Now that Rupert Murdoch has finally snared the Wall Street Journal after a bitter three-month takeover struggle, the victorious mogul can refocus his attention on News Corp.'s digital strategy, which has taken a backseat to his dogged pursuit of the venerable newspaper.

Murdoch now confronts three major online hurdles: combining the new Fox Business Network with WSJ.com, launching the joint News Corp.-NBC Universal video web site, and crafting an exit strategy for MySpace, the popular but increasingly burdensome social networking leader.

Murdoch's first task is deciding how to integrate the new Fox Business Network, which is scheduled to launch this October, with the Journal's web site -- widely considered to be one of the finest business news outlets on the web.

Despite the fact that WSJ.com charges as much as $100 dollars yearly for complete access, the site has built a tremendous audience of 900,000 paying subscribers through the strength of its journalism. But Murdoch knows full well that the subscription price prevents WSJ.com from achieving the traffic numbers he craves.

As he broadens the Journal's coverage to include more national and lifestyle news, Murdoch is likely to reduce the Journal's online subscription price -- if not make the site free altogether -- in order to drive up traffic and attract advertisers.

Larry Kramer, founder of Marketwatch, which along with the rest of Dow Jones will soon be part of News Corp., recently told the New York Times that Murdoch would most likely seek to strike a balance between serious business news consumers willing to pay a premium for financial news, and general web readers, who are typically put off by web site subscription fees.

"There is some number of people who will pay for premium business news, and those people will pay a lot," Kramer told the Times. "For those who won't pay, give them enough of what they need free. You get the best of both worlds."

One scenario would be keeping the Journal's top-level financial news content behind a pay wall -- something akin to the New York Times' "Times Select" service -- and serving the day-to-day Fox Business Network content up for free.

It remains to be seen whether Murdoch will be able to stamp the Journal's storied brand onto the new Fox Business Network given Dow Jones's existing partnership with CNBC, but Murdoch should have no problem housing all of Fox's online business coverage at WSJ.com.

As Portfolio.com's Felix Salmon points out: "Right now, there is no one-stop-shop on the World Wide Web for comprehensive, global business and finance news and analysis. A free WSJ.com would overnight become the global authority on such matters."

(Though given Murdoch's stated goal to make his new business channel "more business friendly" and less "negative" than CNBC, one wonders whether the Journal's recent Pulitzer Prize-winning campaign to expose rampant stock options manipulation at the highest level of American business would ever have occurred on his watch.)

The next item on Murdoch's digital agenda is to jump-start News Corp.'s still unnamed online video joint venture with NBC Universal. The video web site, which Murdoch lieutenant Peter Chernin recently touted as a "game changer for Internet video," was scheduled to debut "this summer," but it has been delayed while Murdoch completed the Dow Jones takeover. With the Bancrofts vanquished, expect to see the new video website fast-tracked.

News Corp. has pledged to stock the free, ad-supported website -- known informally as "NewTube" -- with "full episodes and clips from current hit shows, including Heroes, 24, House, My Name Is Earl, Saturday Night Live, Friday Night Lights, The Riches, 30 Rock, The Simpsons, The Tonight Show, Prison Break, Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader, and Top Chef, plus hits from the studios' vast television libraries," in addition to offering "personalized video playlists, mashups, online communities and video search."

Murdoch's final order of business is figuring out what to do with MySpace, the social networking juggernaut he bought for $580 million in 2005. Although MySpace is far and away the largest social network on the Web, with more than 100 million users, the site is increasingly regarded as passé with the ascendancy of new social networking and communication web sites like Facebook, Twitter and Pownce.

And, as Bear Stearns analyst Spencer Wang points out, it's hard to make the case for synergy between Dow Jones and MySpace.

"We do not subscribe to the view that MySpace users could be a captive target audience for Dow Jones's content or that MySpace could be a meaningful distribution platform for DJ content," Wang wrote in a note to clients anticipating the deal.

Citing the recent, much-discussed essay by Danah Boyd, a Ph.D. student at U.C. Berkeley School of Information Sciences, which found that MySpace users tend to be less well-educated and less affluent than Facebook users, Wang concluded, "MySpace's user base is not the target audience for Dow Jones's financial content."

So it should come as no surprise that Murdoch is interested in unloading MySpace, especially given News Corp.'s seeming inability to police the site for spam, not to mention sexual predators.

Earlier this year, Murdoch held talks with Yahoo about trading MySpace for a 25 percent stake in Yahoo in a deal that would value MySpace at about $10 billion. But the untimely sacking of Yahoo chieftain Terry Semel disrupted those talks, Murdoch implied in a recent interview.

If Murdoch can persuade new Yahoo C.E.O. Jerry Yang to accept the deal, not only will Murdoch dispense with MySpace -- and its attendant legal hassles (read: To Catch a Predator -- MySpace!), he will also have gained a firm foothold from which to do battle with Google, the web search ad king.

For the Bancrofts and anti-Murdoch Journal staffers, it would be the cruelest of ironies if Murdoch could pay off the acquisition of Dow Jones -- the century-old gold standard of financial news and information -- on the back of a four-year-old social networking website populated by teenagers, spammers and web predators.

And who knows? If Murdoch can seal the swap with Yahoo, he may still have enough left over to buy the New York Times Company.

by Sam Gustin