@RupertMurdoch managed to stay quiet last week while Rupert Murdoch, the chairman and CEO of News Corp., was doing last-minute maneuvers behind the scene, then publicly pitching the break up of his company.

But his Twitter alter ego is back with a vengeance, starting Saturday with a sotto voce tweet about the past week:

Tough week, but went better than I expected.

— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) June 30, 2012

Then came a Sunday barrage over 5 hours or so as Murdoch tweeted from the country he verbally shivved Thursday during his media rounds — when he said repeatedly proclaimed that he would not make any more major investments in England. He meant, perhaps, simply to tamp down the possibility that News Corp. would try again for BSkyB but came off as starkly negative on the country where News Corp. still holds 39.1 percent of the pay TV company, including Sky News, and News International, with the Times of London, the Sun and their Sunday editions. It’s also the country where his company, his reputation and that of his son James currently faces the most jeopardy both legal and legislative.

London again. 8 lively, different Sunday papers. Some great writing, some fun, some hysterical but happy change from boring Sunday NYT.

— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) July 1, 2012

So far, so good. That was followed by a bit of unsolicited advice to Prime Minister David Cameron (it was Mitt Romney’s turn in June) — then he couldn’t resist the tabloid news of the day:

Scientology back in news.Very weird cult, but big, big money involved with Tom Cruise either number two or three in hierarchy.

— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) July 1, 2012

That done, as he has on several occasions since taking to Twitter over the winter holidays, Murdoch answered questions:

@gramercypark many emerging, but Google twins, Jack Dorsey stand out. Look for next wave to be in biotech.

— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) July 1, 2012

Sticking through the attacks on his credibility and ethics:

@dr_henry77my folks! Come off it, let’s have serious discussion.

— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) July 1, 2012

But. like many of his news outlets, Murdoch couldn’t stay away from Scientology, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes:

Watch Katie Holmes and Scientology story develop. Something creepy, maybe even evil, about these people.

— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) July 1, 2012

A little later came:

Since Scientology tweet hundreds of attacks.Expect they will increase and get worse and maybe threatening.Still stick to my story.

— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) July 1, 2012

And a question about whether he is a Christian. Murdoch replied: “I try to be.”

He also drew a line between Scientology (“evil”), Mormonism (“a mystery”) and Mormons (“not evil”). Lucky for him given that he appears to be backing a Mormon for president.

@shakircMormonism a mystery to me, but Mormons certainly not evil.

— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) July 1, 2012

Alan Murray, the Wall Street Journal deputy managing editor, chimed in:

Too busy readingthe Scientology tweets!“@keptsimple81: Why everyone retweeting @rupertmurdoch? Why haven’t I seen @alansmurray tweet?”

— Alan Murray (@alansmurray) July 1, 2012

Murdoch grabbed the chance to promote the Journal and went off the air (for now):

@alansmurrayRight!Yesterday’s WSJ iPad app really great. New software, great graphics.

— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) July 1, 2012

That’s just a sampling of the two dozen-plus tweets over six hours. The whole is a canny, conversational stream of consciousness.

No backing off the he-said-what comments that are getting the most attention but also a sincere effort to communicate with people he might not otherwise reach. I’ve watched a lot of people at his level use Twitter to broadcast. Murdoch seems to get that it needs to be interactive to succeed. (He has nearly 265,000 followers now, up from nearly 240,000 when I checked last Thursday.)

It’s a year ago this week that the phone hacking scandal blew up, taking with it the News of the World, News Corp.’s chance to buy BSkyB and, it looked for a time, possibly the Murdochs. It still is far from resolved no matter how often he says it is, particularly with a number of his former execs under arrest and potential investigations in the U.S. It has dented his and the family’s power, to be sure, and helped lead to the break-up of the company he built over some 60 years, but Murdoch survives.

He’ll survive Scientology, too.

• News Corp.’s News International is ready to fight market-leading AutoTrader by launching its own website in the space.

• Mail Online publisher A&N Media last week sold the sector’s number-two player, Motors.co.uk, to Manheim Remarketing, which owns the U.S. Autotrader.com, which is unrelated to AutoTrader of the UK, for an undisclosed sum.

