Fox’s cable TV business made up the vast majority of News Corp’s profits for the quarter ending March 31, contributing $993 million of the $1.36 billion in operating income for the period. Total revenues were $9.54 billion, up 14 percent over the previous year.

The overall home video market is up five percent and “we’re up a bit more than that,” Carey said. “The driving force is digital…the overall marketplace continues to grow really well, and digital is becoming a growing part of what we do.” He also said that the DVD business has stabilized, “with Blu-Ray offsetting the decline in the older formats,” and that “really low-priced rentals” through services like Redbox  are “becoming less of a force.”

In response to an analyst’s question about the future of Hulu, Carey said that the service has “great momentum,” and “we’re particularly excited about subscriptions” through Hulu Plus. “There’s an important role for Hulu Classic in the marketplace,” he said, but “we need to develop the dual-revenue side of it.” In a few years, he said, “Hulu will look a bit different than it does today,” partly in response to changes in Netflix’s business: “Netflix talks about evolving their business to somewhat different business models” (he didn’t elaborate on what those are).

When asked to offer general advice to the broadcast networks, Carey said they are still the “viewership leaders,” but acknowledged the networks might need to “be a bit more targeted in the types of series [they] invest in…networks have been more about the volume game, stuck in historical practices…Do you need to break some of those rules? The answer is clearly yes.”

While most of the losses arose as a result of pension and restructuring expenses, the company’s core business remains distressed. Print advertising revenues fell 8 percent, and while circulation declined by seven percent. A small bright spot comes in the form of a 16 percent increase in online display advertising at a time when such revenue is flat or falling at other newspapers.

While the Washington Post’s earnings reflect a familiar story of the declining newspaper business, they are particularly discouraging because the paper does not appear to have a turnaround plan on the horizon. While the New York Times has been experimenting with its digital paywall for over a year, and now has plans to create different pricing tiers, the Post’s plan to raise online digital subscription revenue remains amorphous. The company plans to launch a paywall this summer, but the model appears so leaky that it is unlikely to bring in significant money any time soon.

At the same time, while the New York Times has cut away all its non-core assets to focus on the flagship brand, the Washington Post Company is also figuring out how to turn around Kaplan, its troubled education segment.

Correction: The first paragraph of this post was updated to correct descriptions of profit and loss.

Overall advertising declined 11.2 percent — 13 percent in print and 4 precent in digital — from the same quarter a year ago, while circulation revenues rose 6.2%. As in previous quarters, the company did not break out how much of this increase was the result of digital income versus increases in the price of its print products.

The Times’ total number of digital subscribers, a figure closely watched by investors and media observers, rose from 668,000 to 708,000 across the company. This number includes totals from the International Herald Tribune and soon-to-be-sold Boston Globe.

The company also announced a “new strategy for growth,” in which CEO Mark Thompson says the Times will begin offering lower-priced products to attract a broader paying audience. The release suggests the company will begin breaking out certain speciality segments like food and travel as standalone paid offerings. A few bullets:

• “A lower-priced paid product designed to allow access to The Times’s most important and interesting stories in a convenient, media-rich package for consumers looking for an efficient way to stay informed.”

• “Other new products, also at lower price points, that would offer deep access and additional content and other new features in specific content areas such as politics, technology, opinion, the arts and food.”

The Times will discuss the results and the new strategy on an 11:00 AM ET earnings call. We will post highlights from the call.

Google share price was up about 1 percent in after-market trading to $772. The company’s consolidated revenue, which includes Motorola and traffic acquisition costs, was $13.97 billion. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters predicted $14.09 billion, and earnings per share of $10.66.

On an earnings call following the release of the results, CEO Larry Page talked up the company’s highly experimental products of the future such as driverless cars, the secret Google X lab and Google Glass. He said products like Gmail were at one time considered to be far from the company’s core search business, but eventually became everyday features. He also cited the fiber-to-home networks Google is unrolling in Kansas, Austin and Provo, Utah.

“That’s why we’re investing in what appear to be speculative products to you today,” said Page, adding in reference to Google Glass, “I get chills when I use a product that is the future.”

Analysts on the call were not entirely persuaded, with one asking if the company would shift the resources it devotes to core versus experiment products. Page said the company would continue doing what it was doing.

In response to a question about whether Facebook’s Home screen for cell phones could marginalize Google software, Page did not address the issue directly but emphasized the company’s overall strength.

• As previously reported, Financial Times digital subscriptions overtook print subscriptions for the first time in 2012. The FT now has “almost 316,000″ digital subscribers, compared to about 286,000 print subs, and “mobile devices now account for 30% of FT.com traffic and 15% of new subscriptions.” The company said it expects advertising to remain weak, “with profits reflecting further actions to accelerate the shift from print to digital.” Pearson CEO John Fallon denied rumors that the company is selling off the FT.
• The Economist isn’t nearly as far along in the digital transition: Total print and digital circulation was 1.67 million, “of which 150,000 customers bought digital-only copies.”
• At Penguin, ebooks accounted for 17 percent of global book revenues, up from 12 percent in 2011, and “almost 30 percent” in the U.S., compared to 20 percent in 2011. Penguin’s total revenues worldwide were £1.053 billion (USD $1.59 billion), up 1 percent over the previous year. Global app sales were up by 200 percent, but the company didn’t break out app revenues.

