The numbers, via parent company GE’s (GE) release this morning: NBCU posted a $732 million operating profit, up 13 percent year over year, on revenue of $4 billion, which is down 20 percent. Important footnote: As GE explained during its earnings call, if you adjust NBCU’s performance for one-time gains, operating profit would actually be down nine percent.

Still, even that result is an improvement over previous quarters. So perhaps those numbers will cheer Comcast investors, who have been beating up the cable company ever since news of its talks to buy NBCU surfaced last month.

GE usually spends very little time discussing NBCU’s performance during its earnings calls, since investors are much more concerned with the rest of the company’s performance, and in particular, its troubled finance arm. But perhaps the pending Comcast (CMCSA) deal will change that this time around.

Some notes from the earnings call: GE CEO Jeff Immelt has joined the “recession is over” crowd, but only mentioned NBCU briefly during his opening statement. He says scatter pricing–ads that marketers buy during the TV season, as opposed to the spring “upfronts”–is “better.”

GE booked a $283 million one-time gain from the sale of some of its stake in the A&E cable channel. And it took charges on write-downs related to its stake in NDTV, its Indian TV investment, as well as the Weather Channel, which it bought alongside some private equity groups for $3.5 billion last year. But the company still ends up $89 million ahead in the one-time events column–the equivalent of a penny per share of earnings.

And as the company explains in the table below, if you take out the one-time gains, NBCU’s quarterly profit increase turns into a loss. This is a reverse of previous quarters, when the company told investors to ignore one-time losses that made horrible earnings look even worse.

More color on the scatter market: CFO Keith Sherin says Q4 pricing is up “double digits” for primetime TV spots, and more than 20 percent for cable TV.

Asked a vague question about the proposed NBCU deal, Immelt gave a vague answer, noting that while “NBCU is a great franchise that’s consistently delivered income growth and cash…we always evaluate our portfolio.” He then suggested that GE doesn’t need to sell NBCU, which is the right thing to say. “We just want to be ready for several scenarios….We don’t have a specific pronouncement, or a specific need for cash.”

Here’s GE’s broad-stroke description of NBCU’s quarter (click to enlarge):

For the record: Disney (DIS) says it always intended to move the company, which offers “bite-sized ideas for green living” via email and a Web site, from its corporate strategy group to its interactive division, which will happen later this year. At that point, “it will still continue in some form,” says spokesman Michelle Bergman.

That doesn’t sound good. Disney says it plans to conduct a review of the unit, so it’s not ready to answer some basic questions about the email newsletter company. Like: Are co-founders Heather Stephenson (who lives and works in San Francisco) and Jennifer Boulden (who until this summer lived and worked in Bozeman, Mont.; she’s now in Los Angeles, I’m told) staying on? Will Disney have to take a write-down on the property? Will there be layoffs? “It’s too early to say. I can’t tell you,” Bergman says.

Okay. But If I had to bet, I’d say at least some of the dozen-plus employees will be hitting the job market.

Disney paid a reported $20 million for the property a year and a half ago, and the plan was to create a big green-centered business around it, but that hasn’t panned out, sources said. The company, founded in 2005, is one of the many lifestyle newsletter businesses backed by Bob Pittman’s Pilot Group.

Comcast (CMCSA) bought DailyCandy, the best known of Pittman’s stable, for $125 million a little more than a year ago. That was surely one of the last “pre-Lehman” Web 2.0 M&A deals, but grunts and murmurs out of Philadelphia and Pilot indicate the business has held up during the recession. And Thrillist, a “DailyCandy for dudes” effort that has yet to sell, seems to be booming.

GE’s (GE) NBC Universal, for instance, just posted second-quarter results that were as bad as its first quarter. Jeff Zucker’s TV and movie unit said revenue was down eight percent and profit down 41 percent for the three months ending June 30; in the previous quarter, revenue was down only two percent, while profit was down 43 percent.

Per usual, GE said NBC’s cable business was doing okay (which makes sense since it gets a guaranteed income stream from cable operators), but that its overall ad business and local TV markets were getting killed. Or in technical terms, they’re seeing “continued pressure.”