• AutoTrader UK owner Trader Media Group (TMG) is jointly owned by Guardian Media Group and Apax, which each this week said they were splitting their jointly-owned Emap media group in to three. GMG hopes to sell both TMG and Emap for a windfall in the future.

Trader Media Group is a case study in digital transition, having successfully moved its traditional printed Autotrader classifieds newspaper to be a search-centric digital listings business. 2010/11 profit hit £34.7 million on seven percent higher revenue.

News International wants a piece of that pie. It is recruiting for a product and content head with a “start-up mentality” to build a “premier car digital destination”.

To start this business and take share from AutoTrader, News International will need to build relationships with car dealerships as well as individual private buyers and sellers.

That won’t be easy. With 10.8 million monthly uniques at last disclosure in March 2011, AutoTrader claimed to be 16 times more popular than its nearest rival. It hosts over 6,000 dealer websites.

But News International may get to draw on its Times and Sun newspapers’ strong brands in car content; the former takes car reviews from Top Gear co-presenter Jeremy Clarkson.

Via MotorTrader.com.

Disclosure: Guardian News & Media Ltd. is an investor in our parent company, Giga Omni Media.

But, though Murdoch will no longer influence the operation, the issue of personnel may now be a side show to a more pertinent question: is anyone in control of the destinies of The Sun and The Times anyway?

Many will say any move which gives News Corp COO and president Chase Carey more direct auspice over News International suggests a possible winding down of the seeds Rupert sowed. Carey is a TV and movie advocate within the group, and Bloomberg quotes him as saying “there certainly is an awareness” News Corp.’s shares would trade higher without newspapers.

But no-one out there would buy News International assets until its toxic phone hacking and media ethics stink has passed. All that has more time to run and shows every sign of getting worse and worse, now perhaps unstoppably bad.

Rupert Murdoch’s arrival in London to launch Sun On Sunday may have filled the commercial gap left by News Of The World‘s absence, and the launch itself may have proved useful as a position statement on what News Corp says is a reformed News Group Newspapers; a scorched earth tactic.

But, thanks to the Metropolitan Police chief’s revelation last week that The Sun ran a network of corrupt police officers, it is now that very paper which is about to be dragged through the mud backward. Can a Sun which News International says is now clean and new survive prosecutions for practices that are dirty and old? Rupert may yet rue throwing his weight behind the title, one last roll of the dice, ahead of these investigations. This summer, who would bet against The Sun setting like it did on its deceased Sunday stablemate?

After The Sun, what’s left? The Times is a respected newspaper with a strong heritage, but is supported by Sun profits and cannot survive without adjacent supporting revenue or without getting ship-shape toward breakeven by itself. This may have been the logic behind charging for Times digital products. Only the likes of Russian or Middle Eastern oligarchs nowadays snap up loss-making newspapers as trophies.

What is left in consumer news publishing anymore for anyone anyway? That may be Carey’s mindset. With the old print business now fast drying up, it is no longer a great business to be in.

The Times‘ digital strategy, which has been executed well and produced quality products for a small, wealthy audience, appears defensive more than expansive for the wide-open web.

Online, The Sun makes plenty of money from its Sun Bingo gaming site, but, in content, it’s hard to draw a logical line by which its millions of daily print readers migrate to its digital manifestations.

While The Times‘ digital strategy is now mostly supported by iPad, whose owners are still self-selectingly attractive demographic for high-end advertisers, it may be some time before they filter out in to the mass market in a way that can support a Sun migration.

Former Scottish Sun editor Jack Irvine told Sky News: “it seems pretty clear to me that Rupert is now back in charge in Britain. Rupert is still in love with newsprint.”

Another former News Corp footsolder agrees News International is safe. “I’m sure the newspapers will survive,” ex BSkyB (NYSE: BSY) programmes head David Elstein told Sky News on Wednesday, adding that James Murdoch should also leave BSkyB’s board to distance the satcaster from the scandals.

“I’m confident that, at the end of this process, the newspapers will be fine, but there is a long process to be gone through.”

