Newspapers often resemble a melting iceberg full of milling penguins when they talk about whether and how to make people pay for their news online. Newsday, the former Tribune-owned daily paper that serves New York’s Long Island, has left the iceberg. Here is the paper, in its own words:

Those who are not customers of Optimum Online or the newspaper - both owned by Bethpage-based Cablevision Systems Corp. - will have to pay a $5 weekly fee. However, nonpaying customers will have access to some of newsday.com’s information, including the home page, school closings, weather, obituaries, classified and entertainment listings. There also will be some limited access to Newsday stories.

Newsday described the move as one that would create a “pioneering Web model,” combining the newspaper’s newsgathering services with Cablevision’s electronic distribution capabilities. About 75 percent of Long Island households are Newsday home delivery or Cablevision online customers or both, according to Newsday. Optimum Online customers total 2.5 million in the New York area, the paper said.

We’re talking $260 a year, if you count that at $5 per week. Some people pay less for The Wall Street Journal, I’m told. In the spirit of offering both sides of the argument, Newsday got a naysayer and a supporter. We’d write this ourselves, but Newsday did such a good job of it that we’ll share that with you too:

Jack Myers of Jack Myers Media Business Report, a Manhattan-based economic research firm, said, “In the long term, it’s a zero-sum game. Basically what you are doing is you are shutting off younger audiences from getting access and becoming fans of your content, so it strikes me as a pretty short-term protective measure that will be a great case study for the industry.”

However, John Morton, head of the Morton Research Inc., a Silver Spring, Md.-based media consulting firm, said the current model of free online content is not a “rational model.”

Most U.S. newspapers have not done well at charging for any of their news. The New York Times didn’t do so well with its TimesSelect program. Other papers, like The Wall Street Journal which has done it from the beginning, have. Still a few others, like the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, are sticking with it one way or another. And yet others may start charging soon. The Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, might begin this year, their chief executive has said.

What’s at stake? Advertising is down, but not out, and it tends to perform well online because businesses know they can reach large numbers of people who read the news for free. If those people decide they don’t want to pay for news, they’ll leave their favorite news websites for another. That is the main reason that publishers have been hesitant to start charging.

I’ve yet to meet people who are shy about sharing their opinions about paying for news on the Internet. So have at it!

Gawker/Valleywag created a bit of stir on the blogosphere Monday with its report that Yahoo was in talks to buy blogging startup Tumblr for “low to mid-eight figures,” or as much as $50 million.

From the post:

We hear the talks are serious, led by Tapan Bhat, a fast-rising executive in charge of Yahoo’s homepage and other key properties — but as with any acquisition talks, they could fall apart.

We figured Yahoo’s new CEO Carol Bartz was too busy figuring out where Yahoo should seek growth and how to stem the leaky ship to pursue an acquisition. Sure enough, Silicon Alley Insider knocked down the Valleywag story by getting Tumblr founder David Karp on the record:

We called David and he said the rumor is categorically false. “We’re just hearing about this now,” he said.

Speaking of acquisitions, it seems like no one’s doing too well with the stuff they’ve bought. Just a couple of days ago, News Corp wrote down the value of its $5.6 billion 2007 acquisition of Dow Jones. And yesterday, Cablevision said it would write down its acquisition of Newsday by $375 million to $450 million. As you may remember, Cablevision bought the Long Island paper just last year for $650 million.

• The recession has taken a heavy toll on sales of celebrity gossip magazines, but magazine circulation in general has held up well, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. (NYTimes)
• Google has developed a free Web service called PowerMeter for consumers to track energy use in their house or business. (NYTimes)
• DirecTV Group added more subscribers than expected during the fourth quarter but rising marketing costs and other expenses dragged down its quarterly profit. (Reuters)
• Omnicom Group shows more resilience to budget cutbacks than Wall Street had expected, but profit still falls 14 percent. (Reuters)

We thought we had a big story on our hands this afternoon when an email popped up in our Inbox proclaiming: “Newsday TV”.

Finally, Cablevision Chief Executive Jim Dolan is sticking it to the Doubting Thomases of Wall Street by serving up the synergies between his recent acquisition, the Long Island newspaper Newsday and his 3-million strong subscriber base of cable TV customers and cable networks, we thought.

It wasn’t anywhere close to what we imagined.

Yes, Cablevision has launched a new interactive Newsday channel. But the interactivity pretty much ends with an on-screen subscription form letting cable customers order up a Newsday subscription on TV screens and charged to cable bills.

From the Cablevision release:

Located on Channel 611, the Newsday channel features both 7-day and weekend delivery options (Thursday, Friday and Sunday), and promotional information on the paper’s various sections and benefits, including local news, sports, Long Island Home, area coupons, the Explore LI feature section and classifieds. Also available through the channel are long-form videos of some recent Newsday stories, and information on the paper’s “Newsday Insider” benefit program for subscribers.

Meanwhile Wall Street cable analyst Craig Moffett of Bernstein Research not only thinks there’s little obvious strategic sense in the Newsday acquisition for Cablevision but that the Dolans, who control the cable operator, probably paid $150 million too much for the paper in May.

In his latest client note titled “Toys in the Attic…What’s Cablevision Really Worth?” Moffett says Cablevision is conservatively worth at least $45 a share compared with its current price of around $28.

In the breakdown of Cablevision’s assets Moffett values Newsday at just $505 million - a 20 percent discount in just three months.

No wonder top Cablevision stakeholder and activist investor Mario Gabelli wants improved corporate governance on big decisions and is calling for a sale of some of Cablevision’s asset’s to help boost the share price.

(Photo: Cablevision)

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.