Chris: sensible comments, as always.

• Provide much-needed funding for NYT journalists and their research.
• Provide more data to be researched from user content. Information is the most valuable commodity now. While I don’t recommend sharing or selling it, the information gleaned from NYT user profiles, blogs, and forums could be a powerful research tool.
• Provide more information for research from the deeper granularity in local news data. Even without increased user participation this could be very useful. Think about writing on military bases and having the latest columns, editorials, and articles from the Fort Hood region consolidated and on your screen.
• Could expand the NYT’s readership considerably by making themselves more locally relevant.
• Could serve as a force for good on the local level, forcing local news groups, online and off, to hold themselves to a higher standard if they hope to compete.

I know that the “New York” can never be taken out of New York Times (and I would not want to do so). But speaking as a non-New Yorker, if the paper of record chooses to dive into a new level of existence that expands its sphere of local awareness and interaction with the rest of the world, I say, Go for it! I think a lot of us would be ready to dive right in with you.

Before they try to embrace web 2.0 goofiness, working to improve the writing, fact-checking, and ethics might be a better place to start. The NYTimes, for example, helped lead us to Iraq with reporting from journalist Judith Miller. Bad writing by one or two can hurt the bottom line for everyone.

The one thing they can do that no one else can do is not web 2.0 – it is world-class journalism.

Did they add the ability to send dots and dashes when their market share was threatened by the telegraph? Did they add orchestras and entertainers when radio bit into their market share? Did they build each reporter a TV studio when TV came on to the scene? No.

The new technologies are just tools.

Sure, give reporters newfangled networked notebooks and 2.0 pencils. At the end of the day, it is the quality of the writing that will decide if the NY Times will whither or grow, not the latest internet fad.

People love the writing that comes on the web, but they all want a newspaper to cuddle up with away from screens. We internet folks can’t provide that experience (unless the big papers abandon that world… then we’ll jump in and fill their void again)

Fight back and win? Easy. Do some real reporting on Murdoch.