The Short Names

Updated In the latest round of will he-won’t he, Rupert Murdoch told his own Fox Business Network not to expect a Kindle-like device from News Corp (NYSE: NWS). Speaking in Sun Valley, where he is participating in the Allen & Co. conference, Murdoch said: “I don’t think that’s likely. We’re looking and talking to a lot of laboratories and big companies around the world, like Sony (NYSE: SNE) and Samsung. We’re all working on wireless readers for books or newspapers or for magazines.  I think they’re a year or two away being marketed in a mass way, high quality ones, and we’ll be absolutely neutral. We’re happy to have our products distributed over any device provided it’s only going to subscribers paying for it.” The video is embedded below.

News Corp. has a mixed track record on selling device subscriptions so far. The Wall Street Journal and Times of London offer Kindle subscriptions, but Murdoch has been quite open about his dislike of the way Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) maintains control of the customer relationships. At the same time, WSJ.com’s iPhone and BlackBerry apps debuted free—albeit with warnings that paying up would be required down the line. We reported last week that Dow Jones is surveying WSJ.com iPhone app uses about willingness to pay and how it might affect or fit in with other subscriptions. No price points were offered and we were told that the timing for a change had not been set.

Murdoch continues to brag about WSJ.com’s subscription base (something well in place before News Corp. acquired parent Dow Jones), adding this time “that no one else has had the nerve to do that yet.” (Actually, lots of companies have tried, some more successfully than others; the WSJ is the largest that has succeeded consistently.) But Murdoch hints that more is coming: “We have a lot of plans I’m not ready to disclose yet, to really lead the newspaper industry into monetizing what it has. It’s true what people say, the distribution of news, it gets cheaper every day because of new technology. And one day you won’t need printing presses or paper. But you’ve still got to have something to move, and that—i.e. content, the news itself. And that can’t come free.”

—UK reports: Murdoch brushed off Stuart Varney’s interview-leading question about a report in The Guardian that News International’s News of The World paid out more than $1 million to keep details of alleged phone hacking confidential. (The paper’s parent Guardian News & Media also owns our parent company ContentNext Media.) “I’m not talking about that issue at all today. I’m sorry,” he told Varney, who quickly backed off.

—Sun Valley economics: “I’m shocked at the business mood, which is talking about either that we’re at the bottom of the recession or we’re going lower, but that it’s going to take years and years, like five years at least, before we see any real growth coming out of this … I would say the conference is definitely very bearish.”