What else would you expect Ballmer to say? Now that Microsoft (MSFT) has got its hands on Yahoo’s (YHOO) search business–without paying a “boatload” for it–there isn’t a whole lot left to buy.

Emphasis on the word “buy.” Microsoft may still be willing to write a big check to boost its search share, specifically to get its hands on queries controlled by Time Warner’s (TWX) AOL, which has about three percent of the domestic search market.

AOL currently outsources its queries to Google (GOOG) in a deal that is said to make quite a bit of money for both sides of the table because AOL’s core user base tends to click through at a much higher rate than the rest of the Web. But AOL’s Google contract is expiring, and both Mountain View and Redmond are thought to be in hot pursuit of a new one. AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, though, is taking his time about his decision.

Also in the potential mix for Microsoft: A deal with News Corp. (NWS), which owns this site. Google’s $900 million search deal with News Corp.’s MySpace and IGN sites expires next year, but unlike the AOL deal, it has been a disappointment for Google.

It’s hard to imagine Ballmer spending much to wrest that one away, but News Corp. digital boss Jon Miller is doing what he can to drum up interest: He’s been talking up the idea of bundling multiple News Corp. properties–like, say, Dow Jones–into a larger deal. But since many of those properties have their own particular agreements and peculiarities, that’s going to take some doing.

“‘We have no plans to acquire EA,’ Phil Spencer, corporate vice president of Microsoft Game Studios, told Reuters in an interview on Thursday. ‘They remain a very important partner to us. No acquisitions.’ Spencer declined to comment on whether it had held talks with Electronics Arts on such a move.”

Anybody else want to take a run at the company? After a seven percent jump yesterday, the company behind the Madden franchise, among others (it also has a piece of the Rock Band business), sports a $6.4 billion market cap.

Meanwhile, both Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO) have announced that they’re in the market for relatively bit-sized deals.

Yesterday, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz said she was in the market for acquisitions–specifically “small and medium-sized opportunities.” Today, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said he’d use his $11 billion cash hoard to do the same thing. At the G20 gathering in Pittsburgh, Schmidt told reporters that now that “it’s clear that the worst is behind us,” his checkbook is open again. Reuters:

“Acquisitions are turned on again at Google and we are doing our normal maneuvers, which is small companies. My estimate would be one-a-month acquisitions and these are largely in lieu of hiring,” Schmidt said.

“There may be larger acquisitions, but they really are unpredictable,” Schmidt added.

And sure enough, Google has been on a mini-buying binge as of late. Last month, it was video compression company On2 for $106 million (though angry owners of the penny stock insist it should be for much more). Earlier this month, it was reCaptcha, the, um, captcha company, for an undisclosed sum. One decent bet for the future: Ad technology companies like Teracent.

Pretty sure I haven’t embedded any Bob Fosse clips before. Time to change that.

If the court’s decision holds up, it could well start another round of dealmaking similar to the one we saw at the beginning of this decade in which the industry consolidated to about half a dozen major players.

Reuters:

“The commission has failed to demonstrate that allowing a cable operator to serve more than 30 percent of all cable subscribers would threaten to reduce either competition or diversity in programming,” the court said.

The judges pointed to rising competition among video providers, including satellite companies like DirecTV Group Inc, as well as telephone companies like AT&T Inc and Verizon Communications Inc, which have been rolling out their own subscription television services.

“Cable operators, therefore, no longer have the bottleneck power over programming that concerned the Congress in 1992.” the court said. The FCC’s cable ownership limit has been the focus of court challenges for years.

As Reuters points out, new FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski can try to appeal the decision or try to write a new one. But if the cap stays off, we’re likely to see another round of combinations, or attempted combinations, at the very least.

Lots of handicappers have already been expecting big cable operators like Comcast (CMCSA) to make a run at programming assets, as it did with Disney (DIS) years ago. But what if the company deploy its assets to bulk up with more subscribers instead? Investors in Cablevision (CVC), the smallish, New York-based cable system that is a perpetual supposed takeover target that never gets taken over, like the idea: CVC shares are climbing modestly in a flat market.

And for the last several years, the New York Times (NYT) has provided excellent on-the-ground coverage, usually via Dealbook’s Andrew Ross Sorkin.

Not this year.

Reporters and media chieftains alike started arriving at the Idaho resort last night, but the Times is AWOL. If you want first-hand reportage on who said what outside the bar or by the duck pond, you’re going to have to rely on other news outlets.

Sorkin explained his absence via email to me:

For better or worse, I couldn’t make it out to Sun Valley this year because I’m chained to my desk for the next couple of weeks trying to finish my upcoming book, “Too Big to Fail.”

Given the market jitters–and resulting deal drought–we made the decision to cover the event from afar this year. I’m trying to stay up to date on the latest machinations out there by speaking with a half dozen of the invitees daily by phone and email–some of whom have already tapped out notes by Blackberry from inside this morning. (We actually might have a pretty interesting Sun Vally story up on DealBook in the next 24 hours.) We’re also running a series of Twitter feeds from other news organizations on DealBook’s homepage. And we plan to run several Sun Valley photo slide shows, as we’ve done in year’s past.

