After much internal discussion and tons of outside advice, the New York Times is now asking a constituency that really counts how much it would pay for online content: print subscribers. In a survey that started out Thursday, the NYT offers multiple scenarios, including one at $5 a month for all content and a discounted version one at $2.50 a month for print subscribers.

New York Times Co. (NYSE: NYT) spokeswoman Catherine Mathis explained by e-mail: “The purpose of the survey is really to reach out to our home-delivery subscribers and understand how they would react to a pay model for the website. We are evaluating a variety of scenarios where access to our content, in varying amounts, would require a fee.” When I asked if there was any scenario that would block off all content, Mathis replied: “No, this research isn’t testing that scenario.”

Photo: RossinaBossioB

Universal Music is linking up with another digital music distributor, albeit this time a less traditional one. The company said it had signed a strategic alliance with TuneCore, a startup that in exchange for a one-time fee will take anyone’s song and distribute it to major online digital music stores. Universal Music will offer its “artist-discovery, marketing, and upstreaming opportunities” to TuneCore customers—and in the process get access to new talent. It also gets an added bonus: Guitar Center is a TuneCore investor and Universal Music will now be able to distribute its records at all 200 Guitar Center stores. The company invested last year in digital music distribution company InGrooves, although that deal involved Universal Music using InGrooves for “a variety of digital distribution, promotional, and royalty management” services, according to Digital Music News.

With social media and user-generated content increasingly influencing mainstream news coverage, it was only a matter of time before that influence made its way over to entertainment news. Blogs like TMZ and Jezebel may attract tons of user comments—but they’re not crowd-sourcing the stories they cover. One site that’s trying to combine citizen journalism, social media and celebrity gossip is iGossip.com; out of beta today, users can post, comment on and share articles about their favorite celebrities.

High time someone asked harder questions: Tagged, the San Francisco-based social network that has taken heat for digging into anyone address books and sending invite e-mails to all, is now about to be sued by Andrew Cuomo, New York’s attorney general. From a statement by AG’s office: it plans to sue “for deceptive email marketing practices and invasion of privacy…Tagged devised an illegal plan to lure new members and artificially inflate traffic on its site. Consumers who visited Tagged were tricked into providing the company with access to their personal email contacts, which the company then used to send millions of promotional emails. Tagged disguised these solicitations to make them appear as if they were coming from a personal contact, when they were actually spam.” The statement goes on to say this happened from April to June this year, but I recall getting such e-mails from purported users last year as well (and I mentioned it in a funding post I did last year).

Photo: Flickr

While satirical newspaper The Onion has got a lot of mileage out of the “death of newspapers” meme—such as this brief—CEO Steve Hannah has warned the staff that the fake news business isn’t immune from the industry’s ad revenue problems. And so, in a memo obtained by Gawker, Hannah says that despite cutting expenses by $6 million, staffers must collaborate more on driving business, especially in light of the decision to lay off five members of the sales team last week. Therefore, Hannah writes, “Saying ‘no’ to an advertiser whose desires don’t exactly match your wishes is a losing game.”

Photo: AP Images

Updated In the latest round of will he-won’t he, Rupert Murdoch told his own Fox Business Network not to expect a Kindle-like device from News Corp (NYSE: NWS). Speaking in Sun Valley, where he is participating in the Allen & Co. conference, Murdoch said: “I don’t think that’s likely. We’re looking and talking to a lot of laboratories and big companies around the world, like Sony (NYSE: SNE) and Samsung. We’re all working on wireless readers for books or newspapers or for magazines.  I think they’re a year or two away being marketed in a mass way, high quality ones, and we’ll be absolutely neutral. We’re happy to have our products distributed over any device provided it’s only going to subscribers paying for it.” The video is embedded below.

News Corp. has a mixed track record on selling device subscriptions so far. The Wall Street Journal and Times of London offer Kindle subscriptions, but Murdoch has been quite open about his dislike of the way Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) maintains control of the customer relationships. At the same time, WSJ.com’s iPhone and BlackBerry apps debuted free—albeit with warnings that paying up would be required down the line. We reported last week that Dow Jones is surveying WSJ.com iPhone app uses about willingness to pay and how it might affect or fit in with other subscriptions. No price points were offered and we were told that the timing for a change had not been set.

CNBC’s new Sun Valley bureau gets to use a video camera instead of Twitter, and is doing some stellar interviews out in the sun, where else. The consensus on the real economy and ad economy from the media titans:

—WPP’s Sir Martin Sorrell: No sign of bottom
—NBCU’s Jeff Zucker: Sign of bottom
—BET founder Robert Johnson: Umm, wait and see
—Random media M&A types: lotsa dry powder sitting on sidelines (a favorite phrase of theirs these days, btw)
—Activision Blizzard’s Bobby Kotick: I don’t care, games still rock
—Stereophonics (why not, it is a slow day): Maybe tomorrow

Wait, this is a joke?

Photo: Flickr / Dave Chen

Never mind that exits are now at a six-year low and that venture capitalists themselves continue to struggle to raise money. For the second quarter in a row, confidence among VCs in the Valley is up. The streak follows six consecutive quarters of decline starting in mid-2007, according to an ongoing survey of VCs by the University of San Francisco. The survey has a small sample size—42 venture capitalists—but is widely followed and is considered to be a leading indicator of the sector’s health.

The 5,000 Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA) subscribers taking part in the company’s planned online VOD trial this summer will have access to 300 movies and some original programming from Starz Entertainment—if they already subscribe to the premium network. The Comcast On Demand Online trial is the first toe in the water for the largest U.S. cable operator—and the most public effort right now showcasing the TV Everywhere concept championed by Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes and Comcast CEO Brian Roberts. Starz is the first premium net to sign on for the experiment; talks are are ongoing with others, including HBO and Showtime.

Collective Intellect, a Boulder, CO-based provider of social media monitoring services for businesses, has raised another $3.1 million in funding, according to an SEC filing just filed (embedded below). This adds to the $9.6 million it has raised in two previous rounds, from investors such as Grotech Capital, Appian Ventures, Croghan Investments and Crawley Hatfield Capital. The company’s service does what a slew of other such companies—Nielsen BuzzMetrics, BuzzLogic, Radian6, Networked Insights and others—offer: tracking blogs, social nets and other services for business intelligence purposes, focusing it on the ad/marketing/branding community across various industry sectors including media. The company, founded in 2005, recently signed on MTV Networks (NYSE: VIA) as a client, working to help them uncover how consumers perceive and engage with its brands, content and marketing, or so it says.

»  The ad collapse across all media is here for good, so we’d better get used to it. [Fortune]

»  A guide to understanding Plain Dealer columnist Connie Schultz’s (pictured) stand for copyright law changes. [Editor and Publisher]

»  NBC Universal (NYSE: GE) is finding that selling ads on its cable outlets is easier than to its broadcast mothership, shifting the negotiations in the advertisers’ favor. [Ad Age]

»  Was Twitter’s feelings hurt in Sun Valley? [LA Times]

»  The Tennessean sadly distributed a pre-printed section of its paper with former quarterback Steve McNair, who was murdered this weekend, on its cover. [Editor and Publisher]

»  Was promoting Ned Hooper to Cisco’s chief strategy officer good for its consumer strategy? [GigaOM]