Newsday: Another Newspaper Heading for the Graveyard

Newsday plans to charge for online news:

Cablevision Systems Corp plans to charge online readers of its Newsday newspaper, a move that would make it one of the first large U.S. papers to reverse a trend toward free Web readership.

Newsday, which covers the New York suburb of Long Island, was bought by Cablevision in a $650 million deal last May that was widely criticized on Wall Street as a puzzling move into a troubled newspaper market.

Cablevision had to write down Newsday’s value by $402 million on Thursday, pushing its fourth-quarter results to a loss, as U.S. print advertising sales and circulation have dropped with more readers seeking free news on the Web.

But Cablevision Chief Operating officer Tom Rutledge said the cable TV company was aware of the difficulties faced by the traditional newspaper business.

“Our goal was and is to use our electronic network assets and subscriber relationships to transform the way news is distributed,” he said on a conference call with analysts.

“We plan to end the distribution of free Web content,” he added.

Guess where I won’t be getting my news from (OK, I admit, I wasn’t reading Newsday to begin with).

Just another failed newspaper trying to sell crap that people can already get for free. Maybe if newspapers were actually in the news reporting business instead of the “let’s knobslob Barack Obama and destroy conservatism” business…fewer of them would be going under (I’m talking about you, NYT: how wobbly are those legs getting).