In truth, it’s debatable whether any news outlet has to be at Sun Valley: Some of the moguls use the opportunity to hold briefings with the press there. Google’s Eric Schmidt (GOOG) has been particularly talkative in years past. But anything truly important generally happens away from the scribes and usually comes to light well after the fact, so you could argue that real-time coverage is overrated.

On the other hand, last year Rupert Murdoch, who owns this Web site, enlisted the help of the press corps to help him find his wedding ring after an evening at the bar. That was a pretty great story.

And in any case, there are still plenty of other outlets on the ground. Among them: The Financial Times, Reuters, Bloomberg, the Los Angeles Times, CNBC, the New York Post, and our colleague Julia Angwin from The Wall Street Journal.

A quick perusal of Google News will keep you up to date, and if you want second-by-second stuff, there’s a Twitter stream, of course. And sure enough, Sorkin’s Dealbook has a nifty widget that lets you toggle between different Twitter feeds. It’s worth checking out.

Why do I care?

• Because his hire is yet another indicator that AOL is continuing to hire experienced writers and reporters–often from ailing publications–to build up its own sites, a strategy championed by content czar Bill Wilson’s MediaGlow. AOL has been steadily hiring journalism vets and using them to reinvigorate existing sites like its FanHouse sports hub and to launch new ones like PoliticsDaily. Other recent hires include Mitch Lipka, a consumer finance writer for the Boston Globe who will join AOL’s Walletpop, and David Wood, a longtime national security writer for the Baltimore Sun,  who is joining PoliticsDaily.
• Because it means that the not-going-to-shut-down-after-all Portoflio.com won’t feature its two marquee bloggers. Felix Salmon, Bercovici’s former colleague at the Condé Nast site, had already left for Reuters to start a finance blog earlier this year.
• Because Bercovici is damned good at the media beat, so I’m going to need to bookmark his page and add his RSS feed into my reader.
• And because I’ve been writing about layoffs since I started this column in October, and this is a nice change of pace.

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.

Google said on Thursday it aimed to build a data centre at an old paper mill in southeastern Finland that it bought from Stora Enso for 40 million euros ($51.7 million).

‘We are currently considering to build a data centre at this site,’ said Google spokesman Kay Oberbeck…

In early 2008 Stora Enso closed down the loss-making Summa mill, which consumed 1,000 gigawatt hours of electricity per year, after nearly 53 years in operation.”

Go ahead and make your own knowing creative destruction joke here. And when you’re done, think about the more prosaic symbolism of the purchase. Last fall, Google (GOOG) was putting the brakes on growth–it delayed and scaled back data centers in Oklahoma and North Carolina, and even laid off some of its recruiters.

You don’t want to read too much into this purchase–buying property isn’t the same as actually building a data center–but it’s certainly a more hopeful sign than a company that’s selling off assets.

[Image Credit: Library of Congress via Flickr]

But! Things may be looking up by the fourth quarter of 2009, Wren says. In part, that’s because those results will be compared to last quarter’s results, which are lousy. But Wren is also hopeful about the effect of stimulus spending in the U.S. and other countries. So that’s something, right?

EARLIER: For much of 2008, the big ad conglomerates seemed unaffected by the global slowdown. But that had to stop sometime: Omnicom Group (OMC) just announced that its fourth-quarter revenue and earnings dropped seven percent and 13.7 percent, respectively.

From the barebones press release Omnicom issued, it’s difficult to get a read on just how off the ad markets really are: The giant holding company hasn’t broken out it results by industry (advertising versus PR, etc.), and crucially, it hasn’t broken out its organic growth rate–i.e., how the company would have performed without recent acquisitions. [UPDATE: Reuters says organic growth dropped 2.3 percent, though I can't see where it got that figure.] Hoping to get more of that during the company’s 830 earnings call and will report back if there’s anything interesting.

Here are two breakdowns of Omnicom’s Q4 numbers, via the company’s conference call.

[Image Credit: jsome1]

So this is kind of like that: Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim may invest “hundreds of millions” in the paper via what amounts to a high-interest loan. Slim, a telecom magnate whom Forbes pegged as the second richest man in the world last year, is looking at buying a slug of preferred stock in the New York Times (NYT), The Wall Street Journal reports.

If the deal goes through, it will give the Times some breathing room to deal with its cash crunch–it has $46 million in cash and more than $1 billion in debt, with a $400 million revolver that winds down in May. But it won’t solve its core problem– print ad dollars are disappearing and it hasn’t figured out how to replace them on the Web.

The breathing room will be expensive, too. But the paper doesn’t have many options at this point. WSJ:

For the Sulzberger family, which controls the Times through super-voting shares, the advantage of such a move would be that it would give the company capital without forcing them to relinquish control or dilute other shareholders. The downside is that the cost of such capital is generally very high.

