Behind MySpace firing

Sounds like a real mess, according to Boomtown's Kara Swisher, who lays out the management tensions leading up to last night's ouster of CEO Owen Van Natta. One insider told her: "It's both impossible to save and hard to give up on." One obvious problem: Along with Van Natta, two other executives, Mike Jones and Jason Hirschorn, had been hired last spring as part of a big shakeup at the Bev Hills-based social networking site. That's an executive chef, two sous chefs and the restaurant owner up front - News Corp. senior executive Jon Miller - all having their own ideas about what should be on the menu. And, according to Swisher, they disagreed a lot.

Sources said relations had gotten so bad that Hirschhorn had told Van Natta recently that he was planning on resigning by June. It was a threat that moved well beyond well-known gripes the former media exec had aired to many outside the company over the last year about how much worse shape MySpace was in than he thought and also weariness from his weekly commute between his home in New York to the company's Los Angeles HQ. And, after a recent blog post that claimed Hirschhorn was the one leaving, relations became even more frosty, sources said.

The relationship between Miller and Van Natta had also become badly frayed, several sources noted, mostly over the pace of change and the level of control Van Natta had over MySpace. "There were serious disagreements and something had to give," said one person close to the situation. After firing Van Natta in an afternoon meeting yesterday, in what several people described as a "termination without cause," Miller appointed Jones and Hirschhorn co-presidents of MySpace.

Earlier: Shakeup at MySpace