News Corp. reported third quarter earnings after the close of the market Wednesday and once again the company disclosed nothing in particular about HarperCollins. Notably, this time around it didn’t even merit an adjective. (Harper itself characterized the previous quarters as “favorable”: before that, it was “solid,” “challenging,” and “terrific” — but this time they declined to comment.) At the larger newspaper publishing unit of which Harper is a small part, sales decreased $87 million to $1.938 billion, while operating income dropped $45 million, to $85 million. The declines owed to another $42 million in costs related to the phone-hacking investigations […]