The new board is heavy on entertainment industry veterans and includes former Yahoo and News Corp. exec Ross Levinsohn, former News Corp exec Peter Liguori, former Walt Disney exec Peter Murphy and entertainment attorney Craig A. Jacobson, along with Tribune Co. CEO and Los Angeles Times publisher Eddy Hartenstein and Bruce Karsh and Kenneth Liang of Oaktree Capital Management, which owns 23 percent of the new company. The Chicago Tribune notes that Liguori is expected to be named CEO in coming weeks, replacing Hartenstein.

According to the Chicago Tribune:

“Before cash distributions and new financing, a 2012 analysis by financial adviser Lazard valued the broadcasting assets, including the TV stations, WGN-AM 720, CLTV and national cable channel WGN America, at $2.85 billion. Other strategic assets, such as online job site CareerBuilder and cable channel Food Network, are worth $2.26 billion.

Tribune Co.’s newspaper holdings, including the Tribune, Los Angeles Times and six other daily publications, have withered to $623 million in total value, according to Lazard.”

News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, Warren Buffett and Aaron Kushner have expressed interest in buying Tribune Co. papers.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock / Steve Broer

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“We’re all family travelers ourselves,” said MiniTime CEO John Smelzer in an interview. “Most travel sites have a generic family filter, but most sites don’t take into account the ages of your kids. You get activities and things that are not appropriate for your kids. You can get literally hundreds of reviews from families not like yours, or any manner of comment on hotels or activities.”

The MiniTime founders have interesting tech backgrounds. Co-founders Nimrod Lev and Oleg Sandler ALSO founded kSolo, which was acquired by Fox Interactive Media, and Lev sold Jcupid.com to Spark Networks, the owner of JDate. Smelzer also co-founded 5to1, an ad network acquired by Yahoo in 2011.

MiniTime, which has been in private beta for several months and has acquired “a couple thousand users,” according to Smelzer, allows parents and potential travelers to search options like hotels and attractions specific to kid ages within a variety of popular vacation spots, from Disneyland to Niagara Falls to San Francisco. But Smelzer said they’re not just aiming to be a Kayak for family travel. 

“I think we could really go broad in a family lifestyle brand,” Smelzer said. The company has raised $1 million in seed financing so far from investors including Levinsohn.

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Levinsohn is leaving with some lucrative parting gifts under a separation agreement filed with the SEC after the market closed Monday, two weeks after Mayer’s signing as CEO was announced. His official last day at Yahoo is July 31. The two-part package includes a July 26th equity award of 67,000 restricted stock units — worth more than $1 million at Monday’s close –and 250,000 stock options (priced at last Friday’s close — $15.80 per share); the “termination without cause” award accelerates vesting of that award and any other equity or options that would have vested in the next 12 months. He also gets a cash severance equal to his 2012 salary, his full 2012 target bonus, a portion of his 2013 target bonus and health care payments for a year. The agreement includes a mutual five-year non-disparagement clause.

Levinsohn is credited with recharging Yahoo’s media business and upgrading the view from Madison Avenue. He stepped in as interim CEO in May when Scott Thompson was ousted for claiming a degree he didn’t have, and undid the damage Thompson wreaked when he sued Facebook over patents, instead settling the patent issue and forging a broader content deal with the social network. His departure was reported first by Kara Swisher.

Here’s what he had to say in a brief farewell note:

“It has been an incredible journey for me and I could not be prouder of what we accomplished over the past few years helping define Yahoo as a leader in digital media and advertising. Yahoo is an amazing brand and company, and I leave knowing we did all we could to help inform and entertain more than 700 million users each month. Leading this company has been one of the best experiences of my career, but it is time for me to look for the next challenge.”

Levinsohn was passed over in favor of PayPal exec Thompson to replace Carol Bartz, the CEO who hired him in late 2012 to revamp Yahoo’s media presence. He was thought to have the best shot at CEO this time around, especially after the Yahoo board allowed him to undo much of Thompson’s reorganization — and to hire Michael Barrett as chief revenue office and others while promoting some high-level execs. I’ve heard some criticism of Levinsohn for hiring too many former colleagues from his time at Fox Interactive Media, among them Barrett, Mickie Rosen, his media lieutenant who moved to lead while he was interim CEO, and Jim Heckman, svp of strategy and emerging businesses. But there’s also concern over a drain of talent and knowledge when it comes to media and advertising. Levinsohn and Rosen forged a number of high-profile deals, including original programming with Tom Hanks and others, an expanded relationship with ABC News and a financial news pact with CNBC. The future of that strategy is unclear.