The announcement (below) comes from News Corp’s New York HQ (from where he will now work) and not News International’s in London, says Murdoch has “relinquished” his position, and leaves leadership of the unit to News International CEO Tom Mockridge, who, unlike Murdoch, was not in place during the scandal.

Murdoch remains News Corp group deputy COO. His father Rupert says James will now focus only on News Corp’s international pay-TV businesses, which he previously led before climbing the News Corp ranks. In fact, News Corp confirms to paidContent he retains his role as “CEO” of News Corp’s international business – a title the announcement does not refer to.

In essence, Murdoch is being distanced from News Corp’s most toxic asset. Through evidence to the UK parliament’s media select committee in to whether it was misled on phone hacking, as well as evidence heard at Lord Leveson’s public inquiry, he has looked increasingly vulnerable…

He had repeatedly told the committee his footsoldiers had not made him aware of the extent of phone hacking, before later recalling that he had indeed received a weekend email about it which he did not fully act upon. Last week, court documents revealed that News International deleted emails to cover up the scandal, emails which were later discovered.

The scandal has also now spread from just News Of The World to News International’s main Sun title, which London’s Metropolitan Police chief last week said ran a network of corrupt police officers.

The select committee is due to report before parliament’s easter recess (March 27 to April 26), committee member Therese Coffey told Sky News: “This wasn’t unexpected, the timing was a surprise. If James Murdoch had taken this a bit more seriously, he wouldn’t be having to make this move now.”

Committee chair John Whittingdale told Sky News: “He was running the company at the time when a lot of these payments (to phone hacking victims) were being made. If News Corp wanted to start afresh, his presence was always going to be a problem for them.”

If News Corp ever wants to return to its proposed, postponed buy-out of BSkyB, it may need to pass the regulator Ofcom’s “fit and proper persons” test. James Murdoch’s ongoing place atop News Corp’s international TV business means that test could still be applied to him.

Announcement follows…

JAMES MURDOCH STEPS *DOWN* AS EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN, NEWS INTERNATIONAL TO FOCUS ON EXPANDING INTERNATIONAL TV BUSINESSES
______________________
New York, NY February 29, 2012 – News Corporation today announced that, following his relocation to the Company’s headquarters in New York, James Murdoch, Deputy Chief Operating Officer, has relinquished his position as Executive Chairman of News International, its UK publishing unit. Tom Mockridge, Chief Executive Officer of News International, will continue in his post and will report to News Corporation President and COO Chase Carey.

“We are all grateful for James’ leadership at News International and across Europe and Asia, where he has made lasting contributions to the group’s strategy in paid digital content and its efforts to improve and enhance governance programs,” said Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, News Corporation (NSDQ: NWS). “He has demonstrated leadership and continues to create great value at Star TV, Sky Deutschland, Sky Italia, and BSkyB (NYSE: BSY). Now that he has moved to New York, James will continue to assume a variety of essential corporate leadership mandates, with particular focus on important pay-TV businesses and broader international operations.”

“I deeply appreciate the dedication of my many talented colleagues at News International who work tirelessly to inform the public and am confident about the tremendous momentum we have achieved under the leadership of my father and Tom Mockridge,” said James Murdoch. “With the successful launch of The Sun on Sunday and new business practices in place across all titles, News International is now in a strong position to build on its successes in the future. As Deputy Chief Operating Officer, I look forward to expanding my commitment to News Corporation’s international television businesses and other key initiatives across the Company.”

From March 1, The Times and Sunday Times’ Digital Pack (for web, mobile and tablet) will hike from £2 a week (billed as £8.88 per month) to £4 per week. The web-only fee of £2 per week will remain unchanged.

A Times spokesperson tells paidContent: “We’re not ‘doubling’ our price. We’re introducing a new pack that includes all digital products. Previously, we were offering iPad access as complementary offer.” The difference may effectively be semantic.

Existing digital subscribers, of whom there are 119,255 for the Times, will stay on the previous rate until 2013. After that time, if the current subscriber count held steady, we could speculate that the rate increase would double the publisher’s theoretical maximum monthly digital income to £1.9 million, before stripping out commission to distributors like Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), a few corporate licenses etc. Doubtless, The Times would also like to add new subscribers by that time.

