One of the first things Carol Bartz said when she made her public debut as new Yahoo CEO was that everyone should give the company “some friggin’ breathing room.”

Some heard “frickin’,” while others heard “frackin’.”

Whatever the exact invective Bartz used, the tough talk was presumably designed for maximum impact to impose a definitive I’m-in-charge-here leadership style that had been sorely lacking at Yahoo for a long time.

Bartz has been employing the creative curse word a lot of late, trying to shape up Yahoo as Tom Hanks–playing the grumpily drunk but effective coach Jimmy Dugan–did to the Rockford Peaches in “A League of Their Own.”

But she is certainly going to need a lot more than that kind of mental mojo to get the company going.

And, more importantly, to convince Wall Street that she can cure what has been ailing Yahoo (YHOO) as it announces what will likely be a dismal fourth-quarter earnings report tomorrow.

“I’ve been passively abused for a year now by Yahoo management and I am in no mood to be aggressively abused by them, unless there is some concrete strategic plan soon,” said one major investor.

Well, the abuse might continue a little while longer, as Bartz gets the dubious honor of delivering what most expect to be even weaker results and perhaps worse guidance for the upcoming quarter.

That’s why, if BoomTown were to guess, to focus attention away from the bad news, Bartz seems like the type to unveil some sort of meatier plan this week, including cost cuts and some serious trimming of Yahoo’s businesses.

Bartz has, in fact, been meeting with most top execs over the last two weeks, with no entourage (except her assistant, Judy) and little formality, asking a lot of questions and apparently trying to gauge executive talent.

One exec told me that he expects this will result in a lot more management turmoil over the next few month, with multiple goodbyes–with some departing due to their loyalty to former CEO Jerry Yang and President Sue Decker, some due to not having the perseverance to live through a wrenching turnaround effort and some due to the fact that they should simply be let go.

Not surprisingly, some inside Yahoo relish this, while others do not.

“Carol has been cutting through the BS like a knife,” said one Yahoo insider, who admires her forthright manner.

Said another who does not, calling it too brash: “She is like a buzzsaw who just wants to cut without knowing a lot of what the impact will be.”

(Ironically, Buzzsaw is an “on-demand collaborative project management solution” offered by Autodesk, the software company that Bartz ruled for 14 years until 2006.)

She certainly has to get up to speed. While her hands are clean, with the weak economy and continuing internal turmoil, Yahoo’s financial quarterly report tomorrow is going to be a mess.

According to estimates from MarketWatch, Yahoo will report about $1.4 billion in revenue, up two percent, earning 13 cents a share for the quarter. That’s down from last year’s 15 cents and down further from the year before’s 19 cents.

That’s not exactly the direction one would hope for.

Display advertising, which is Yahoo’s dominant business, is expected to show the worst performance, with its search business stronger.

Still, search is not exactly considered to be Yahoo’s buoy in tough times or for the future, which is why analysts will likely focus on Bartz’s thoughts on a search deal with Microsoft (MSFT).

The last time she was asked at a Yahoo all-hands meeting, Bartz noted that her “gut” told her that selling might not be such a good idea. Of course, this was said exactly as Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock was meeting with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to discuss such a deal.

Other questions high on the list should be about cost-cutting, defining what Yahoo’s core business is and, of course, what she will do about the long discussions her predecessors had been having with Time Warner (TWX) over merging with its AOL online unit.

One thing that everyone I have talked inside Yahoo has said is that Bartz has been asking a lot of questions about all this and more since she arrived.

This is a good thing.

But while she asked–let’s be honest, demanded–some breathing room, after tomorrow is out of the way, the only thing investors and employees will want is some answers, and quickly.

Until then, here’s that great video scene from “A League of Their Own” about no crying in baseball:

As readers of AllThingsD.com might have noticed, we added MarketWatch columnist Therese Poletti (pictured here) to the main rail of the site today.

Her twice-weekly column, Tech Tales, which appears on MarketWatch on Tuesdays and Thursdays, will also be published here too.

Poletti joins Eric Savitz (pictured here) of Barron’s, whose posts on his Tech Trader Daily blog about tech stocks have been appearing on the front of ATD several times a day for the past month.

We added these two very talented voices from other publications within Dow Jones (owner of this site), because we want to bring more cogent and useful news and analysis about tech and media to our readers. Also, they rock.

