Cablevision, which foolishly bought Newsday for $650 million and promptly began running it into the ground (more so), is now setting money alight by rejecting newspaper ads from Cablevision competitor Verizon. Cablevision is unskilled at newspaper management. [NYT]

• Controversial right-wing columnist Robert Novak is dead at 78. [NYT]
• Sunday's hyped-up premiere of Mad Men attracted lots more viewers, as expected. Some 2.8 million people tuned in, up 33% from last year. [Reuters]
• Struggling studio MGM has dumped its CEO and hired a new one. [WSJ]
• Is Sam Zell going to walk away from Tribune? That's the rumor. [NYP]
• The president will speak at next month's Walter Cronkite memorial. [NYT]
• Steven Spielberg's new movie studio now has $825 million in the bank. The company says it plans to make 21 movies over the next four years. [WSJ]
• It looks like MySpace is buying the site iLike for "around $20 million." [DB]
• Newsday is under fire after rejecting an ad by the Tennis Channel that happened to be critical of the newspaper's parent company, Cablevision. [NYT]
• Irony alert: BusinessWeek, the struggling business mag desperately seeking a buyer, just launched a new website called "The Case for Optimism." [BW]

CityFile seems to think so! They ran a story saying that Jim Dolan, whose Cablevision runs Radio City Music Hall, is considering shutting down the long-running Christmas variety spectacular. But now the Rockettes have said that CityFile's got it wrong.

• Cablevision is planning to launch an entire cable network devoted to nothing but wedding shows. So now you'll be able to watch Bridezillas 24/7. Yay. [B&C]
• It may not be over for Vibe. Quincy Jones, who founded the magazine in '93, says he's looking into buying it back and keeping it alive as a website. [Ebony]
• Spin reportedly laid off 20 percent of its staff yesterday. [Gawker]
• Gannett Co., the largest newspaper publisher in the U.S. by circulation, is reportedly cutting between 1,000 and 2,000 jobs at the company. [WSJ]
• More bad news for CNN: MSNBC is now in front on weeknights and Campbell Brown's nightly show continues to plunge in the ratings, too. [NYT, TVBTN]
• CNBC's Dennis Kneale doesn't like it when bloggers mock him. Will acting like a nut on TV fix that? No, but it sure makes for amusing TV. [Dealbreaker]

• Jim Dolan's Cablevision says that Newsday is not for sale, which is good since there isn't a company on the planet that wants to buy it. [E&P]
• David Geffen made an offer to acquire the stake in the New York Times Co. controlled by Phil Falcone's Harbinger fund; Harbinger passed. [Fortune]
• The mood isn't too upbeat at the Cannes Film Festival, unsurprisingly. [THR]
• 60 Minutes' segment on Anna Wintour should air this Sunday. [Gawker]
• As of the publishing biz didn't have enough to worry about, "web pirates" are now posting copies of books on the Internet. [NYT]
• Anderson Cooper's ratings have been on the decline all year. [LAT]
• OK! appears to be dissolving into chaos. [ASSME, Gawker]

• CBS posted a first-quarter loss as the ad recession took its toll. [THR, NYT]
• News Corp. reported a 70 percent drop in quarterly profits. [LAT, B&C]
• Profit dropped by 46 percent at Warner Music during the same period. [PC]
• Sirius XM posted a $236 million quarterly loss and also announced that its number of subscribers declined for the first time ever. [AP]
• Cablevision plans to "explore" a spinoff of Madison Square Garden. [NYT]
• News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch says he plans to charge readers to access the online content of his newspapers in the near future. [E&P]
• The new Bob Dylan album is No. 1 on the charts this week. [THR]
• Felix Dennis says The Week is for sale. For just $200 million. [Folio]

• More trouble at Condé Nast: Ad pages at Vogue are down 31 percent this year and Vanity Fair experienced a 52 percent drop in May alone. The silver lining: Graydon Carter's lavish expense account remains unaffected. [NYP]
• The Sun really may be returning after all. As a website, that is. Seth Lipsky says "there's a business plan for the site in the formative stages." [Politico]
• This certainly isn't a good sign: It seems NBC is exploring the possibility of leasing out part of its headquarters in Washington D.C. [NYO]
• More desperate: NBC will air another season of Celebrity Apprentice. [THR]
• The Portfolio names/logos that never were (and more on its closing). [NYO]
• Al Roker will co-host a Weather Channel show called Wake Up With Al from 6 to 7 a.m. Because waking up with Al is what you've always dreamed of. [NYT]
• Oprah Winfrey's Twitter usage is way down. So much for that! [AdAge]

• The LA Times ran an ad designed to look like an actual news story on the front page of the paper today. Much criticism has followed, obvs. [ATD, E&P]
• The NYT is asking its reporters to come up with cost-cutting ideas. [NYO]
• A Chicago-based Good Morning America staffer was given the boot after he tried to put his nose job on his corporate credit card. [P6]
• The acquisition of the Wall Street Journal was a giant misstep for News Corp., but Fox News is making Rupert Murdoch some money. [Reuters]
• Cablevision's Jim Dolan earned a $12.5 million pay package last year. [AP]
• Time Warner's Jeff Bewkes raked in $19.9 million in 2008. [MC]
• The 15 top moneymakers on primetime television. [Forbes]
• Barely-living Blackbook is now refusing to pay some freelancers. [Jossip]

• The Wall Street Journal's new glossy mag, WSJ, will remain a quarterly and will not be going monthly as planned due to "market conditions." [WWD]
• Amazon is launching a program to let you read books by iPhone. [WSJ]
• Fox is ahead in the ratings with 18 to 49-year-olds thanks to the success of Idol, but CBS is gaining ground and is now No. 1 among total viewers. [LAT]
• As expected, Julius Genachowski has been nominated as FCC head. [AP]
• Cablevision will soon start targeting TV ads based on "income, ethnicity, gender or whether the homeowner has children or pets." [NYT]
• WNBC's new digital channel, New York Nonstop, launched Monday. [NYDN]
• David Carr's Carpetbagger blog will not be a year-round thing. [NYT]
• Good news, unemployed TV journalists: Dan Rather is hiring. [NYO]

• Fox News remains in first place in the cable news ratings race. MSNBC is showing modest gains, while CNN is dropping like a lead balloon. [NYT, MM]
• Cablevision says it plans to charge readers to access to Newsday.com. [NYP]
• Hearst is launching an e-reader for magazines and newspapers. [Fortune]
• The Times is launching several local "citizen journalism" sites. [E&P]
• Sony CEO Howard Stringer has pushed aside two senior execs. [WSJ]
• Old Navy's newest ad campaign resembles a celeb tabloid. [Jossip]
• Peter Scarlet has resigned as the Tribeca Film Fest's artistic director. [THR]
• Take a tour of the White House with Katie Couric if you'd like. [YouTube]
• Denver's Rocky Mountain News says goodbye. [RMN]

Pundits will say Newsday's desperate plan to charge for the Long Island newspaper's website is some kind of bellwether for the industry. What it really means: Newsday and its owner, Cablevision, have nothing to lose.

The top editors of Newsday: they're missing! From work. Or are they? Rumors say they've been fired! Other rumors say they haven't. One thing is for sure: Cablevision sucks a big one, managerially speaking.

♦ The Emmy Awards will take place on Sunday evening; AMC's Mad Men is the "overwhelming favorite" to win for best drama series. [Reuters]
♦ What's happening with the New York Sun, which said it will shut down on September 29th without additional funding? It's a "very fluid situation," according to Ira Stoll. [Portfolio]
♦ Tina Fey's SNL imitation of Sarah Palin earned NBC its most-watched web clip in history. [THR]
♦ According to a new research study, Survivor is the most addictive show on TV. [NYP]
♦ MSNBC is expanding to India and Indonesia, among other places. [THR]
♦ The founders of Dreamworks have sealed their pact India's Reliance, a deal that will provide them with $1.2 billion to set up a new film company. [WSJ]

• An analyst suggests Lehman may be a hostile takeover candidate; a WSJ reporter explains why that's unlikely; and another points out the difficulty involved in selling off its asset management business. [NYP, WSJ, WSJ]

• That story in the Journal about Barack Obama being too skinny to be president? The reporter pulled the quotes from a message board thread she started herself. The WSJ prints a correction, Slate deconstructs. [Slate, WSJ]

"With the stroke of a pen, the appeals court has opened the door to a massive increase in the penetration of DVR capabilities." [Hollywood Reporter]

When Cablevision's ruling Dolan family—famous for making reporters' lives hell as they try to cover the Dolan-owned New York Knicks—became the new owners of Newsday , every media reporter in the city simultaneously realized that they could write a funny story about how the asshole Dolans probably won't even speak to their own company's new reporters. And everyone obliged! The Observer wraps the story in a nice little bow, detailing how Newsday editors got "screamed at" for sending a reporter to the Dolans' house. And while the paper's top editors are now obliged to be nice to the Dolans, most of the reporters are pissed off or just sad, as their quotes show pretty plainly:

Having bought Newsday for $650 million, Cablevision executives, who pretty much suck at making money on anything that's not a cable system, are now interested in maybe having an actual newspaper company print, distribute and sell advertising into the tabloid. A printing deal with Post owner News Corp. or Daily News owner Mort Zuckerman would make eminent financial sense, since Newsday has an outdated printing plant and both the Daily News and Post stand to cut their own printing costs if they can sign up the Long Island newspaper as a customer. And cross-selling ads could drum up some extra revenue. But if Cablevision were to do a comprehensive deal covering pretty much all business-side operations, it would beg the question, why did Cablevision buy Newsday in the first place? Were the cross-selling opportunities between cable, internet and the newspaper really worth an $80 million premium over bids from News Corp. and Zuckerman? Prediction: Whichever media company ends up doing this deal with Cablevision, and one of them will, is going to end up owning the newspaper in a few years when Cablevision's high expectations are deflated. [Times]

Rupert Murdoch's secret, sneaky plan to destroy Long Island tabloid Newsday: let a dysfunctional company buy it for more money. Cablevision purchased the paper for $650 million and Murdoch withdrew his bid this weekend. Now, everyone is a bit confused. Because Cablevision owns many odd things, but none of them have been newspapers up til now. "The Newsday bid had the backing of both Charles Dolan, who founded the company, and his son James L. Dolan, the chief executive," the Times reports, even though generally the Dolans hate each other and disagree about everything. And according to witnesses of the meetings between the Dolans and former Newsday owner Sam Zell, the "tension between the two has been obvious." As have the tensions between Cablevision and its shareholders. Because Cablevision is a company that does one thing quite well and everything else quite poorly.

"News Corporation, the global media conglomerate controlled by Rupert Murdoch, is withdrawing its bid to purchase Newsday. The withdrawal of the bid was first reported on the Web site of The Wall Street Journal, which is owned by the News Corporation.The bid withdrawal appears to be a reversal from Wednesday, when in the News Corporation's earnings conference call Mr. Murdoch voiced skepticism that Cablevision could succeed in its bid for Newsday, even as he vowed not to get into a bidding war for the newspaper, which was at the center of a tussle among three New York moguls."