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NEW YORK The Long Island daily Newsday has been losing money for at least three years but turned a profit in the first half of 2008 because of a one-time tax change, its new owner said in a regulatory filing.

The report with the Securities and Exchange Commission offers a rare peek into a newspaper's finances. Newspaper companies typically aggregate the numbers for all their papers, but Newsday is the only newspaper property owned by Cablevision Systems Corp., which bought it from Tribune Co. this year for $650 million.

The accounting statements, however, do include Newsday's smaller publications, including the free New York daily amNewYork and the Pennysaver weekly shopper guide.

Cablevision said Friday that Newsday lost $80.8 million in 2007, down from $282 million in 2006 and $414 million in 2005. Advertising, circulation and other revenue fell each year, but the newspaper managed to cut expenses. The filing said Newsday cut 330 positions during those three years combined and more than 200 this year.

The biggest change from year to year is in the amount of losses attributed to "goodwill" and other intangible assets, such as a brand or intellectual property.

Newspaper companies have had to reduce their goodwill value because they expect less advertising revenue in the future, largely because of the migration of readers to the Internet. The amount of the reduction each year is counted as an expense.

Newsday would have been profitable or come closer to profitability in all three years without the goodwill charges.

In the first half of 2008, Newsday turned a profit of $127 million. But that was largely because of a change in tax treatment. According to the filing, by restructuring as a subchapter S corporation, the operations are exempt from most state and federal income taxes. Cablevision recorded $148 million in future tax savings as a one-time gain.

The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., owned by privately held Advance Publications Inc., also has posted losses for the past three years. It recently won union concessions and received voluntary buyouts to help reduce the losses or turn a profit.

Most newspaper companies, however, remain profitable, just less profitable than they used to be.

Newsday is the 11th largest newspaper in the country, according to the latest figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations, with 379,613 average paid weekday copies in the six-month period that ended in March.

Tribune, which sold Newsday to help pay down a $13 billion debt incurred when real estate mogul Sam Zell orchestrated a complex buyout and took the company private, retains a 3 percent ownership to gain a more favorable tax treatment than an outright sale would.