Three months ago, GE went out of its way to make the point that if you stripped out one-time charges like write-downs, its earnings drop would have only been in the 15-25 percent range. It may make the same argument again during the earnings call later this morning, so I’ll check back then.

UPDATE: Once again, NBC is arguing that its earnings aren’t that terrible. The company had to take nearly $100 million in charges this quarter, and last year it had some one-time gains. So really, the company argues, its earnings are down a mere 24 percent. Here’s the highlight reel from the earnings call. Note the lines about upfront sales being slow and Web display ads being hit. Click chart to enlarge.

Warner, which told investors last month that it had written off the $16 million it had invested in the Web music start-up, plus another $4 million in debt, has made a new deal with the company and will get another slug of equity. The big difference: This time, Warner isn’t cutting Imeem a check.

Instead, Warner will get more equity in Imeem in exchange for a renegotiated licensing deal that is supposed to 1) give Imeem a better chance of being able to pay Warner for use of its music and 2) reduce the amount of cash Imeem does pay out to Warner every quarter.

Both companies declined to comment. But multiple sources familiar with the transaction say it was tied to a funding round that Imeem just closed, a follow-up to the emergency money it took on earlier this spring. In total, I’m told, Imeem will have raised an additional $6.5 million this spring. No word on which investors ponied up cash.

But I do know that it wasn’t Warner Music Group (WMG), which already had to tell investors that the $20 million it put into the company previously was worthless. Warner still holds the shares it has written off, but it wasn’t going to pony up any more cash in the recapitalization.

So why make another deal with Imeem at all? The positive spin is that Warner’s earlier write-down was simply an accounting requirement, and that Warner really does like the streaming music company. I’m not sure how much enthusiasm Warner really has for Imeem, but at this point, taking a flier on the company is a no-risk bet: Instead of throwing good money after bad, Warner only has to give it access to its digital music catalog, which doesn’t cost the company a cent, and won’t show up on its books.

Best case scenario: Imeem survives and Warner’s stake is worth something again some day.

And if you want to be optimistic, the really good news here could be for the battered online music business in general, which has struggled to figure a model that works. Up to now, no one except Apple (AAPL) and Amazon (AMZN) has been able to figure out how to make a business out of providing music over the Web–in large part because of the music labels’ insistence on unworkable payment structures.

You could argue that this isn’t the labels’ problem, it’s the start-ups’ problem, and they shouldn’t have gotten into the business in the first place. But now that they’re in it, the labels can try to keep them alive or pull the plug entirely. Looks like they think they’re better off keeping them around.

After factoring out one-time charges and write-offs, Bob Iger and company earned 43 cents a share on revenue of $8.1 billion. Wall Street had been looking for 40 cents and $8.15 billion, respectively.

Iger: “We had a difficult second quarter due to the weak economy and other factors.”

The bright spot for the entertainment conglomerate is the same one you see at every media giant these days: Disney’s cable business. Revenue at ESPN and the Disney Channel was up four percent and operating income was up five percent. That’s because those powerhouse channels have locked in payments from cable operators that show up regardless of the economy’s state.

And that’s why you won’t see (much) programming from those channels on Hulu–there’s no way Iger is going to rile up the cable operators who pay for that programming by running it for free online.

Disney’s interactive group, which includes videogames and sites like Club Penguin, but not revenue from ABC.com and sales from Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes store, saw revenue decline 17 percent, and operating income drop two percent.

Here’s the breakdown by segment (click to enlarge):

Write-down watch: Disney took $203 million in “impairment charges”–accountant-speak for “the stuff we bought back then isn’t worth much now.” That includes “$108 million related to radio FCC licenses and $46 million related to an investment in an Indian media company.”

This follows on the heels of a lousy February quarter in which the company didn’t hit expectations.

Disney (DIS) is the first of several big media companies to report this week. News Corp. (NWS) weighs in tomorrow, followed by CBS (CBS) on Thursday.

The Disney earnings call is starting now. I’ll listen in and update as warranted.

Disney CFO Tom Staggs on ad market, economy: “While we believe the pace of decline has generally stabilized, we believe ad buyers and consumers remain cautious.”

