News Corp. is shuffling digital executives as part of its new structure, bringing in a fresh face for the congom and moving back a veteran to its studio.

Details are still spotty, but based on reporting by Deadline Hollywood and AllThingsD, it looks like there are two major changes: Peter Levinsohn (right) is moving from his current job job as president of Fox Interactive Media, in which he oversees the conglomerate's online properties, most notably MySpace, IGN, Fox.com and FoxSports.com, back to the studio, where he used to work as president of digital media. According to AllThingsD, Levinsohn's job will be to "coordinate the delivery [Fox] assets on mobile and digital platforms, sources said. It will be his task to create sustainable business models in this fast-moving arena."

Actually, that's pretty much what he did before moving over to FIM in 2005. When he took that job, Variety reported that Levinsohn had been "a key architect in the digital revenue-sharing agreement with Fox affiliates... he also led the Fox on Demand effort, which brought primetime series to the Internet... [and]'s headed Fox's development of the VOD business and electronic sell-through for film and television product." Of course, today digital media is a much bigger deal for a movie/TV studio and you can bet chairmen Jim Gianopolus and Tom Rothman, to whom Levinsohn will report, will be paying a lot more attention than they did four years ago and counting on him to helm them juice some real growth.

Nonetheless, there's no avoiding the fact that it's at best a lateral move. Levinsohn used to be in charge of a separate unit and report directly to Rupert Murdoch. Now he's a senior executive within a unit and reports to the guys who run it, not world's richest Aussie.

Levinsohn is moving so that Jonathan Miller (left, in what I hope will become his official photo at News Corp), the former chairman/CEO of AOL, can take his job and then some. In his old job, Miller transitioned AOL from a subscription-based ISP with a Web component to an advertising-based Web portal with an ISP component, but didn't make the shift quickly and smoothly enough for his Time Warner bosses, who replaced him with Randy Falco (himself recently replaced by Google's Tim Armstrong).

Miller's new title will reportedly be chief digital officer, reporting directly to Murdoch as Levinsohn did. But his portfolio will be bigger, encompassing not just the FIM properties, but also overseeing digital initiatives for every New Corp property.

Including Fox? One of the big questions now is how and whether Levinsohn and Miller work together. Will Levinsohn be in charge of his own digital strategy? Will he have to coordinate with Miller? And even though they have separate reporting lines on paper, which one will be seen as the bigger digital honcho within Fox and within News Corp.?

And how exactly will Miller handle his duties? Directly underneath him are assets like MySpace and IGN that have seen their growth slow of late along with the online advertising market. MySpace's heralded search advertising deal with Google, in particular, is said to be a disappointment.

Furthermore, Miller's job as, essentially, a digital coordinator for the rest of News Corp. is a little blurry. Will folks at businesses as diverse as the Wall Street Journal and Sky Broadcasting and HarperCollins run their online initiatives through him? How does he make himself an asset to them, as opposed to a layer of bureaucracy that makes it harder to get anything done, as so often happens with executives in his position at big conglomerates?

More to come soon, no doubt, especially when News Corp. announces the deal and perhaps lets both of them speak publicly.

When Time Warner tapped Randy Falco, then president of NBC Universal television, to head up AOL, it was a sign that old media and new were increasingly merging. The way to save revive its struggling Web brand, the conglomerate was saying, is to bring in someone who knows how to build a huge media business and sell it to top tier advertisers.

A little over two years later, old media is out and new media is in. By firing Falco and replacing him with Tim Armstrong, the head of ad sales for Google, it's admitting an experienced network hand isn't the solution. The answer, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes hopes, is a less experienced new media hand who knows how to generate revenue.

That, in a word, is AOL's problem. Google and Facebook may have surpassed it in buzz (and even pageviews), but it's still a relevant worldwide brand for millions of people. And traffic is actually up. As PaidContent noted, pageviews were up 14% in the most recent quarter. AOL has executed a strategy of focusing on a diversified group of brands like FanHouse, Asylum, and LemonDrop, following the path of one you might have heard of called TMZ. New people are coming, while the portal's traditional aud of middle-aged women keeps using the home page to discover what's relevant. AOL has even started to integrate content from other mail services and social nets, while at the same time drawing on the successful Bebo (which it acquired in what even Bewkes has said might have been an overvalued deal).

But there's the little matter of revenue. At the same time that pageviews were up, total ad revs fell six percent and the revenue at AOL's own sites (as opposed to the ones it services through its Platform A division) plummeted 15%. That's no help for a media company that wants to raise its stock price, and that is hoping to either spin-off its Internet division or sell it.

In a brief interview with AllThingsD, Armstrong (left) admitted that's most likely his job, stating, "One of the things we discussed was making sure we were able to have the best outcome for AOL. That could take the form of a lot of different paths.”

So Falco and his predescessor Jonathan Miller have managed to transition AOL from a subscription service to a moderately successful, and popular, Web portal. But they couldn't turn it into a business. Falco's decades of experience growing one of the world's biggest television businesses just didn't translate. Time Warner is hoping that by ditching someone who built an old media business for someone who helped build the world's biggest new media business, it can find the way to monetize that transition, at least enough to convince somebody to take AOL off its hands at a decent price.