Might Google Buy the New York Times?

I hope not. I agree that this would be a good exit for the NYT, and I love the NYT, but I don't get the feeling this is a good idea for either party. Google and the NYT are in pretty separate businesses, and I think it could be bad for Google's individual businesses if Google turned into a GM-style conglomerate.

On the other hand, if Google has some clever ideas to make the #1 American news source of the 20th century into a pioneer of news in the 21st century then I'll support it 100%. But this article is just some random guy speculating that it'd be a good fit.

Google's mission statement is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

The New York Times, on the other hand, is about _creating_ information. They also maintain a big archive, but that's not their first priority. Doesn't sound like a good fit to me.

I can tell you for sure that the big publishing companies are scrambling to find other ways to build up their online presence. I recently left a company that was catering to those publishers by building vertical social network communities for them. I feel like we may end up seeing an RIAA-type scramble of the big publishers (news corp, dow jones, reed reed elsevier) to stay relevant. Perhaps we already are, actually...

I can't see that it would work. Too different a culture, and really what would Google get out of it?