In a press release sent out after the market closed Wednesday, Barnes & Noble said it ”expects its fiscal year 2013 Nook segment EBITDA loss to be greater than it was in fiscal 2012 and expects fiscal year 2013 Nook Media revenues to be less than $3 billion.” Previously, B&N had expected Nook Media’s FY 2013 revenues to be $3 billion, with EBITDA losses comparable to those in FY 2012.

Barnes & Noble had also been set to announce its third-quarter earnings for fiscal year 2013 on February 22, but said Wednesday it will actually report them a week later, on February 28.

Nook Media is supposed to be the profitable part of the company. Consisting of B&N’s Nook and college businesses, Barnes & Noble spun it off in 2012 with a $300 million investment from Microsoft and, as of late December 2012, an $89.5 million investment from Pearson. (Barnes & Noble holds 78.2 percent of Nook Media.) Instead, Nook is doing worse at the same time that Barnes & Noble’s other segments — retail stores and BN.com sales — are also doing badly. Over the holidays, Nook device sales, BN.com sales and in-store sales all fell compared to the previous year. And the company plans to close up to a third of its retail stores over the next decade.

The New York Times Company posted earnings on Thursday morning that show the company’s ongoing struggle to create significant growth in its digital operations. While circulation revenues continue to rise, all forms of advertising are in decline and overall revenue is shrinking.

The company posted earnings per share of 32 cents (excluding special items) which is about what analysts predicted. Compared to the same 13-week period from a year ago, total revenues decreased 0.7 percent, with advertising revenues down 8.3 percent and circulation revenues up 8.6 percent.

The circulation revenues should, in theory, be a bright spot for the Times but it’s not possible to tell how much of that 8.6 percent comes from new digital revenue and how much from an increase in the price of the print edition (the Times doesn’t break out these numbers).

Update: On an earnings call, executives addressed the company’s large cash reserve which has been the source of speculation about whether the Times would re-issue its dividends which are a source of income for the clans that control the paper. For now, the company will not use the $955 million in cash for dividends but will instead pursue a conservative strategy based on reducing long-term debt and investing in its digital operations (this is good news for those rooting for the paper’s long-term sustainability).

Incoming CEO, Mark Thompson, also used the call to state that he views growth opportunities in international markets, new products with the Times brand and an expanded events business.

Analysts on the earnings call pressed executives for details about the nature of its digital subscribers to the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune which now number 640,000 (a 13-percent increase from the previous quarter.) Most of these come from people who already visited the Times website frequently, which raises the question of how many more new subscribers the company can draw in. NYTimes.com general manager Denise Warren pointed to marketing operations outside of internal Times channels to say this number would grow.

Analysts also questioned the fate of the Boston Globe which now has 28,000 digital subscribers, an eight-percent increase from the last quarter but still a small overall number.

Overall, the bottom line here is that this is the same old story for the New York Times company: it is shedding revenue, assets and longtime staff faster than it can build up a new digital business. If you’re looking for positive signs, the company’s decision to hold off issuing dividends is important because it shows a willingness to invest in the Times’ future. The company’s ongoing brand strengths and creative marketing may also provide it with a way forward.

Facebook made crucial gains in mobile this quarter, one of the primary areas that has been used to evaluate the health of the company since its IPO last year. Facebook saw mobile daily active users (DAUs) exceed web DAUs for the first time in the fourth quarter.

“Today there’s no argument. Facebook is a mobile company,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on the earnings call Wednesday afternoon, stating strongly that while the company has made important leaps on mobile, it will not be developing the much-discussed Facebook phone.

The company saw a serious uptick in mobile advertising revenue, which made up 23 percent of its total advertising revenue in the fourth quarter, compared to 14 percent in the third quarter. Mobile is the most important game now for Facebook, as it was for the last earnings report. The company has worked to improve the speed of its native apps in 2012. Zuckerberg highlighted the speed of the company’s apps as a major area of improvement in 2012.

“Often, doing a good job is focusing on basic issues like performance and stability,” he said.

Over the past year, Facebook has focused tremendously on monetization through mobile advertising. COO Sheryl Sandberg emphasized that Facebook is the platform that marketers should consider when allocating their advertising dollars because of the company’s strength among mobile users, obviously contrasting the company to its ad rival Google.

“Facebook is a relatively new marketing platform, so proving that our ads are effective remains an important priority,” she said. “Marketers are realizing that our newsfeed is the most efficient and effective way to reach their customers.”

The company now has 1.06 billion monthly active users as of Dec. 31, as compared to 1.01 billion as of Sept. 30. The company has 618 million daily active users compared to 584 million on average in September, and mobile MAUs are at 680 million compared to 604 million as of Sept. 30.