Some would be forgiven for thinking higher fees may make new customer acquisition more difficult. But the average salary of the (Times’) iPad reader is £109,000 and over 15 percent of the its daily iPad audience earns over £200,000 a year, the publisher told paidContent last month. That’s ample room to bump the price.

Times editorial director Tom Whitwell ttells paidContent: “The iPad edition is a super-premium product with huge take-up. Pricing now reflects that.”

Why would Times Newspapers, which pioneered paid consumer news content’s second wave when it introduced the fees to much scepticism in summer 2010, do this now? Here is some speculation…

• The publisher considers 119,255 a success and reckons it can confidently ratchet up prices without impacting the adoption future adoption base.
• Because it can. It seems like The Times can milk its wealthy iPad base for more.
• It’s decided adoption may be have a ceiling at around the current rate and wants to wring more money from existing subscribers, albeit after 2013.
• The publisher wants to reclaim some of the 30 percent Apple is taking for those new iPad subscriptions.
• Times Newspapers losses remain heavy and News International wants to get Times Newspapers ship-shape with bankable extra income ahead of a divestment amid News International’s turmoil.

The Times 2010 fees introduction polarised many in the industry, with some more recent fee adopters like The New York Times (NYSE: NYT) opting for a softer, metered model. Now News Corp.’s (NSDQ: NWS) The Times is preparing to give some free stories to friends of customers who share article links in social media, the publisher revealed to paidContent in January.

Latest figures issued by News International show The Times and Sunday Times websites, apps and digital editions gathered a total 6,147 new customers in January…

But, despite the customer additions, total cross-format paid sales for each title are lower than a year ago…

News International combines print and new digital paid copies to show that total paid sales are holding up. When combined, Times sales look healthier than they would be if observers considered only print circulation, which is falling despite a seasonal fillip at The Sunday Times.

The Times‘ web traffic has fallen from 20 million monthly uniques, but consider that, in the paid environment, a whole fifth of The Times‘ sales are now digital. What’s more, those customers are long-term subscribers.

Typically, iPad has played a big part in generating the Times’ digital custom. The daily title saw an average 59,882 copies downloaded daily in January, while the Sunday stablemate clocked 63,959.

Figures show The Sun lost 15 percent of its circulation (470,979) through the last 12 months…

But don’t go thinking negative perception radiating from its Sunday stablemate was to blame. Last year’s sales pattern merely followed that which has flowed for the last decade…

That is, The Sun’s circulation dips in winter before recovering in January. Rinse, repeat.

It never recovers enough to make up for a creeping and long-term decline. The Sun’s circulation has been falling for all the last 10 years – it is now almost a quarter down on this time a decade ago.

But this is about the same rate of decline shared by the industry as a whole, and has more to do with wider consumer factors like new technology choices than with phone hacking.

The point is, the Sun so far has been unhurt by the whirlwind surrounding it. But, now that the arrests of several senior journalists have dragged its own practices in to question, let’s watch to see if that changes.

The Sun, despite its circulation decline, remains profitable. After all, when proprietors cut costs, they can keep profit. Indeed, it supports its stablemates The Times and Sunday Times.

The matter apparently concerns former Times media reporter Patrick Foster, who allegedly unmasked an anonymous police blogger by guessing his way in to his target’s Hotmail account, reports say (Guardian, PA).

The disclosure of the identity of the blogger, detective Richard Horton, led to Horton being disciplined by his employer, Lancashire Police. But The Times also gave its reporter a written warning for professional misconduct, editor Jeremy Harding said at the Leveson public inquiry last month.

At this stage, the email hacking incident appears to have been isolated, unlike phone hacking at News Of The World, which has been described as of “industrial scale.

Foster was “dismissed following an unrelated incident” in 2011, News International CEO Tom Mockbridge previously told Leveson.

Foster is now a freelance reporter. Ironically, since he left The Times, he has freelanced 31 pieces for the media section of the Guardian, which has led the way in covering the phone-hacking scandal. His pieces including at least one piece about the scandal itself.

Disclosure: Our publisher, ContentNext Media, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Guardian News & Media.