On the advertising side, personnel changes could undo the progress that was starting to show up in display advertising. Levinsohn’s team spearheaded a ad sales alliance with Microsoft and AOL that is still in the early stages; that could wind up derailed.

What’s next for Levinsohn? Even though he was passed over again, it helps that it was for Mayer — not for someone in his own area. His stint as interim CEO gave people a chance to see him deal with some high-profile problems; he led the shareholders’ Q&A at the annual meeting. In the end, his vision of a media-tech company didn’t match the board’s — and, while hiring him would have been a perfectly fine choice, hiring Mayer brought a star to Yahoo and a PR statement he couldn’t match.

Levinsohn is sure to be on the shortlist of nearly every major media job. One rumor cropping up: Levinsohn to fill the CEO gap at the New York Times Co. He was on the board of Freedom Communications, fits the digital bill NYTCo Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. has stressed (although he’s no Eric Schmidt) and knows media. Do I see it happening? It would be a shocker — but it’s an example of what we’re going to hear until Levinsohn shows up at his next stop.

Another possibility — although I’m not sure why he would want it — running Hulu after Jason Kilar makes his exit. The Santa Monica video portal is close to home, he helped conceive the idea that became Hulu and he was behind the notion of Yahoo as a possible buyer when it was for sale last year.

In the meantime, he’s leaving with more than enough money to take a break and think it through.

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Some people aren’t thrilled, particularly those who see Yahoo as a media-tech company and/or are supporters of interim CEO Ross Levinsohn. But the overwhelming first response is a mix of surprise that a Yahoo board could make such a bold choice and that Mayer could be wooed way from her longtime home at Google for something as uncool as a portal.

While attention was being directed through a series of leaks around other candidates, including Hulu CEO Jason Kilar — and the discussion was being framed rightly as a choice between product and media — Yahoo was already deep in talks with Mayer. In the end, it was kept so far under wraps that I don’t think even Levinsohn knew she was his chief competition until shortly before the news broke.

The other day I suggested that about the only hire Yahoo could make at this point instead of Levinsohn for CEO and get away with it would be Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. I forgot to look under the Gs, as in Google, where Mayer, employee #20 and the company’s first woman engineer, was a veteran exec with rock-star status and a fair amount of power but no visible path up. When Larry Page put his imprint on Google as CEO, Mayer wound up a layer down as the head of local, maps and location services, although she was on the operating committee.

Sandberg, too, left Google, where she was VP of global online sales and operations, applying her operating skills to help Facebook grow up and carving out a role as a corporate leader. Already a Disney board member, she was just elected to the Facebook board. As CEO, Mayer will be on the Yahoo board from the beginning.

I also underestimated how very much this board wanted to make its own statement about Yahoo and its future. Promoting someone hired by former CEO Carol Bartz wouldn’t cut it — although that probably could have been overcome if the board was convinced that Yahoo was a media tech company and not a product company.

But the board went for product with a capital P. What about media? In this view of Yahoo, it’s important but not the heart of the company. “Most of the company is search and mail and the home page,” one person familiar with the board’s thinking told me. Mayer, the person said, “built” mail, search and maps at Google. (Her work in mobile products wasn’t mentioned but it should be a big plus.) More important, she “created” engineers who are now throughout the Valley.

The thinking: having the best technology equals win — and it’s a lot harder to bring in people on the product side than it is to hire for media. It’s particularly difficult when a company has gained a rep for wrecking products or failing to deliver on ideas or overcrowding to the point that nothing comes through the clutter. Yahoo hopes hiring Mayer will start the engineer hiring equivalent of “follow the leader” — which, in turn, would help Yahoo.

