Another torrent of words on Rupert Murdoch but this time the News Corp. chairman was an active participant ... Time’s Eric Pooley made the most of his Murdoch moments. including some chatter about online. I can’t tell from reading it, though, how much Murdoch actually knows about the way WSJ.com and the other DJ online consumer efforts work and how much he’s glossing over. Too, as is the case with most of the coverage, it’s so Journal-centric it’s hard to see where anything but the Journal franchise fits in. Full article here.

A quick MySpace-Yahoo detour: Murdoch re the very preliminary talks with then-Yahoo CEO Terry Semel about swapping MySpace for 25 percent of Yahoo: “Terry Semel was enthusiastic about it. ... We were looking to see if it was a good idea. I wasn’t sure.” With Semel moved to non-exec chairman,  Murdoch has to get a sense of Jerry Yang-led Yahoo.

Hybrid WSJ.com: Murdoch suspects the online Journal could be more valuable as an ad-subscription hybrid with premium users paying for high-end content: “But it needs to be studied carefully.” (DJ online already takes a hybrid approach with ads, an expanding number of “free” sites and MarketWatch but it sounds like Murdoch would go further with WSJ.com. Maybe.) In a different context, he adds: “A media company is basically anything that communicates with people — news, ideas, entertainment, advertising — and allows them to communicate with each other. ... But the internet is teaching people every day to expect everything for free. So it has to be advertising supported.”

Blue Sky: Then there’s the “blue sky” or maybe “pie in the sky” approach: “What if, at the Journal, we spent $100 million a year hiring all the best business journalists in the world? Say 200 of them. And spent some money on establishing the brand but went global — a great, great newspaper with big, iconic names, outstanding writers, reporters, experts. And then you make it free, online only. No printing plants, no paper, no trucks. How long would it take for the advertising to come? It would be successful, it would work and you’d make ... a little bit of money. Then again, the Journal and the Times make very little money now.”

Also in the article, some good fly-on-the-wall detail on the negotiations, a few mild mea culpas, and the bit about how the price for the Journal is $60 a share “plus vitriol.” Speaking of the latter, WSJ uninion members came to work late Thursday to protest a possible Murdoch takeover and the enhanced gold parachutes for 135 top execs. The union’s explanation.