“As (Spotify) got bigger, the annoying adverts started to creep in and, with them, the gnawing sense that it was unfair to get so much use out of a service without paying. So a year ago, I went premium…

“But last week I reverted back …

“For me, Spotify is a victim of the conundrum that almost all internet industries have yet to resolve – when you can get something so good for free, why pay?”

That is ironic because it is the same argument some onlookers use to suggest The Times’ own payment strategy “won’t work” (you’ll need to be a subscriber to read Ford’s piece).

Let’s compare…

Spotify’s raison d’être is making the listening experience so appealing and easy that people will want to pay for it rather than download illegally or elsewhere for free.

It’s having some success within that. Having racked up three million paying subscribers from an apparent 15 million active users for a conversion rate of 20 percent, it has built the world’s largest music subscription business.

That is at a price slightly more than The Times’ own monthly news package, which does not come with a free trial in the same way Spotify does.

By contrast, The Times website has slipped from around 20 million unique monthly users to 115,000 paying online subscribers – a 0.57 percent conversion.

This, however, is not a like-for-like comparison. Only a minority of The Times’ total, pre-paywall monthly uniques could ever have been considered “active” (ie. core, regular) readers, in the same way Spotify describes them. Current online subscribers as a percentage of this figure are likely far higher.

By the same token, were Spotify to express its subscriber count as a percentage of total users, it would shrink drastically. That is especially so since, lately, its first-time, free user base has been inflated by its Facebook promotion.

“For us, this is a huge catalyst for change actually,” Nick Bell, who joined his first corporate gig in October after a career as a young digital entrepreneur and investor, told paidContent.

“Tom Mockridge joined as CEO. When any new CEO joins an organisation, there’s going to be change. From a digital perspective, we like to think we saw it as an opportunity to drive forward some of the change.

“It’s probably had the opposite effect of slowing us down – it’s probably focused us more on how we innovate. It’s focused our minds on how we make sure the customers who are paying for our products are getting value for money, making sure we look after our customers. The focus on our customers has increased.”

Now 28, Bell was a teenage dot.com star. In 1999, he founded an early content site, Teenfront.com and attracted around 500,000 unique monthly users before selling it to Rools for reportedly close to £1 million, aged 16.

He later formed a business establishing sunbed and tanning studios inside Tesco stores, founded and later sold his stake in a business providing video screens to the luxury yacht market and started Quick.tv, an online video company that raised seed funding and which is now working on web video ad tech. Bell remains interested in startup investing.

Bell, along with leavers from Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) and Google (NSDQ: GOOG), was hired by News International chief information officer Paul Cheesbrough to inject some of this spirit in to the publisher. Now he says using data to understand customers and constant product iteration are his guiding principles.

“When I joined the organisation, it was traditional IT-oriented,” Bell told me. “It would be a slow process, three to six months, to do a piece of work. Then that team would get disbanded to go and do something else. We’ve moved toward a product stream where we have key products and a team that constantly iterates. It’s about listening to the customer.”

One example, whose original debut pre-dates Bell, is The Times’ iPad edition, which launched fast, alongside the tablet, in the UK and which took a small dose of customer criticism for bugs, which were ironed out in routine updates. By contrast, The Guardian recently launched its first iPad edition around a year and a half after the gadget went on sale.

“We recently introduced an R&D lab,” Bell says. “In a slightly Google-esque manner, every member of our technology team now will spend one twelfth of their time cycling through the innovation lab. It creates a space where they think about problems differently.

“Some of the products coming out of there are very interesting. We’ve been through our first couple of cycles there. We’ve learned something from every product created in the lab – some of those will start to be baked back in to our core apps.”

This kind of “hacking” (of code) is a refreshing alternative to the one which has engulfed News International over the last year.

“Of my team of peers, five or six of us invest in businesses as well,” he says. But News International, which previously invested in digital property classifieds startups, has now sold on those assets, and Bell appears keener that the publisher partner with startups than take equity in them.

Bell cites “working with smaller, agile more companies” like Livefyre, a story comments platform operator which News International took an early bet on enlisting. “Being prepared to work with small startups of best-of-breed is key.”