“It’s going to be a totally new day,” the source mentioned above told me. And a new road map, as I suspected after the annual meeting. The board let Levinsohn go out and pitch his version of the company, a vision where content and technology were equally important but in different ways. “We have really put our energy against being this tech-powered media company;” he told dissatisfied shareholders. “If you want to be in the tech and media business you need to be in both very aggressively.” That includes products like Yahoo Genome, the big data tool for advertisers that rolled out earlier this month.

In the end, it wasn’t about CEO experience, which some suggested might keep Levinsohn from getting the job. Mayer has managed large areas at Google but she hasn’t been a CEO and Google is the only company where she’s worked. (Mayer is a new member of the Wal-Mart board.) Levinsohn got credit for his performance as interim CEO and I don’t get the sense there were qualms about him personally in that role.

It came down to a sense that Yahoo needed a product person. Mayer has deep product management experience and longevity at a Yahoo competitor. She has a high profile but also an intense work ethic and knows how to deliver. That’s mighty tempting for a company that often has failed to execute.

But it also means a new learning curve. Unlike Levinsohn, who started a Yahoo immersion course when he joined in late 2010, Mayer faces the same kind of corporate learning curve as Scott Thompson, who succeeded Carol Bartz as CEO after a four-month search. Thompson spent a couple of months learning the company, than started major layoffs and a reorganization. His ouster for claiming a computer science degree he didn’t have set off the two-month search for Mayer.

As for Levinsohn himself, I’m told they would like him to stay. Whether that can work is a little hard to see. What it bodes for media is unclear — or for Michael Barrett, the just-hired chief revenue officer or any of the other people who were hired or took on new roles while Levinsohn was in charge.

What is clear is a company that has been through the wringer, and then some, is facing more change. And it will take place in an even more glaring spotlight as the Mayer era at Yahoo begins.

Sidenote: I’ve seen some people react with surprise to Yahoo hiring a woman for CEO. Hello? It’s not like this is Google, Facebook, Microsoft or Apple. Yahoo’s already had a woman CEO and before that Sue Decker was president. But it does put her on two very short lists of women CEOs: tech and public. She’s also under 40, 37 to be precise.

Update: Add one more list: expectant CEOS. Mayer and her husband Zachary Bogue are expecting a boy on Oct. 7, Fortune reported late Monday. She didn’t mention it when she was first contacted June 18 by the search firm but told Michael Wolf, a member of the search committee, about the pregnancy when they met in person in late June. She met with the entire board last Wednesday and, Mayer told Fortune, none showed any concern about hiring a pregnant CEO. Mayer went public with the personal news through the exclusive to Fortune and by tweeting a link to it. (Someone suggested my initial description of this sounded like Mayer had done something wrong by not mentioning her pregnancy to the search firm. Not at all. I thought the way she approached it was more of a sign of her interest in the job as matters progressed.)

Mayer was offered the job by phone the day of the annual meeting. She told Fortune‘s Patricia Sellers that she wasn’t commenting on her discussions with Levinsohn, who she calls a “phenomenal executive.”

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That’s why the annual shareholders meeting Thursday sounded a tad off key. (Sounded because the company that brags about its video views only webcast the audio for the Santa Clara, Calif., event.) Listening to interim CEO Ross Levinsohn talk about a road map he may not be there to chart or navigate rang a little hollow. Not his fault — Levinsohn is at heart a salesman who knows when to pitch and how to gauge answers.

But knowing that the 11 board members elected for a full term at the meeting have yet to agree on a CEO — and that the entire process might wind up as nothing more than an elaborate exercise — makes it hard to take as a real sign of where Yahoo is headed.

Ten of the board members were on hand for the meeting led by Chairman Fred Amoroso, who stressed the differences between this version and the last one: All of the board members are independent and eight of the 11 joined in the last five months. (Weather Channel CEO David Kenny, one of the holdovers between the two boards, couldn’t make it.)

Amoroso referred only obliquely to the pressures that got some of them there, saying that there wasn’t anyone on the board he didn’t want to work with. That was an implicit reference to activist investor Dan Loeb, head of Third Point, who acquired enough stock, uncovered CEO Scott Thompson’s claim of a degree he didn’t have in computer science, and made enough noise (and sense) to force a showdown with the board. The settlement resulted in Thompson’s ouster, Levinsohn’s interim appointment and put Loeb on along with Harry Wilson and Michael Wolf. His fourth candidate, former NBCU CEO Jeff Zucker, withdrew as part of the agreement.