When Goldman Sachs Group Inc needed $5 billion in September, for example, it found a willing investor in Warren Buffett but only after agreeing to pay a 10% dividend on perpetual preferred shares. Yet with credit tight, especially for companies like the Times that have poor credit ratings, many lenders have few options but to accept onerous terms.

Mr. Slim, who is said to be worth $60 billion, already had a 6.4% stake as of the end of September. The value of the investment has dropped by more than half…since then and is now worth about $60 million. At the time of the investment, a spokesman for Mr. Slim said the 68-year-old billionaire simply saw an opportunity for a piece of a ‘great’ company at an ‘attractive’ price and had no plans to take a role in its management or board.”

The Times declined to comment on the report to me, but Reuters has followed up with a story of its own confirming the basics of the WSJ account.

Last June, a Vornado executive told Reuters that the store would shut down in the first quarter of 2009. The decision to close the store appears related to real estate and the value connected to the location. That executive was quoted as saying that Virgin pays only $54 per square-foot when the market rent in the area is about $700 a square foot.

So, while the store, which does an estimated $55 million in annual volume, is profitable to the tune of $6 million, according to sources, the space would be even more profitable for its owner with a higher rent tenant. Vornado bought the 180,000 square foot retail component of the Bertelsmann building, which houses the Times Square store, in 2006, and will lease the space to Century 21, according to reports.

The closure leaves the Virgin chain with five stores, and one of them, the Union Square store in New York, will now be the city’s premiere record store, with an estimated $40 million annual volume. But the status of that store is also at question as the Related Cos. and Vornado leased the ground floor of the store to Nordstrom Rack for the holiday season, only to have the deal fall through.”

I get that the decision appears to be “related to real estate,” but it’s really about the health–or lack thereof–of bricks-and-mortar music retail. If the No. 1 store in the country can’t make it, and if New York City’s “premiere record store” rented out a floor during the peak sales season, then why is anyone bothering to sell CDs in stores, period?

Plenty of retail executives seem to be asking themselves the same question, and are responding by cutting the small space they’ve devoted to CDs even further. The exceptions: Special promotions for exclusive albums, like Wal-Mart’s (WMT) successful push for the new AC/DC album last year, and Best Buy’s (BBY) unsuccessful gambit with Guns N’ Roses.

[Image Credit: Troshy]

Verizon Wireless is poised to have rivals of Amazon’s popular electronic Kindle reader use its network to download material such as books and newspapers wirelessly, according to an executive for the wireless service provider.

Tony Lewis, who runs a program that helps third-party vendors certify their products to work on Verizon’s network, said in an interview ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show that he does not see the U.S. recession and concerns about weak consumer spending stalling manufacturers’ plans to bring out even nonessential products such as e-readers.

‘Competitors to the Kindle are out there and ready,’ said Lewis, who declined to name the company’s e-reader partners. ‘In 2009 I’d expect them to come to the market.’”

Amazon’s e-book uses Sprint’s (S) wireless network to let you beam books, blogs and other stuff directly to the device, so it makes sense that Verizon Wireless, a joint venture between Verizon (VZ) and Vodafone, would want to get in on the action.

Looking for more details? No dice–I have a feeling that Lewis was in a wide-ranging talk about Verizon’s plans, and e-books came up glancingly. And indeed, Verizon could add a whole range of interesting products this year, a result of its “Open Development” program, which is supposed to crack open its airwaves to a slew of electronic devices, prompted by nagging from Google (GOOG).

[Image Credit: Kindle Cake via geeksugar]

In another era, the move would have occasioned finger-wagging from a certain kind of journalistic moralizer. But I think that any moralizers left are busy job-hunting or thinking about new careers. And the Times certainly needs the cash.

But how much cash will this provide? Reuters’s excellent Robert MacMillan takes some preliminary guesstimates from the New York Post and does his own rough math. He figures the Times could pull in $28.6 million a year if it sells the inventory every day of the year. For comparison, that’s a little more than nine percent of the company’s November sales.

Very nice, especially given that this is essentially found money that the Times can count on as along it still has a sales staff and a print edition. But at this rate, that may not be long. Again: What took you so long?

Why is this noteworthy? Because the AP, which is actually a cooperative owned by 1,500+ member newspapers, supplies the bulk of the content that fills your daily newspaper or Web site, or whatever.

Since much of the copy the AP produces is lifted from its participating members–that’s the point of the co-op structure–the cuts don’t necessarily mean that its output is going to diminish in any way. But if it does, it poses a real problem for the same companies that are currently cutting their own staffs, since they depend on the AP to fill their holes.

Time Warner’s (TWX) Time magazine, for instance, just laid off many of its foreign bureau reporters. Right now, Time can reasonably expect wire services like the AP to pick up the slack (that image above is an AP mailbox from Belgrade). But if they don’t…