In all seriousness, the tech blogging arena is one with a lot of players–some great and some not so much–so we are especially proud of the high standards, accuracy and quality that each of these writers represents.

We will be adding more writers soon, so watch this space.

Of course, we also don’t believe in only cross-promoting Dow Jones brands, and publish a half-dozen major links to other sites daily in Voices, along with our tabbed front page feeds that link directly to CNET, paidContent, GigaOm and Techmeme.

We admire the work those sites are doing and, most of all, want to give our readers as many ways as possible to access the best posts being done across the digital landscape.

Of course, BoomTown and John Paczkowski’s Digital Daily remain the anchor of the main rail, while the work of Walt Mossberg and Katherine Boehret gets its own place at the top of the main home page of ATD.

In all, we hope readers find our commitment to giving you high-quality and incisive work–from scoops to analysis to reviews–helpful and we welcome any feedback.

Here’s the classic stylings of Apple’s Steve Jobs, showing off the iPhone 3G, from the keynote today at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco.

Yes, those are actual oohs and ahs from the audience, which includes a massive passel of press, as if Jobs was showing them the secret to eternal happiness (which is, by the way, not a new iPhone, but a dozen tasty donuts).

Here’s the video from MarketWatch on WSJ.com:

Today, we debut our new redesign of the home screen of AllThingsD.com.

It is, in fact, our second redesign since we launched the site in late April of 2007, although it is a much more drastic redesign, with a lot more elements added.

Why did we do it? No, we are not hyperactive (OK, we are, but we are taking medication for that).

Actually, it is because we in the ATD brain trust (that would be Walt Mossberg and me), along with our many much-more-intelligent staffers and advisers, wanted to bring even more digital news and analysis to our readers by making more stories available on the front page from us and also from around the Web.

Our aim was simple: Now newsier than ever!

In fact, we hope you will find our new look linktastic, as we try hard to embrace the notion that ATD’s audience wants to be able to find great tech and media stories anywhere and everywhere.

Just fyi, the inside sections remain exactly the same–it is only the front page that has undergone the renovation.

Here’s a quick tour, from the top to the bottom of the page:

Megablog: We combined the BoomTown and John Paczkowski’s Digital Daily blogs in one rolling one in the center rail.

We felt that it allowed us to feature a lot more of our stories on the main page longer, up to 20 typically, and also made it easier for readers to find stories before they dropped off the front.

We will be adding more material to this section soon, as we develop our content further.

Walt Mossberg: Walt’s weekly Personal Technology and Mailbox columns and Mossblog, as well as Katherine Boehret’s Mossberg Solution, move up and to the right in a high-profile spot.

As ever, Walt is the site’s amazing anchor and a tech consumer’s greatest adviser, telling it like it is and writing reviews that matter.

Tech Headlines: On the top left, we wanted to bring in the stellar work from our Dow Jones brethren at The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s and MarketWatch, as well as from the Dow Jones newswires, to give readers links to as many stories as we can as news breaks.

This section will be updated every nine minutes to keep it fresh and new.

Voices: This section on the left remains the same, except it goes vertical. We try to hand-select (no stinkin’ algorithm for us) from across the digital blogosphere, so we can feature blog posts we think you need to see to keep up.

Also, expect more guest bloggers who write original posts just for ATD, like one tomorrow from Slide’s Keith Rabois, giving BoomTown a hard time for our problem with juvenile widgets.

The Tech Top 10: Also on the left, just below Voices, we keep our edited Tech Top 10, a list of the stories we think you need to know about every day.

Video: On the right is our featured video. We do a lot of video at ATD and we will feature our latest-posted here.

Tech Around the Web: Also on the right, we are posting, via RSS, the feed from four digital news sources we like and think are useful for our audience.

Two are editorially driven sites, paidContent and GigaOm, who we believe are combining the energy of the blogosphere and also providing readers with trusted reporting that also adheres to the standards of accuracy and ethics we try to operate under too.

This is a big focus for us at ATD and we want to point readers to high-quality material. They say you are judged by the company you keep and we could not agree more.

Both Digg and Techmeme, of course, are the key news aggregators of the sector and we like how helpful they are in surfacing important tech and media stories for readers.

Just click on each tab to get to each section. This section will also be constantly refreshed throughout the day.

More ads: Well, we have to pay the bills, don’t we? We hope you do find them useful and don’t find them too intrusive.