The annual shareholders’ meeting came two months after that deal was struck and a formal search began for yet another CEO. To be fair, as far as I know the board never promised publicly to end the search by a certain date. That pressure is coming from other sources (including folks like me, to be sure), but mostly from those inside and out who think the best shot lies with the candidate who’s already doing the job.

Actions gave credence to Levinsohn as frontrunner, including the way he has been allowed to make senior hires like Chief Revenue Officer Michael Barrett and unwind Thompson’s reorg, as well as the approval of complicated deals like the agreement that ended the Facebook patent dispute started by Thompson with board approval or the resolution of long-standing differences over Alibaba. (Amoroso, the former CEO of Rovi, was seen as one of the backers of that aggressive patent strategy.) The person some perceived as his top competition, Jason Kilar, “graciously” declined to be considered last Friday, seeming to set the stage for an announcement. As one source told AllThingsD:

We’re going to make sure that we have looked at every strong candidate possible. … This is a CEO selection the board cannot afford to be wrong on.

Levinsohn gave the management presentation during the hour-long meeting, describing a road map for now based on content, technology and realizing value from Alibaba. He also took questions from some shareholders. One of the first: “What role Yahoo has in the future? Where are we going to focus?” Levinsohn replied:

“We have really put our energy against being this tech-powered media company. If you want to be in the tech and media business you need to be in both very aggressively.”

That means leveraging the scale of 700 million monthly unique users with “compelling experiences for viewer.” He added later, “We also need to market and program our sites better than we have in the past.”

He spoke of balancing algorithms with human editors on the Yahoo.com front page. “We blend technology and human touch. That’s a unique proposition for somebody the size of Yahoo.” It’s also, he said, an amazing white space for Yahoo to own as a massive distributor, a creator and curator of content, and a creator of technology.” No stats yet on recently launched ad-data project Genome.

And after bragging that because of the ABC News deal and other moves, more than half of news videos watched in May were from Yahoo, he heard from a shareholder who raved about Yahoo Sports and Levinsohn’s own background in sports, but complained that the Yahoo video experience was so bad, he looks for the same videos on YouTube. I’m not sure what his technical issues were but one very non-technical message came through loud and clear: “Your problem is simple. One word: Execute.”

Levinsohn picked up on the theme later when he acknowledged the need to deliver on the products and initiatives being mentioned, “If we don’t execute, none of it matters. … My leadership team that’s currently in place will focus on that every day.”

And that’s the rub. As job auditions go, it went well. Whether any of it turns out to be meaningful in the long run, is up to the board. It’s not often that an exec ends a meeting with the usual “we look forward to seeing you all again next year” and you wonder whether he’ll be there.

Analyst weighs in

The lack of clarity about the CEO job runs the risk of blurring what has been accomplished and putting off a real plan even longer. S&P analyst Scott Kessler’s brief client note on the meeting included this:

We think Levinsohn is a very strong candidate for the position and that YHOO would benefit from his appointment sooner rather than later.

He repeated his strong buy opinion for the stock and didn’t say whether it would be affected by a prolonged delay in this CEO search.

The CEO search isn’t the only aspect being watched closely by analysts. Yahoo reports second quarter earnings Tuesday. Those results will matter a lot more than anything that happened at the annual meeting. And in that case, the “interim” may help Levinsohn remind people the Q2 numbers reflect Thompson’s Yahoo more than his. If he gets the job, though, from here out it’s all his.

Speaking of execution

One issue that didn’t come up during the questions: how did Yahoo let a file with 400,000 user passwords get stolen?

The file dates back a couple of years to the acquisition of Associated Content, now known as the Yahoo Contributor Network, and includes other companies’ logins as well. You could read plenty about it while the meeting was going on and after but anyone looking for info on Yahoo’s corporate blog or in its press releases was out of luck. Yahoo said fewer than 5 percent of the stolen Yahoo passwords were valid.

