JP Morgan Fires New Bear Stearns Hires

JP Morgan (JPM) is rescinding half of the job offers Bear Stearns (BSC) made to MBAs and other new hires, DealBook says .

Fired new hires will get to keep their signing bonuses and relocation grants of $50,000-$60,000 apiece, which means they'll make more for not working a day than most junior folks in other industries make in a year. (Of course, relative to their friends, they'll be impoverished). They'll also be provided with career services.

Microsoft and Yahoo Meet Again: No Deal

Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO) execs had their second meeting, the WSJ says , and made no progress. Yahoo is insisting that Microsoft raise its bid before the companies enter formal negotiations, Microsoft is refusing to budge:

The meeting, which took place near Yahoo headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif., was the second between top executives from the two companies in recent weeks. Neither meeting included bankers.

The Microsoft executives showed no willingness to raise their cash-and-stock offer, and the Yahoo camp continued to refuse to enter formal negotiations without a sweetened bid, people familiar with the matter say.

Both positions are understandable, but time is working against both companies. One imagines that this standoff could quickly be ended by the companies' $300 million investment bankers: A quick phone call and a verbal agreement that, if Yahoo comes to the table , Microsoft will likely raise its bid at the 11th hour (as we still expect it will) should suffice.

Meanwhile... Yahoo, when are you going to schedule that shareholder meeting ?

See Also:
Microsoft: No Plans To Raise Yahoo Bid (Yet)
Microsoft-Yahoo Takeover Glitch: Can't Find Dissident Board Members

News Corp. Blows MySpace Targets, Dumps Sales Chief (NWS)

News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media group, which includes MySpace and other web sites, will miss the company's goals of $1 billion in revenue and $200 million in operating profit. FIM chief revenue officer Michael Barrett will leave and the company will reorg its sales team.

We first heard last September that FIM's sales staff was struggling to meet the goals Rupert Murdoch had laid out for the unit last August; FIM missed its goals for July and August 2007 . But since then Murdoch and other News Corp. (NWS) execs haved been adamant that the company would hit its numbers, and Murdoch reiterated the promise in February during the company's quarterly earnings call. He said FIM's Q2 performance " adds confidence to our $1 billion revenue, and 20% profit target for the [fiscal[ year ," which ends June 30.

We're told that Barrett was offered another job at FIM, which he declined; he's supposed to stay on temporarily during the reorg. FIM tech EVP Adam Bain will run the company's ad network (see memo below); TechCrunch reports that MySpace marketing head Jeff Berman will now head sales, which syncs with what we hear.

Most important: What does FIM's revenue miss mean? Were the goals too ambitious to begin with? Is there a specific problem at MySpace or a different FIM web property? Or is it reflective of larger problems across the advertising business? We don't know, though we expect it's a combination of all three factors.

Earlier this year we were told that FIM was specifically struggling with goals for its non-premium inventory, both with mortgage/financial services ads and with remnant/ad network sales in general. If so, this means that's News Corp.'s ad problems could be everyone else's as well.

Internal memo from FIM head Peter Levinsohn follows:

All,

Since its inception nearly three years ago, FIM and its properties have
experienced phenomenal growth and success as a result of your collective
efforts. You have worked diligently to create the largest, most
innovative content communities in the world, and, as a company, we are
now prepared to take the next step in our evolution.

That next step involves two things: 1) leveraging our industry-leading
advertising technologies to create an entirely new business for the
company and 2) more closely aligning our products and revenue. We will
achieve this alignment through a restructure of our sales and
advertising groups that will begin to take effect in the coming weeks.

FIM Audience Network
First, we have created a new business unit called the FIM Audience
Network. Despite the press in our industry about the challenges of
monetizing social media, we have built amazing Hyper Targeting and
Optimization technologies that dramatically improve our ability to
provide better advertising solutions to our clients. Given these
strengths, Adam Bain - who has been so instrumental in developing this
capability - has been promoted to President of the new unit.

Adam's team will be comprised of FIM's ad technology, ad operations and
performance sales groups. Their charter will be to optimize monetization

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