It seems that the New York Times may be on its last legs.  Broadly speaking print journalism is dying quickly as revenue from print publishing declines and revenues from Internet operations have not caught up.  With the down turn, they are having an additional problem in that getting lines of credit to keep them afloat have become difficult and ad revenues are down.  They are not in good shape.

My biggest concern with this is that, broadly speaking, the trends that have pushed our news media to become more opinion oriented and partisan seem to be accelerating.  This has happened because simple reporting of fact has become a commodity with rapidly declining value.  To illustrate the point, go to Google news and look at the headlines and see that there are hundreds of newspapers all reporting the exact same thing.  Much of the "reporting" is just rehashing of the same wire service article.  

The problem, of course is that as these news outlets struggle to survive, the resources dedicated to news gathering and objective analysis are dwindling.  They can't survive on rehashing the same wire article and so they cannot maintain a staff of reporters to cover local events that would ultimately make them the source of other wire articles.  Yes, amateurs have stepped up to an extent, reporting on what's going on around them, but they have limited resources, and you end up with a serious signal to noise problem. 

In the long run I feel like this will lead to people being less informed and less aware of the world around them.  People will seek out their information sources and be informed in limited ways, but there will be less common basis of understanding between people.  This has already happened to an extent and if you saw the folks who genuinely believed Obama was a Muslim, you got a glimpse of the kind of idiocy that can happen when people are lost in their own little media bubbles.