Credit: Levinsohn photo courtesy of Yahoo Advertising

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It would seem to be simple enough, which is why many people expected that news Wednesday and why Yahoo might start running into problems if it isn’t announced today, preferably before the board meeting. Holding off any longer, if it is Levinsohn, makes little sense unless someone hopes a later announcement will overshadow earnings. That would be a mistake.

The two-month search for the third CEO in a year — typing that really drives it home — even took over the headlines of a big win for Yahoo when the Facebook patent agreement should have been the only company news getting attention.

Instead, the overarching story was who else might be in the running for CEO and, just as the Facebook settlement was coming out, Hulu said its CEO Jason Kilar, considered by some to be a leading candidate for the Yahoo post, “graciously” took himself out of the running. Levinsohn’s work with Facebook to repair the relationship damaged by ex-CEO Scott Thompson’s lawsuit over patents (supported by some still on the board) and the details of the deal got attention but much of it was still in the context of whether it would help him get the job.

Dayenu (a Hebrew word that means “enough already”). Levinsohn won’t make all the right moves — no CEO does– but he has deep inside and industry knowledge plus the backing of enough people inside and out to start from a better foundation than most Yahoo CEOs of the modern era have had. Dragging it out even this long risks undermining that.

Pivotal Research Group’s Brian Wieser put it like this in a client note Wednesday:

“BOTTOM LINE. We believe the Yahoo Board of Directors will soon announce that Ross Levinsohn will formally become its new permanent CEO. We would view such news favorably, as it involves the installation of an individual with most of what the company needs for the role. It also eliminates risks associated with a transition if someone else were chosen.”

At this point, about the only hire Yahoo could make instead of Levinsohn for the role and get away with it would be Sheryl Sandberg. The chances of that, of course, are slim and none.

An announcement could come as early as this morning. We can only hope.

Update: So much for hope. Nothing today, and if Kara Swisher’s sources are on mark, nothing anything soon as the board equates a lengthy search process with a careful one. A look at recent history would show that’s not always the case but this new board would rather not follow the previous board’s track record with its first choice of CEO. The board, writes Kara, “still is pondering if Levinsohn is the right leader for the company, debating whether a more product-centric exec or one who has had more CEO experience is the better choice for the future direction of the company.”

Meanwhile. Levinsohn is in the spotlight and has chalked up some wins. He considered leaving when Scott Thompson first got the job and I doubt he’d have stayed much longer with the former PayPal exec in charge. Will he stay through this process? Even though he’s been able to hire top execs and make his own org chart, some of his supporters are warning the board not to take him for granted. The suggestion isn’t that he would leave in a huff but that he’s be more vulnerable to offers from other companies searching for senior or top execs. Names raised include Comcast — and Hulu, if Kilar negotiates his way off the island.

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[View the story "Yahoo CEO watch: Levinsohn alone on deck" on Storify]

Yahoo CEO watch: Levinsohn alone on deck

Ross Levinsohn has been interim CEO of Yahoo for nearly two months while the board conducts a search for the right person to succeed ousted CEO Scott Thompson. That should be ending any day now.

Storified by Staci D Kramer · Fri, Jul 06 2012 16:57:26

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In the weeks since, Levinsohn has made key hires, including former News Corp. colleague Michael Barrett as EVP and chief revenue officer, and has unwound Thompson’s version of what the company should look like. Each move lent credence to the idea that he would be CEO when the dust settles, but the search didn’t stop. A week before Yahoo’s July 12th annual meeting, the drumbeats are getting louder – but that doesn’t mean Levinsohn is out…

Thursday, in an all-caps tweet, Reuters tried to sell the idea that the search committee is talking to Jon Miller, the chief digital officer at News Corp. For nearly any other media CEO job, that report would make sense – Miller is a usual suspect of the first degree. But Miller not only is a friend and former business partner of Levinsohn’s, he endorsed him for the job on stage at paidContent 2012 and explained why he thought the board was going in the right direction. That was a non-starter. (Reuters tried to tone it down later).

