Newsday to charge for website, online cable service

Cablevision Systems plans to charge online readers of its Newsday newspaper, a move that would make it one of the first large US papers to reverse a trend toward free Web readership. The paper said in a statement late on Thursday that it is in the process of transforming the site into a locally focused cable service. 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.