Charley Brown and the Rocky Mountain News will be divorcing the Iron Chef and Shopzilla under a plan put forward Tuesday by media company E.W. Scripps.

The board of E.W.Scripps has approved a proposal to spin off its national cable networks and online properties such as the Food Network and uSwitch.com into the new Scripps Networks Interactive, while retaining its newspapers and local TV stations under the current corporate umbrella.

Wall Street has pushed media companies to disperse the “dark cloud” of print journalism as a means of unlocking the value of faster-growing cable and online franchises. Investors cheered the news, pushing up shares of E.W. Scripps $3.10, or 7.3 percent, to $45.38 in afternoon trading.

Edward Atorino, an analyst at The Benchmark Company, noted that Scripps is not the first to separate its faster-growing broadcast and online businesses from newspapers.

“It gives stockholders relief from the dark cloud of traditional media,” he said.

In January, The New York Times Company agreed to sell its nine local TV stations to private equity player Oak Hill Capital Partners for $575 million. On October 1, the Belo Group announced it was splitting into two companies, one for its newspaper properties and the other for its broadcast group.

The new publicly traded Scripps Interactive Networks will include HGTV, Food Network, DIY Network, the Fine Living Television Network, Great American Country, and their online businesses as well as shopping search engine Shopzilla and uSwitch, a web site designed to help customers switch their utility services like phone and television companies.

Current E.W. Scripps Chief Executive Kenneth Lowe is projected to become the CEO of that company, whose businesses have 2,100 employees and annual revenues of about $1.4 billion.

Questions immediately arose about the future of uSwitch, based in the United Kingdom, and Shopzilla, which competes against comparison-shopping search engines like PriceGrabber, Shopping.com, and Google’s Product Search.

In a conference call, Mr. Lowe hinted that Shopzilla and uSwitch might not fit with the rest of the new company’s properties.

“As far as Shopzilla and uSwitch, I think it gives us an opportunity to look a lot harder at those businesses and how they fit overall into our interactive strategy,” he said. Cincinnati-based Scripps bought Shopzilla for $525 million in 2005 and paid $366 for uSwitch in 2006.

Both online units have had a “substantial shortfall” in performance in recent months, Mr. Atorino said, perhaps making them eligible for a spot on the Scripps DIY (Do It Yourself) Network. “They’ve become fixer-uppers,” he added.

The remaining company, E.W. Scripps, with 10 local TV stations, newspapers in 17 markets, and a feature syndication business that is the home of Dilbert and Peanuts character Charlie Brown, is slated to be led by Rich Boehne, current executive vice president and chief operating officer of the combined company. That company has revenue of about $1.1 billion and 7,100 employees.

The spin-off is expected to take place as a tax-free stock dividend to shareholders in the second quarter of 2008.