The 24/7 Wall Street blog’s list of newspapers that it teed up as going out of business this year is making a certain group of people rather unhappy — the people who run those papers. Two of them are so hopping mad that they have aired their complaints to the public.

You can read the whole list on 24/7 Wall Street, but here is what it said about:

New York Daily News:

NY Daily News is one of several large papers fighting for circulation and advertising in the New York City area. Unlike The New York Times, New York Post, Newsday, and Newark Star Ledger, the Daily News is not owned by a larger organization. Real estate billionaire Mort Zuckerman owns the paper. Based on figures from other big dailies it could easily lose $60 million or $70 million and has no chance of recovering from that level

And the Philadelphia Daily News:

The Philadelphia Daily News. The smaller of the two papers owned by The Philadelphia Newspapers LLC, which recently filed for bankruptcy. The parent company says it will make money this year, but with newspaper advertising still falling sharply, the city cannot support two papers and the Dally News has a daily circulation of only about 100,000. The tabloid has a small staff, most of whom could probably stay on at Philly.com, the web operation for both of the city dailies.

New York Daily News Editor Marc Kramer unloaded on the blog and Editor Doug McIntyre, as you can see in this story in his big rival, the New York Post (which must have enjoyed the writeup).

Brian Tierney, who runs the Philadelphia papers, put his skills as a seasoned public releations executive to work and issued this press release:

On Monday, March 9, 2009, Time.com posted a blog entry titled, The 10 Most Endangered Newspapers in America, which included the Philadelphia Daily News at the top of its list. First, let me say that I like catchy Top 10 lists as much as the next guy, but the Daily News is not going anywhere. It is beloved by its readers for its Philly attitude toward sports, entertainment and politics. I agree with my good friend, Marc Kramer at the New York Daily News (also on the list) who called the report, ‘unfounded and baseless.’ The fact that this “report” can get such widespread coverage is a case study in why we need to preserve institutions like The Daily News, which has reporters who actually call sources and editors who actually check facts. If we hold up this type of blog “reporting” as journalism, God save our democracy.

The blog had a number of wrong assumptions and factual errors. First, The Daily News is profitable. Our newspapers made $36 million last year. The Daily News is the 91st largest newspaper in America in the fourth largest media market. There is ample room for two newspapers in Philadelphia. Second, the blog assumed The Daily News journalists could be absorbed into philly.com. The Daily News has 107 journalists. It would be quite a squeeze to get them all into the philly.com offices, where we have about 10 content producers. Maybe they could share chairs and desks?

The public needs and expects journalism to be accurate and factually correct. To do otherwise is a disservice to them.

At least he didn’t say that bloggers aren’t journalists. That’s a step toward the future!

(Photo: Reuters)

When Rupert Murdoch said the other day that he wasn’t investing in newspapers anymore, we assumed that he was being ironic, especially as it came in the same telephone conference call with News Corp analysts and reporters in which he said that he thought his agreement to buy Newsday from Tribune Co was all but sewn up .

That goes to show you what they say about assuming things.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday , and we subsequently confirmed , that News Corp isn’t going to chase Newsday after all. Instead, it’s pulling its $580 million bid, paving the way for Cablevision to likely take over its fellow Long Island media outlet. New York Daily News owner Mortimer Zuckerman is in the race still as far as we know, but it’s hard to see how Tribune will take his $580 million bid when Cablevision has a $70 million sweetener on top of that.

Why? Apparently the economics were unjustifiable. What could that mean? The short list: Tribune’s quarterly financial results, which came out late Friday, show the company continuing to lose advertising revenue at its newspapers; media ownership laws might make it tough for Murdoch to take the paper yet keep his New York-area television broadcast licenses; and finally, a bid higher than $650 million is already a higher valuation for a newspaper than most sensible financial folks see as feasible.

That didn’t seem to bother Murdoch before. Here’s what he said on the News Corp earnings call (reproduced from our earlier blog entry ):

No, I don’t think Cablevision will prevail. Just be patient for a couple of days (inaudible). We’re certainly not in the business of getting into an auction here …

We’re hoping to wrap it up within the next week. And I don’t mean the end of next week, I mean within the next seven days … It takes two to agree. But we’re at a pretty advanced stage. I’ll just leave it at that at the moment.

Here’s what he subsequently said at the Time 100 dinner later that week, according to the New York Observer (whose owner Jared Kushner also was interested in bidding, though a source close to Kushner Properties told us recently that he has no idea what he wants to do about a bid right now — we’re guessing nothing):

“Yeah, I might have gone a little too far saying it was a certainty,” he told The Observer. “I was telling the truth, but you don’t know until …”

Until Saturday.