Hulu CEO Jason Kilar’s name also has also come up, tweeted by Reuters as being on the shortlist and mentioned by Kara Swisher as the only real contender other than Levinsohn. That wouldn’t be surprising. Kilar has been a natural on many CEO search committee lists and he has a reputation as someone who can lead a product-driven company. Kara paints it as a media vs. product decision for the board. Given her track record on Yahoo personnel moves, it can’t be ignored, but a source tells paidContent he’s not in the mix.

The flurry of reports makes sense in terms of timing. Yahoo’s annual meeting is next Thursday. It’s the first for the compromise board formed with Dan Loeb, the activist shareholder who outed Thompson’s lack of a computer science degree and lobbied hard for a board makeover. Thompson’s resume was the wedge he needed to get himself and two others on the board.

Does Yahoo need someone like Kilar, who would be starting from scratch, more than someone like Levinsohn who is well into the Yahoo learning curve after nearly two years and has a strong digital media background as well as relationships with the key content and advertising players?

The theory behind hiring Bartz and Thompson was they could hire people to lead media — Levinsohn was hired by Bartz — but their tech/business backgrounds made them better suited for the job. Bartz was CEO of AutoDesk; Thompson was president of eBay’s PayPal unit and brought a strong background in ecommerce.

Kilar’s allure, in addition to his product props, is that he has been running a media company for several years now. He gets a bonus making it through those years with a board full of strong-minded senior media execs from Hulu’s equity partners News Corp., Disney and, until the Comcast deal, NBC Universal. He made it through the loss of the initial backers inside those companies, too.

Some people I know have been waiting for him to jump ship for so long that every day could be “Jason is leaving” day. Eventually, they will be right. Others point out that Kilar started with a massive advantage in Hulu’s access to prime-time shows from three of the four majors and deals for distribution. He didn’t have to contend with an existing portal that has nearly 700 million global unique users and years of product.

Timing and momentum

However attractive other candidates might seem, the real decision here may well be one of timing and momentum. Choosing anyone from outside means Yahoo will be starting over. Again. Unless somehow the board hires someone willing to go by another exec’s blueprint, that’s at minimum a three-month process and longer for execution. A company with two CEOs and two interim CEOs in three-plus years can’t afford to start from scratch. (That’s one reason Rob Glaser is back as interim CEO at RealNetworks; as the founder and chairman who never really left, he can step right in).

Levinsohn has supporters on the board; maybe it’s just that no-one wants to be thought of as anything less than thorough at this point. Levinsohn, chosen by Rupert Murdoch to form Fox Interactive Media, made a splash by buying MySpace, IGN and other properties, then got dinged by some as not being an operator. The interim role gives the board a chance to see him operating at that level, a kind of audition, and to get a little distance between the recent unpleasantness and a full appointment. In the meantime, he’s been relatively quiet in public, although he led Yahoo’s delegation to Cannes, where he appeared on stage.

Sometimes interim equals caretaker. Sometimes, it can’t. CFO Tim Morse acted in that regard as interim CEO between Bartz and Thompson. When Levinsohn got the interim nod, I suggested it was a choice between business-as-usual and moving forward but that the board made a mistake by not going all the way:

Starting another CEO hunt at this point when you have a qualified in-house candidate just prolongs the drama and raises another series of questions when the focus should be on answers.

Wait too much longer to make a choice, send out too many vibes you might not stick with the leader you have, and you risk that momentum.

Sometimes “interim” is a solution; sometimes it’s the problem.

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Now that Yahoo has managed to make its way through yet another CEO shuffle — its sixth in just five years — the former portal has to get back to the main task at hand: namely, figuring out what its future looks like. By replacing Scott Thompson with Ross Levinsohn, who currently runs Yahoo’s global media business and used to be a senior executive at News Corp., the company seems to be indicating that it wants to focus (again) on being a media player. But does Yahoo even have what it takes to succeed as a new-media entity? There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical, and the company’s knowledge gaps are not going to be easy to fill.

The news that Levinsohn had been elevated to the top spot sparked a lot of favorable reactions from those in the media and tech sphere. Although some observers — including former Adweek editor and author Michael Wolff — seemed less than enthusiastic about his abilities, others such as former Myspace president Jason Hirschhorn were much more positive, saying the company couldn’t have made a better choice. Many pointed to his purchase of Myspace while at News Corp. as a sign that Levinsohn is both a forward thinker and willing to make big acquisitions to further those goals (Myspace’s decline into irrelevance began after Levinsohn left the company, his supporters say).

