• Get ready for the Spider-Man ride at Disney World: Walt Disney has agreed to pay $4 billion in cash and stock to acquire Marvel Entertainment. [NYT, WSJ]
• Because she was clearly the very best person for the job, Jenna Bush has signed on with the Today show. The daughter of the former president will be contributing stories "about once a month on issues like education." [THR]
• The Final Destination was No. 1 at the box office this weekend with a $28.3 million take; Inglourious Basterds came in No. 2 with $20 million. [THR]
• Newsstand magazine sales continue to fall. Single-copy sales fell 12 percent during the first half of the 2009 compared to the same period in 2008. [AP]
• NBC's new slogan for its fall marketing campaign? "More colorful." [Variety]

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]

The LA Times has a new website! So does Newsday! And you know both these papers are in some serious trouble, so these redesigns better work. What's their secret success formula? Not so much boring "news."

• 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]

New York's tabloids are in high dudgeon over yesterday's Air Force One flyby. Who got the best headline and front-page out of it?

A newspaper's most basic function, one could argue, is to keep tabs on crime. For decades, New York newspapers have done this out of the "police shack," but the NYPD is now kicking them out.

• 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.

Look: It's a glorious, bona fide press brawl! Caroline Kennedy's withdrawal from senate consideration touched off the rivalry between New York and D.C. news desks. New York won.

Mailing it in for Hamilton Nolan, who's, er, on assignment, I'm here with your post-inaugural, Nobama media column.

• The broadcast of yesterday's inauguration earned the highest ratings since Reagan took the oath in 1981. Early numbers from Nielsen indicate 29% of US households tuned in. That figure doesn't factor in the people who viewed it online, and the big event in DC yesterday set web traffic records, too. [THR, NYT]
• The Wall Street Journal received a dozen envelopes filled with a mysterious white powder today. [WSJ]
• Maria Bartiromo has signed a new contract with CNBC. [NYP]
• Newsday editor John Mancini has returned to work following a dispute with the paper's owner, Cablevision's Jim Dolan. [Newsday, E&P]
• Clear Channel is laying off 9% of its work force. [AdAge]
• People pushed back its Tuesday afternoon deadline to Wednesday so it could publish a special double issue with Obama on the cover. [WWD]
• North Korea's news agency didn't bother to report the inauguration until late yesterday afternoon. The article was three sentences long. [FB]

• Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helù has pumped $250 million into the beleaguered New York Times Co. [NYT]
• Newsday's editor-in-chief and managing editor have been absent from the office the past few days and it's still unclear what exactly happened. [NYP]
• Matt Cooper has joined Talking Points Memo as editor-at-large. [Politico]
• For the first time, movie ads will appear during this year's Oscars. [AdAge]
• NBC says 90 percent of its Super Bowl ads have been sold. [AP]
• Jennifer Aniston on the cover of Vogue in December and GQ in January provided a nice boost to both titles. [WWD]

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.

Did you know that when the stock market goes down, media bosses get poorer like magic? It's true — and the fact that it's a totally obvious point doesn't make it any less fun!

Newsday, the little Long Island paper that couldn't, just laid off 100 staffers. And they told the union: On the way out, take your damn holiday "food drive bins" with you. Bah humbug:

Newsday, the Long Island paper that was bought by Cablevision for $680 million earlier this year in one of the worst-timed (and most unpopular) media purchases in recent memory, is unsurprisingly being forced to lay people off. The paper is cutting 100 jobs, about 5% of its total workforce. Details of the cuts, in that inimitable corporate internal layoff memo style, below:

♦ Newsday is slashing 100 jobs. [Newsday]
♦ More on the cutbacks at CNBC and some cost-cutting measures at OK! [NYP]
♦ Bill O'Reilly is giving up his syndicated radio show. [NYDN]
♦ The New Yorker's Rick Hertzberg was ambushed by Bill O'Reilly operatives outside his apartment building. Confusion and hilarity ensues. [HuffPo]
♦ Oprah Winfrey was named the most powerful woman in entertainment as part of the Hollywood Reporter's "Power 100" issue. [THR]
♦ Neal Boulton, the attention-seeking former editor of Men's Fitness, is writing a book about life as a bisexual. [P6]
♦ Lauren Zalaznick says that NBC is not interesting in selling iVillage. [WWD]
♦ George Rush and Joanna Molloy are stepping down as daily gossips for the Daily News, but they'll stay on with the paper with a Sunday column. [NYDN]

♦ Gordon Gekko will live again: A sequel to Wall Street is in the works, although Michael Douglas has yet to sign on to the pic. [Variety]
♦ The downturn has been good for financial news sites: CNNMoney.com and BusinessWeek.com have both experience record growth. [WWD]
♦ The new issue of Rolling Stone is shorter and skinnier than issues past. [AP]
♦ Andy Lack, the former president of NBC News (and, more recently, the relatively unsuccessful CEO of Sony Music) is joining Bloomberg L.P. as CEO of the company's multimedia group. [NYO]

Newsday reporter Rocco Parascandola either drew the short straw at the assignment desk yesterday, or he sincerely believes that a five-year-old's opinion on the graffiti menace is worth 700 words. A mouthy little law-and-order kindergartener on Long Island got so worked up by an earlier Newsday story on taggers that he had his grandpa transcribe his tiny thoughts on the issue into a letter, which warranted another Newsday story, in which everybody comes off as monumentally stupid. Particularly Newsday: