP-sales. I’ve been told COO John Gilmore will take the reins for now but that may not be official. While no one is talking about any differences, there certainly is a big cultural gap between the tech-creative side and the traditional cable team at EchoStar.”

To tease that out: The Sling team can rightly point to a string of successes–the company racked up a number of awards at both the Consumer Electronics Show and MacWorld last week–but if things were humming smoothly at Echostar, you’d think the company would find a way to make them stick around.

The Slingbox is a potentially disruptive technology, but it’s still nascent, and Sling.com just launched late last year and will need a motivated team to help it gain traction in a crowded field. All those involved say they’ll be taking time off; everyone who knows the team involved finds that hard to believe.

The New York Post’s Keith Kelly has already reported that layoffs are in motion at People, Time and Sports Illustrated over the next few days; I am told that cuts are also coming to Fortune magazine today or tomorrow. Here’s a Sports Illustrated employee’s take on the situation there:

We are all expecting the hatchet Thursday or Friday. Morale is dismal. One colleague of mine, uber golf writer John Garrity, told several of us that he’s taking the package but will continue on for a while as a special contributor. We expect two or three photo editors to go, and two or three members of the Sport’s Illustrated Latino staff (the Spanish language SI publication, which posted a net profit of approx. one million in ’07 and broke even in ’08, was inexplicably shuttered). Also photographers are rumored to be being cut to half time service and members of our copy desk have been asked to take up to a 30% pay reduction for which they will work fewer hours. Charlie Leerhsen, one of our two executive editors, told a few staff members that he was going to be leaving.”

In other layoff/shutdown news:

• I am told that Forbes (where I worked for many years), is in the final stages of planning cuts as it prepares to merge the editorial operations of its magazine and Web site units. Last month the company began integrating its business groups and laid off about three dozen people in the process.
• GE’s (GE) NBC Universal has laid off at least 30 people in its sales group, reports AdAge. The cuts are part of a previously reported mandate from NBC CEO Jeff Zucker to cut three percent of the company’s budget. The Post says another 80 people could be fired at CNBC.
• Barry Diller’s IAC (IACI) is breaking up its programming group, which includes ventures like College Humor, 236.com and Tina Brown’s DailyBeast.com. Some but not all of the sites will be closed down or sold off. PaidContent has details.

As always, I value reader input: You can reach me directly at peter@allthingsd.com. If you want to be completely anonymous, you can use the blind tip box here.

I’ll update if I get any more info, or any kind of response from founder Arianna Huffington or her people. A source “close to the company” informs Silicon Alley Insider that the reports are “stupid and false” and “wrong across the board”; Huffpo cofounder Ken Lerer is an investor in SAI (see lengthy disclosure below).

That said, the size of the round and the valuation both sound plausible. And they reflect the rocket ride the site has been on for the past year or so (someone who should know better allowed the New York Times to float a $200 million estimate earlier this year, but no one takes that seriously).

ComScore pegged the site’s traffic at 4.5 million unique visitors in September 2008, up from 800,000 the year before. Meanwhile the DrudgeReport, the site’s conservative counterpart/model, was at two million. Both sites will claim their traffic is much higher, because that’s what every Web publisher says when confronted with outside numbers (this one included). But by any count, it has gotten very big very quickly.

The big question is whether Huffpo can sustain even a fraction of that growth rate in the aftermath of the election (and sell ads, too, though that’s another matter). Huffpo’s standard answer to that question is that that only 50 percent of its traffic comes from political stories. And indeed, there is plenty of real estate dedicated to topics like Lindsay Lohan’s love troubles, and those of Madonna, as well. And here’s a page called “Sex.” Guess what it’s about?

But there are lots of sites that can tell you about those topics–and indeed, Huffpo is primarily in the business of aggregating that stuff in an eye-catching way, not creating original content. And while the Huffpo people are absolute wizards at optimizing the site for search engines, and maniacally focused about tweaking the site in real time for optimal click-throughs, it really will be hard to sustain growth without political fervor.

If you had to bet on political Web sites that will grow for the next four years, you’d be better off placing a wager on sites that cater to conservatives/Republicans/etc. for the same reason that nonprofits of that ilk will raise more money during the same time–anger and frustration are great animators. Recall that conservative talk radio really exploded once Bill Clinton took office–and yes, this augurs well for Fox News, owned by News Corp. (NWS), which owns this Web site. (And while we’re at it, I most recently worked at Silicon Alley Insider, which has a loose distribution relationship with HuffPo. Phew.)

One hopeful note: New politics/stats/forecasting site 538.com, using an admittedly crude measurement, says both HuffPo and Drudge have been able to keep their post-election audiences.

Like most other big media companies, digital is much more important strategically than it is financially for Disney (DIS), so the shortfall didn’t have an impact on its earnings report yesterday. And Disney has much bigger problems to worry about, like the fact that people are much less willing to book trips to Orlando than they were earlier in year.

Still, it’s worth noting that Staggs blames the shortfall on Web advertising softness, and he makes an interesting point in passing–Disney started seeing a problem with Web ads earlier than most big media companies have publicly acknowledged so far. From Staci Kramer’s interview:

Asked about online advertising in that context, Staggs said: ‘Online advertising actually started to soften a little bit earlier than some of the other media outlets; not quite as early as local but not long thereafter. … It hasn’t necessarily softened as deeply but there’s the same sort of trend you’re seeing in other advertising areas.’ He attributes it to some advertisers questioning the efficacy of online advertising.”

Depending on whom you listen to, the local advertising market started falling off in late winter/early spring. So let’s say, for argument’s sake, that Disney noticed the softness in, say May or June. Again, the online ad market isn’t material to Disney’s business, so it wouldn’t be required to flag investors about that. But it would have been nice for the rest of us who follow the market.

While we’re at it, we’d love to know more about these advertisers who are “questioning the efficacy of online advertising.” Tom? Anyone?

Wenda Harris Millard sat down for an entertaining question-and-answer at paidContent’s “EconWomen” conference today.

And while the co-CEO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (MSO) insisted that her relationship with founder Martha Stewart was just fine, I wanted to be clear: Was there any truth to a recent New York Post report that said she was feuding with Martha, and would end up running Microsoft’s online unit?

So I asked her.

“There’s nothing to it. I’m not going to Microsoft or anywhere else,” she told me.

Fair enough. Anybody want to take issue with that?

If you’re willing to use your real name, you can leave a comment below. If you want to be more discreet, you can email me: peter@allthingsd.com.

Meanwhile, a question still left unanswered: Who is going to run digital for Microsoft (MSFT), anyway?

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.