This is a big deal to everyone. Independent, high-quality, high-integrity journalism is essential to society. Of three who provided it on a national scale, the

This is a big deal to everyone. Independent, high-quality, high-integrity journalism is essential to society. Of three who provided it on a national scale, the NY Times might be the last standing.[1] Now they are affiliated with someone who recruited other tech leaders by saying:[2] [We can be] "one of the most powerful political forces" because "We control massive distribution channels, both as companies and individuals. We saw the tip of the iceberg with SOPA/PIPA." To what degree is the Times part of that distrubtion channel? You and I may agree with their SOPA stance, but in general I want to make up my own mind and I need independent journalism to do that. Regarding the Times: Reading their internal report from last year[3] it was a frustrating to see how far behind they were in both development and perspective. If you haven't read it, some of it is shocking, at least to me. I hope the owners of the Times see themselves as stewards of an institution essential to society (not only the publication itself, and also independent, quality journalism), and will sell it to another responsible steward if they can't make it work. [1] Following and reading the 'serious' media closely for a long time, my perspective is that maybe 10 years ago there were three top-end sources: The Times, the Wall St Journal, and the Washington Post. The WSJ is now published by the same people as Fox News, which (along with their willingness to publish absurd lies on their editorial page) tells me about their journalistic ethics. The Post now publishes increasingly strident and poorly considered stories, seemingly aiming for BuzzFeed. People love to criticize the Times; partly that's a result of being #1 in any field. They are imperfect as is every human institution, but if you look at all they do, we would be much worse off without them. For example, why was the Times the only publication (AFAIK) kicked out of China? Bloomberg openly made the concession to not criticize the government; how do the others avoid trouble? [2] http://www.politico.com/story/2013/04/mark-zuckerberg-immigration-groups-status-stumbling-89652.html http://www.politico.com/story/2013/04/mark-zuckerberg-immigr... [3] https://www.scribd.com/embeds/224608514/content?start_page=1&view_mode=scroll&access_key=key-TiQrYKIlOq2iHdtIubdB&show_recommendations=false https://www.scribd.com/embeds/224608514/content?start_page=1...