There will be even more to come from us in the coming weeks, especially as we gear up for the sixth edition of the D: All Things Digital conference, which is taking place May 27 to 29.

So, please let us know what you think of our new look, as we would love feedback.

And special thanks to all who worked on the redesign, including Mike Monteiro of Mule Design Studio and especially the tireless and multi-talented Adam Tow, our Web genius.

For those who do not know it, BoomTown is a closet–get it??–home renovation freak and once had a column in The Wall Street Journal called “Home Economics.” (Here is a link to my 2004 review of high-tech toilets, for example, with the unfortunate lede: “Is happiness a warm toilet seat?”)

Nonetheless, we press on, and “Home Economics” might even return here in a new video format, so get ready.

Until then, check out this sparkling MarketWatch video:

Today, that means being able to give credit where credit is surely due. In this case, being able to thank L. Gordon Crovitz (pictured here), the outgoing publisher of The Wall Street Journal, for all he has done for both Walt Mossberg and me and all he has done for our little Dow Jones enterprises–this Web site, AllThingsD.com and our annual conference, D: All Things Digital.

Today, with the change in leadership due to the purchase of Dow Jones by News Corp., it was announced that Crovitz is leaving the company as a manager next week, although he will apparently be writing a column on media. He had run the company’s consumer media group, including the flagship Wall Street Journal, WSJ.com, Barron’s and Barron’s Online, MarketWatch and the other properties.

And also its most outlying outpost, AllThingsD.com and our D conference.

Simply put, without Crovitz’s unstinting support, along with that of former Managing Editor Paul Steiger and a few others, we would never have been able to mount this clearly entrepreneurial effort within the confines of a traditional media company.

While the image of a mainstream media mandarin is a mutated creature–kind of a slow-moving turtle combined with a very shy ostrich whose head resides permanently in the sand–Crovitz was the key executive at Dow Jones who made it possible for us to push forward unusual new things like the conference and the site.

We had started the successful conference before he got the job as publisher, but Crovitz always backed us as we wanted to try new things. And he did not blink when we brought the idea of a separately run Web site to him, related to it.

Our pitch wasn’t exactly smooth or even appealing–we told him to think of us like we were the “crazy cousins” at Dow Jones, trying all sorts of new experiments in online media and without a committee of bureaucrats to muck up the process.

Still, Crovitz said yes and yes again, over and over. This is no small thing, especially against a backdrop of a mainstream-media world beset by frightening change. But Crovitz embraced and welcomed that digital shift.

More importantly, he–and we are in his debt for this–fully understood the need for change in all its forms, as long as we adhered to what makes Dow Jones great–high standards and ethics and great reporting.

Now the man who started his career at Dow Jones in 1980 as a summer intern writing editorials for The Wall Street Journal–he won a Gerald Loeb Award for business commentary in 1990–will head on out, to be replaced by a News Corp. exec and Times of London editor Robert Thomson (Bob! Bobby! Call! Write! We’re not that crazy!).

So, for all you have done for us, Gordon, Walt and I thank you and wish you well on your next endeavor. (And, if you really want to help us more, write a blog for us and make it snappy!)

First, Microsoft unveils newest Zune Media players, in attractive guano-green, as the clever Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski notes in his post yesterday:

Then Starbucks joins up with Apple for a new “Song a Day” promotion, where they will give away 50 million songs all for the greater glory of the iTunes Wi-Fi Music stores and the sale of more Caramel Macchiatos!:

And, hey, we might see a national economic recession coming, but techies in the San Francisco Bay area are apparently safe, all due to Facebook, Google and green tech:

I’m going to use my $100 rebate I get from the I-had-to-have-it-before-my-brother iPhone to get one! And I’ll even have a dollar left over for a refreshing can of soda.

Watch Colligan explain here:

Hopefully, the Centro will do a little better than Palm’s Foleo, which was demoed at our D5 and was dumped before the launch.

And, as an added bonus, here is that Foleo demo video by Jeff Hawkins:

Since then–back in the dark ages and after a stint at the San Francisco Examiner–he has spent a lot of his time over the past decade building the financial news site MarketWatch, which was owned in large part by CBS and then sold to Dow Jones (owner of this site) in 2005.

He stayed on for a bit at CBS, working on its digital initiatives, but recently signed on as a senior adviser to Boston-based Polaris Ventures. There, he’ll be advising them on digital-media issues and helping their portfolio of companies.