The company recently released Graph Search, which will likely have its own monetization opportunities, and Zuckerberg was eager to emphasize that while it’s still a beta product, it creates serious long-term opportunities for the company. He took obvious digs at Google in emphasizing Facebook’s collection of personal data and connections that can be used in search, and said the companies had different goals:

“We’re just coming from a completely different place,” he said. “Our whole product is people and structured connections.”

Facebook has gone through a holiday season with the full roll-out of its e-commerce “Facebook Gifts” product. However, the company did not break out revenue from Facebook gifts in its earnings report, stating only that advertising made up 84 percent of revenue, up from 41 percent from the same quarter last year. And the company said only that it is working to figure out how to get people using Facebook Gifts more and making it part of the natural site experience. Revenue from payments and other fees (such as those connected with games) was $256 million, which saw essentially no increase over the previous year after adjusting for accounting changes in December.

This post was updated continuously to reflect Facebook’s afternoon earnings call.

Net income for the quarter was $97 million, or $0.21 per share, on revenue of $21.27 billion — compared to profits of $177 million on revenue of $17.43 billion a year ago. Operating income rose 45 percent to $405 million.

Analysts had expected earnings of $0.27 per share on revenues of $22.3 billion, and $506 million in operating income.

In the release, CEO Jeff Bezos called out ebooks in particular: “We’re now seeing the transition we’ve been expecting. After five years, ebooks is a multi-billion dollar category for us and growing fast — up approximately 70 percent last year. In contrast, our physical book sales experienced the lowest December growth rate in our 17 years as a book seller, up just 5 percent.” The company didn’t share actual ebook numbers, but North American media revenues were $2.9 billion for the quarter and $9.19 billion for the year — up 13 percent and 15 percent, respectively, over 2011. International media revenues were $3.6 billion for the quarter and $10.75 billion for the year.

As usual, Amazon did not disclose Kindle device sales. The company released new Kindle Fire tablets and the Paperwhite e-reader in September 2012. The earnings release noted that Kindle Fire HD is still “the #1 best-selling, most gifted, and most wished for product” on the site, but didn’t tout any specific holiday sales nuggets the way it did in 2011. In an investor call following the earnings report, CFO Tom Szkutak said the company wasn’t able to fulfill all the orders it got for Kindle Paperwhite: “We would have had more sales in Q4 if we were able to keep up with the demand, and so the team is working very hard to make sure we have good in-stock going forward on that product.”

North American sales of electronics and other general merchandise were $8.5 billion for the quarter and $23.27 billion for the year — up 24 percent and 34 percent, respectively, over 2011.

Sales of Amazon Web Services — which get lumped into the “other” category —  looked like a bright spot for the quarter. “Other” sales in North America logged $769 million for the quarter, up 68 percent from $459 million a year earlier. That category also includes things like branded credit cards, but most analysts say AWS makes up the bulk of the number. However, it’s unclear how profitable AWS is.

For the full year, revenue was $61.09 billion, up 27 percent from 2011. Operating income fell for the full year to $676 million, from $862 million in 2011. The company saw a net loss of $39 million compared to net income of $631 million the previous year.

For the first quarter of 2013, the company told investors to expect revenues between $15 billion and $16.6 billion, with guidance on operating income ranging from -$285 million to $65 million.

A previous version of this story stated Amazon’s revenues in millions, not billions. I’ve now fixed that. The story was updated several times throughout the afternoon and during the investor call.

Amazon is holding an investor call at 2 p.m. PT, and we will be on the call.

In case you missed it, Yahoo’s earnings came in at 32 cents a share yesterday which is better than the 28 cents that analysts had predicted. On the investor call following the earnings report, CEO Marissa Mayer stressed partnerships and the “tremendous internal transformation in the culture, energy and execution of the company.” She claims to have fixed hundreds of pressure points in the Yahoo bureaucracy and boasted that company employees worldwide are now enjoying free cafeteria food.

These are tactics, not a strategy. The reality is that Yahoo is still getting pummeled in its core business of display advertising and its search business, while posting higher revenue, is still losing market share. Despite some nifty content offerings (especially its finance and sports), the company is struggling for relevance in a world where no one says “portal” anymore. And while its stock is flying high, a big reason for that is Yahoo plowing money from asset sales into share buybacks.

To get an idea of where Yahoo stands, recall that the company was once regarded as an internet “giant” and that it stood astride the tech world like Apple and Amazon do today. Now, look at the chart below to see its relative significance today:

The other companies on the chart are not just other tech companies, but the companies with which Yahoo must compete directly. Google and Microsoft remain genuine giants while Facebook is still much smaller but, unlike Yahoo, is poised for powerful growth in the next two years. And, as my colleague Mathew Ingram noted, “partnering with everyone else is not a winning strategy.”

Mayer said on the investor call that Yahoo’s biggest opportunities lie in “search, display, mobile and video” but gave little indication how it would dislodge its immediate competitors — let alone the likes of Twitter, Tumblr and other upstarts.

The best that can be said for Marissa Mayer’s Yahoo is that the company is not outright dysfunctional. But it still needs a competitive advantage and a growth strategy. Until it has those things, let’s not waste our breath talking of a turnaround.

(Image by  Olesia Bilkei via Shutterstock)