Media is no longer about who has the most eyeballs

But while seeing Myspace as an opportunity in 2005 may be a mark in Levinsohn’s favor, some of what the new CEO has said about Yahoo both before and since he took the position raises questions about where he sees the company going as a digital-media entity. In a memo to the troops in the wake of Thompson’s departure, he said Yahoo was “achieving genuine and meaningful successes in the marketplace every day and heading in the right direction,” and in an interview with paidContent last year he said:

Yahoo is the premier digital company in the world and embracing that isn’t a hard thing to do. That’s just fact-based. Tell me what other type of media can sit with you and say ‘I’ve got the top 19 #1 or #2 newspapers, I’ve got the top 20 shows, I’ve got the 19 of the top 20 radio stations, 19 of the top 20 magazines’?

But does that mean Yahoo is well-positioned to be a media player for the next decade, rather than the past one? That’s not entirely clear. Levinsohn seems to think having a huge number of eyeballs aggregated around Yahoo’s various properties is a sign of success, but that’s arguably not what media companies of any kind ought to be concentrating on right now. Increasingly, advertisers don’t want hundreds of millions of eyeballs to show banner ads to anymore. They want targeted reach and they want mobile and they want social, and there aren’t a lot of signs that Yahoo has what they need.

In an interview on Friday at Harvard, the head of Google’s news division — former Salon CEO Richard Gingras — compared newspapers to Yahoo and not in a good way. He said newspapers have suffered from the same kind of problems portals like Yahoo have since the social Web started changing the landscape: Namely, they are still operating on the assumption that aggregating a lot of miscellaneous content together in one digital bundle is what readers and advertisers want. But that is not the case.

Where is Yahoo’s social or mobile strategy?

Google may not have solved the issue of adding social signals and features to its business, but at least the launch of Google+ has been a credible attempt in that direction. Does Yahoo even have a social strategy? Not long after it gave up on the search business and handed that responsibility over to Microsoft, the company effectively admitted defeat on the social end of its media operations by integrating with Facebook. Is that the beginning and end of its ambitions when it comes to adding social features to its business? If it is, then Yahoo is going to have a big problem on its hands.

Mobile is another aspect of a modern media strategy where Yahoo seems to have virtually no role to play. Apart from the occasional bundling deal, there is no sign the company has anything to offer — and what it does offer often seems to be a day late and more than a dollar short. Could it acquire something like Flipboard as a way of making a move in that area, the way CNN acquired Zite last year? Possibly. But then Yahoo’s history of acquiring things only to let them wither on the vine isn’t likely to fill anyone with hope.

The biggest challenge Levinsohn and Yahoo face is thinking about media in a different way, and it is the same challenge newspapers face: Just as they got used to being the main destination for people in search of content when paper was the dominant delivery system, Yahoo still seems to be stuck in a mindset that sees media as a game of scale, where the player with the most eyeballs wins. AOL has arguably been playing the same kind of game, and it hasn’t been having much more luck than Yahoo has.

If the rise of Facebook as an advertising entity has shown anything, it is that what matters now is targeting and focus — the ability to drill down into precise market segments and base decisions on actual user behavior. Just how valuable that is for Facebook and for advertisers may still be a question mark, but there is no question that advertisers want it. And Facebook is a lot better positioned to offer that than Yahoo is. If Levinsohn wants to own the future of media, he’s going to have to figure that out, and fast.

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And he doesn’t have to learn digital media — from helping to create online sports powerhouses at CBS Sportsline and Fox, to building a $1 billion-plus digital portfolio for Rupert Murdoch, to launching and investing companies through his own private equity fund, he’s covered the digital media waterfront and then some.

He’s Hollywood and Santa Monica but he speaks fluent Silicon Valley.

Most important, he knows Yahoo is a media company — and he knows how to sell it that way. Of all the things he found when he joined Yahoo in late 2010, the most disconcerting was how much the company was doing right and how very bad it was at making that count. Here’s how he put it during an interview with paidContent last year as he emerged from a quiet period:

“I spent six months digging into the company making sure I’m not crazy — and I’m not crazy.