Kramer has always had a lot of fast-forward opinions about the changes–or, more accurately, the turmoil–suffered by old-media companies in the wake of the digital onslaught. He talks about all that here, as well as making a prediction about the end of search as the big power in the sector.

Here is the video:

And MarketWatch’s media maven Jon Friedman does a video post related to his Media Web column on the Washington Post’s political reporter Anne Kornblut, using her to depict what the new breed of reporter needs to know how to do–namely, everything multimedia.

That debate has been all over the Web since News Corp. won its battle to buy Dow Jones (owner of this site) last week, including posts by Jeff Jarvis and Fred Wilson in favor of the move.

But former MarketWatch head Larry Kramer disagreed, noting that his old site should be the free product, while the Journal’s content should remain premium.

Sorry, Larry, but I vote–and I know Murdoch (pictured here from a magazine spread with an Apple computer at the ready, apparently) definitely does not preside over a democracy–yes, ma’am, um, sir, for a free WSJ.com.

(And just to show this is not a kiss-up to the new boss, but a cogent analysis of the landscape for the Journal moving forward under Murdoch, here is a video interview posted below that I did in Los Angeles with Beet.TV’s Andy Plesser back in May about the possible News Corp. takeover and how I felt about the situation. Not so happy and also really wrong about Rupe’s chances of winning Dow Jones, as you will see.)

Also, I have posted many times on this subject, such as this recent piece.

There are, of course, valid arguments to be made to keep the Journal’s much-admired online subscription model, combined with freeing up more content offerings over time.

Interestingly, in an interview with paidContent.org last week, WSJ publisher Gordon Crovitz said: “So far, our analysis says the way to maximize revenues and earnings is to have a mixed model.”

While I hate to differ with Crovitz, who helped us immeasurably in getting this site up and running as a free one, I think an open and ad-supported model is the only way to go now, especially under a larger and more powerful (and, most important, global) company like News Corp. that can really vault the site to higher prominence and higher traffic.

And given that the Journal’s online site garners estimated revenues of about $65 million from its paid efforts, which is admirable, it is chump change for News Corp. to try turbocharging the site as a free one, an experiment that will surely pay back the short-term cost.

An interesting analysis released last week by Lehman Brothers’ Doug Anmuth looks at the trade-off–more page views are likely to be gained by going free, although with possibly lowered ad revenues in the short term and lower ad revenues per page in general.

That sounds about right, as it is likely in time and with the marketing muscle of News Corp. that WSJ.com could go from its current 2.6 million unique visitors globally a month to three times that or more.

More importantly, while it has almost hit an impressive 1 million paid subscribers, an audience that has been growing, the online paid site is only going to gain so many more subscribers before that paid-wall people hit finally takes a hit itself.

Most importantly, while a good product, the paid version simply creates a situation in which the Journal is not as relevant as it could and should be. I know Journal execs have heard this before and would argue the paper is influential with a much more elite audience willing to pay the annual fee for access.

But, to my mind, too much of that is a lot of expense-account money talking. That same audience would remain and expand in an unpaid scenario and also add many more who get less excellent, but still adequate, coverage from a plethora of finance sites now.

(By the way, the rumors that the New York Times will end its TimesSelect, which gates the best stuff behind a paid wall, are back again, courtesy of the Murdoch-owned New York Post. Who knows what the Times will do, but it should dump the dumb system, which only irks readers and, I assume, its imprisoned star writers.)

And for the hyper-elite crowd, there are still all kinds of premium content that can be charged for to accompany the free site. In addition, business networking tools and other features could be ladled on (why in the world is Facebook, and not The Wall Street Journal, the de facto social-networking site right now for Silicon Valley, for example) to create a very loyal and high-level audience.

I could go on, but why not let Murdoch, who floated one of the more intriguing ideas in a very interesting interview he did with Time in late June before he won his quest to nab Dow Jones:

“What if, at the Journal, we spent $100 million a year hiring all the best business journalists in the world? Say 200 of them. And spent some money on establishing the brand but went global–a great, great newspaper with big, iconic names, outstanding writers, reporters, experts. And then you make it free, online only. No printing plants, no paper, no trucks,” he said. “How long would it take for the advertising to come? It would be successful, it would work and you’d make … a little bit of money. Then again, the Journal and the Times make very little money now.”

Ouch. But what-if indeed, especially if Murdoch is footing the bill to find out?