He certainly has the motivation: revenge — and the success which is its best form.

Van Natta joined Facebook when the startup was an also-ran site, limited to college kids and run by college dropouts, and steered it through a period of hypergrowth. He was a key negotiator behind an advertising deal with Microsoft which provided Facebook with a solid financial footing as its user numbers blew up. His payback? Founder Mark Zuckerberg demoted him gracelessly in August 2007, and left in February 2008 — the first of many high-profile departures by executives who had fallings-out with Zuckerberg.

He then spent months hanging out and vacationing before joining a Palo Alto music startup he'd invested in, Project Playlist, as its CEO. Playlist's music widget for social networks had been banned by both Facebook and MySpace as it feuded with the major labels, and while he didn't manage to get it reinstated on either site, Van Natta did strike a deal with EMI.

Deals are what Van Natta built his reputation on. He spent seven years at Amazon.com, ultimately becoming its vice president of worldwide business development. Before that, his LinkedIn profile offers few details. There's a six-year gap between his 1992 graduation from the University of California at Santa Cruz with a BA in English and American literature and his 1998 arrival at Amazon.

Here's what we've reconstructed of his background: CNET editor Charlie Cooper recalls him being a sales intern at Computer Shopper in the early '90s. By 1996, he was working at Softbank Expos, a conference organizer. He then joined Zip2, a now-forgotten dotcom started by Elon Musk, now the CEO of Tesla Motors, and became its senior director of network advertising. In 1998, he joined PlanetAll, a nascent social network, as its VP of sales, shortly before it was acquired by Amazon.com.

What this alleged Internet studmuffin's resume tells us is that he's a smart opportunist. Is that what MySpace needs? It has certainly missed enough opportunities along the way. The other skill Van Natta's noted for is the ability, rare among slick suit-wearing dealmakers, to be tolerated by engineers. MySpace has never been a technology-driven company, and that flaw finally caught up with it over the past couple of years.

If Van Natta plays to his past reputation and just cuts some flashy deals, he'll solidify his reputation as a dilettante dealmaker, and doom his career. If he woos the right talent to MySpace and turns the place around, he'll prove he deserves to be a CEO — and rub his success in the face of a certain snotnosed punk in Palo Alto.

Everyone is competing to be more-elegiacal-than-thou in Romenesko-mourning the Rocky Mountain News, a Denver newspaper which, in the end, was only notable for being the loser in one of the last few entertaining intra-newspaper wars. Ah, for the days when newspapers killed each other, instead of being done in by intransigence in the face of technological change.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer could be gone within weeks. The solution? Talking about it endlessly!

The American Society of Newspaper Editors has scrapped its 2009 convention. Good thing, as we should know by later this year if there are any newspapers left to edit. The trade group now plans to vote electronically on whether to add website editors and J-school professors to fluff up its ranks. Technology!

Worth has indefinitely delayed its relaunch and laid off editors and salespeople.

Computer Shopper has folded, because of all those people who already shopped for a computer and can now do so online.

Doubledown Media, publisher of Trader Monthly and other Wall Street-focused print titles, has filed for bankruptcy. It has legal troubles, too. No wonder its president, Randall Lane, looks so glum.

(There was absolutely no good news in the world of media. We looked!)