“Yahoo is the premier digital company in the world and embracing that isn’t a hard thing to do. That’s just fact-based. Tell me what other type of media can sit with you and say ‘I’ve got the top 19 #1 or #2 newspapers, I’ve got the top 20 shows, I’ve got the 19 of the top 20 radio stations, 19 of the top 20 magazines’?

“Duh. But you have to fully embrace that. You can’t half-ass that.”

Last fall, he took the stage at paidContent Advertising to pitch the company. The interview came just days after Carol Bartz, who hired him to head media and ad sales for The Americas, was fired. At the time, he was considered a leading internal candidate for CEO. He talked about Yahoo’s need for “a little bravado, a little swagger”:

“Yahoo is a huge, mature, gigantic business. Some of that is overlooked right now. Businesses grow at different rates. We’re 16 years old and we’ve been on top for 15 years. It’s hard to maintain that. When you think of entertainment and gossip, you think of TMZ, but OMG is twice as big with 30 million users a month and still growing. But no one knows that.”

Levinsohn’s biggest coup at News Corp. was acquiring MySpace from under Viacom’s nose for $580 million in 2005. In hindsight, given how MySpace panned out, perhaps it was anything but a coup — but, at the time, it was transformative, and as big a statement as News Corp. could make about being in the digital game.

Here’s how Levinsohn described it when we talked about why MySpace wasn’t a fit for Yahoo in 2011:

“We bought a social networking site in 2005, before anyone knew what social networking was and now look at where social networking is — so if you look at the trendline we were way head of the game.

“When we bought it, it was doing about $1 million a month; 24 months later we were on a run rate to do $500 million a year. You’d have to say that was a pretty good trajectory.

“Users went from, when we bought it, to 70,000 signups a day (which I thought was astounding), to the month I left about 450,000 signups a day. So again, trajectory, unbelievable.”

Levinsohn was replaced at Fox Interactive when it switched from M&A to operating mode. He’s been battling against perceptions ever since that that he’s not an ops guy.

In addition to rebuilding the internal sales organization and partnering with AOL and Microsoft in a digital sales alliance, and with his top media exec Mickie Rosen setting up a series of high-profile original content deals, Levinsohn has been out telling that story. Not the one of the company that can’t shoot straight – the one about the media company at its core.

Since then, he’s interviewed Tom Hanks to promote a new Yahoo original, been on stage with Katie Couric at the Yahoo digital upfront last month and a few days later being photographed with Sophia Vergara during the White House Correspondents Dinner festivities. He upgraded and expanded an existing relationship with ABC News.

Levinsohn hasn’t left M&A behind but he insists Yahoo doesn’t need a big acquisition to fix its problems, although, if he could have found a way, Hulu would be a Yahoo property. Look at him to focus on making the pieces Yahoo already has fit better, pick up tuck-in acquisitions — and finally decide whether Yahoo should be in the ad tech business or sell it.

Until now, everything he’s done at Yahoo has been in the shadow of CEOs making the final decisions on resources and setting the overall tone. Now — at least for the interim — Yahoo is Levinsohn’s Pottery Barn. He told Yahoos in a lengthy internal e-mail Sunday:

“I know there is one thing we should definitely all be doing in light of this news, and that is to focus on the momentum we’ve created over the last few months.

“Many of you have heard me talk about the possibilities we have, and about the opportunities in front of us. In spite of the very bumpy road we’ve traveled, we are achieving genuine and meaningful successes in the marketplace every day and heading in the right direction.”

What he’ll have to decide now is whether to spend the next months acting as CEO or auditioning for it. Here’s Demand CEO Richard Rosenblatt’s advice, following a Forbes piece by outspoken Yahoo shareholder and tech writer Eric Jackson:

I agree Ross run it like you are the permanent CEO not interim. Own itforbes.com/sites/ericjack…

— Richard Rosenblatt (@demandrichard) May 14, 2012

And, yes, that is the same Richard Rosenblatt who was the CEO that sold MySpace to News Corp., then bought back some of the pieces that helped build Demand Media.

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