Just when you thought old media was dead. Word is that three media moguls are girding for battle over Newsday, the suburban New York newspaper.  

The New York Times and New York Sun report that Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corp., Mortimer Zuckerman, real estate developer and owner of the New York Daily News, and James Dolan, whose family owns cable operator Cablevision, are set to duke it out over the tabloid daily owned by the Tribune Company.

Newsday is an attractive paper because of its proximity to the affluent New York market. Based on Long Island, Newsday serves the suburban counties of Nassau and Suffolk and the city’s mostly middle class borough of Queens. The paper made a big push into Manhattan itself a decade ago with a large dedicated staff and a midtown office but withdrew after losing millions of dollars trying to compete with the New York Post, the Daily News, and, of course, The New York Times.

Why would savvy businessmen want to go after the dead tree business? Well, mostly because you can still make money in news. While most U.S. papers are seeing slow but steady declines in readership and advertising, what they earn from print still dwarfs the amount they make from online properties. Newsday could go for $350 to $400 million, according to newspaper analyst John Morton. That’s down from a price tag that might have reached $1 billion a few years back, but then the steady erosion to the web and the down market in real estate and Wall Street ads suggests times will be tough for a while.

Both Mr. Murdoch and Mr. Zuckerman, who go head-to-head in New York City via the New York Post and the Daily News, could use Newsday as reinforcement, adding another 387,000 readers and cutting some costs.

The Times reported that Murdoch was considering combining the back office operations of the two newspapers. Mr. Dolan, who has the much-disliked cable monopoly for the countries served by Newsday, could probably cross-promote his properties by owning both. He could also use Newsday’s content to support his cable news operation.

Interestingly, none of the three newspapers have terribly innovative web sites. The kindest word I'd use is “utilitarian.” But Mr. Murdoch, who recently acquired Dow Jones and its flagship The Wall Street Journal, along with MySpace earlier, is likely to focus attention on his print properties’ Internet presence in the near future, triggering a web arms race among New York’s print-centric tabloids.