Browsing the Web sites of two major daily newspapers is about to start costing: After posting substantial losses, both Newsday and the San Francisco Chronicle have announced plans to begin charging readers for online content.

Late Thursday, Tom Zucker, COO of Newsday‘s parent company Cablevision said the paper plans “to end the distribution of free Web content.” Zucker declined to specify when when Newsday will begin charging to read content on its site, and did not reveal what that pricing would be. The shift comes as ad revenue and circulation are both down at the paper: Cablevision bought Newsday for $650 million in May 2008, and was recently forced to write down Newsday‘s value by $402 million, leading to a fourth-quarter loss.

Meanwhile on the West coast…

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NYO: Fortune‘s Barney Gimbel Leaves Magazine Amid Plagiarism Charge

Politico: Kerry on Condiments, 2004, and Blago’s Hair

AP: Officials: Pentagon OKs Media Photos of War Dead

Salon: The Novelist in Wartime

Politico: Let Me Explain the Bronze Prize

Game on? AllThingsD has picked up on the news that Google has introduced ads to Google News. Meaning that as newspapers continue (an increasingly desperate) fight for their lives Google aims to make some money off of what is left. Times are tough all around!

So, will this be the straw that breaks the camel’s back or merely the first domino in a long line that ends with everyone, including Google, paying for content. As Kafka point out this may be just the thing to do it:

In 2006, the World Association of Newspapers demanded that Google News stop indexing its member sites on the grounds that Google was profiting from the use of their copyright material. Agence France-Presse sued Google for the same thing in 2005. At the time, Google News carried no advertisements and hence, no obvious revenue stream. What will they, and other members of the fast-deteriorating newspaper industry say now that it does?

One imagines we won’t have to wait too long to find out.

Tomorrow marks the last day of publication for the Rocky Mountain News, which has been for sale since December. The paper’s owner, Scripps, failed to find a buyer and made the decision to close the 150-year-old paper citing huge — and ever-increasing — losses.

“Denver can’t support two newspapers any longer,” Scripps CEO Rich Boehne told staffers. “It’s certainly not good news for you, and it’s certainly not good news for Denver.”

According to the paper, there was one interested party, but they withdrew after learning it would take an investment of $100 million to keep the paper alive.

Since 2001, the Rocky Mountain News shared a business side with The Denver Post in an effort to “preserve two editorial voices in the community.” After tomorrow, there will only be one.

Entertainment magazine Movieline announced today that it will relaunch this spring as a “Web portal covering all things Hollywood,” written by the trio of editors who used to run Defamer.com, the Hollywood gossip site that was folded into parent company Gawker Media’s flagship Gawker.com blog by company head Nick Denton last week. Defamer’s three writers, Seth Abramovitch, S.T. VanAirsdale, and Kyle Buchanan, have been hired full-time by Movieline’s parent company Mail.com Media Corporation to provide the new portal with “original content, up-to-the-minute blogs, reviews and high-profile interviews.”

According to Abramovitch, the original incarnation of Movieline “had a big influence on Defamer, and the idea of reviving it for a new generation of savvy industry insiders and pop culture fanatics is a thrill, to say the least.”

Full release after the jump.

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Kudos to Portfolio magazine for this morning’s thought-provoking panel about Bernie Madoff. Panelists: Elie Wiesel (pr. Eely Vee-zel), a prominent author and founder of the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, which lost money to Madoff; Harvey Pitt, ceo of Kalorama Partners and former Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC); and Jim Chanos, President and founder of Kynikos Associates, a well-known short-seller. Portfolio Editor in Chief Joanne Lipman moderated. The conversation ranged from heart-felt to thought-provoking to vengeful. I Twittered it at http://www.twitter.com/laureltouby

Some of the questions raised: What is Affinity fraud? Why was there such a lack of accountability on the part of the SEC? Did Madoff have accomplices? Will the high-stakes banker-types at Lehman and Merrill be accused of criminal behavior? How can we trust that it was a $50b fraud when that number was what Madoff himself reported?

The best answer was given when someone in the audience asked Wiesel (who lost tens of millions of dollars to Madoff): “Could you ever forgive him?”

Wiesel repeats the question: “Forgive?” as if to consider it. Then, after a looooong pause, retorts “No!….He’d have to ask for forgiveness and he wouldn’t do that.”

A bit later, I’ll post some video. In the meantime, hit the “continued” link to find out more about what was said (and what went noticeably unsaid) about the Madoff Fraud…

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Tina Brown sat down with David Carr — who’d just returned from his Carpetbagger stint out in Hollywood and was sporting a rather sharp goatee — last night for an all things media chat hosted by the Center for Publishing at NYU-SCPS held at NYU’s prestigious (and packed) Greenberg Lounge. Over the course of 90 minutes the discussion mostly focused on Brown’s transition from print to web and the dire media circumstances we all find ourselves in these days: Brown says she can’t even fathom being in magazines at the moment, particularly with the world in such turmoil “The May issue? Who knows if we’ll even be here in May?”

She also talked a bit about the challenges of launching The Daily Beast compared to those she’s faced launching a magazine, and how important it is to pay writers (and Brown clearly loves her writers!): “You wouldn’t ask a dentist to work for free would you?”

We managed to grab a couple of clips from the talk: the first is Brown discussing why the Beast has yet to feature ads, their plans to bring ads to the site, and what those ads might look like. After the jump she talks about how the Beast came to be.

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Video 1: In which, Laurel introduces herself to strange men at the party.

I attended the party to kick off the TVNewser summit Tuesday night. For those of you not in the know, the Summit (which happens March 10th. Still time to register!) isn’t just about all the pretty anchors. It’s about new TV news tech tools and ways to monetize digitally.

There were over 200 people RSVP’d and about 80 people showed up at the kick-off party in Tribeca Cinemas, from producers (NBC, FOX) to bookers to strategists. I went around the room and asked folks what they wanted to see covered at the Summit. And if we are able to touch upon half their questions and concerns, this Summit is going to kick butt!

Here’s a little more video, to catch you up on the flavor of the evening.

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Today on the Menu we welcome author, model, and self-promotion expert Isobella Jade.

Jade self-published her own book before striking a deal with Harper Collins and has lots of good relevant advice for up-and-coming writers on how to get your product out there. She’s also a BlogTalkRadio host as well. You can listen to the podcast live every morning at 9amET on BlogTalkRadio.com/mediabistro and call in at 646-929-0321. You can also subscribe to the iTunes feed of the podcast by clicking the “iTunes” button.

Is Jack McBrayer the new Tina Fey? After Bobby Jindal’s very ‘Kenneth the Page’-ish response to Barack Obama on Tuesday all eyes (or links) were on McBrayer, who made an exclusive appearance on Jimmy Fallon’s Late Night to respond to the Internet response to the Republican response to Obama’s Not State of the Union address.