During Q&A, Iger has a long monologue about online philosophy, Hulu, etc., but my Webcast cut him off before he was finished. Don’t know whether to blame Disney or Time Warner Cable (TWC) for that one….

In any event, here’s my paraphrase of what I could get down, with a smattering of quotes:

“We found that as we move product to the Web…at least [with regard to] piracy that we’re aware of, there’s been a stabilization….We feel that if we don’t put it online…it will be demanded by consumers, and they’ll find ways.”

Research on cannibalization and piracy in general is inconclusive and some research conflicts with other research we’ve seen. “Some of this is instinct, by the way. It’s not all based on research.”

We feel media consumption is moving to the Web and that media consumption may be expanding. We think we’re better being online than not being online. We realize that Web monetization doesn’t exist yet, at least not at TV-like levels, but we believe that eventually it will.

A lot of the consumption that we’re seeing is incremental because it’s a different demographic. The average age of consumers watching ABC.com and itunes is younger than the average age of those watching network TV. The Hulu demographic is generally younger than prime-time network demographics. So we don’t believe it’s cannibalization.

Yes, says WSJ.com Executive Editor Alan Murray, who alluded to his plans in an interview with Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab. Murray doesn’t go into any level of detail about what he has up his sleeve except to say that he’s thinking about niche products that might focus on energy, or a “news service for chief financial officers.”

In other words, trade newsletters, which have proven to be a very resilient business for the likes of McGraw-Hill (MHP).

The video of the interview is embedded below, and you can see a full transcript here. But here’s the relevant text:

Murray: We’re working on a premium initiative to launch a series of, as you say, niche or narrower information services that we can sell at a premium to smaller groups of subscribers on subjects that they care most about.

Question: What sort of subjects?

Murray: Oh, I mean, there are potentially thousands of them. Energy might be an example. Obviously a lot of our readers are deeply interested in financial subjects. Perhaps some sort of a news service for chief financial officers. There are a lot of ideas that are on the table. We’ve started prioritizing them–got a few that will probably come out first. But I’m not going to break that news on your video.

I’d complain about the Nieman crew not following up on this (and burying the lede, too–what are they teaching over there at Harvard?), but the fact is that Murray has been talking about this stuff internally for a while. So has his boss, WSJ Managing Editor Robert Thomson, so I’m not sure whether this qualifies as new news.

But it is worth noting that News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, who was just forced to take a huge write-down on the Journal, has sounded increasingly disenchanted with advertising-based businesses, period. You may recall that when Murdoch acquired the paper in 2007, he was geared to take down the pay wall surrounding the Web site altogether, as the New York Times (NYT) had done with its flagship site. Now it looks like News Corp. (NWS) is willing to put up even more walls.

Also, while I’m at it, the disclosure: The site you’re reading right now is owned by Dow Jones, which owns The Wall Street Journal. But as far as I know, we’ve got no plans to charge for it. Enjoy, gratis!

Alan Murray of The Wall Street Journal on charging for content from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo.

J.P. Morgan’s Imran Khan does some quick math and concludes that what Time Warner (TWX) is really saying is that ad revenue at AOL dropped 18 percent in the last quarter (see below for math). That’s awful, but believable: AOL ad revenue dropped six percent in the previous quarter, and as I noted last fall, those results only included a couple weeks of flat-out economic collapse.

This obviously doesn’t augur well for the rest of the Internet ad business, either. But only the most die-hard optimist thought that the Web was going to survive this thing unscathed anyway.

No comment from Time Warner on Khan’s math. We’ll see actual numbers Feb. 4, when CEO Jeff Bewkes announces the company’s year-end earnings results.

Khan’s estimate, from his note:

“We estimate that advertising revenue shortfall at AOL is at least $64M implying an 18.4% Y/Y advertising revenue decline. We make the following assumptions to arrive at this estimate: (1) we assume that half of the 1% shortfall in Y/Y Adjusted OIBDA growth that TWX press release attributes to both Publishing and AOL is due to online ad revenue shortfall; and (2) we assume a 100% incremental margin.”