An even bigger problem for ALL USA and Canadian newspapers isn't their debt burden or drop off in advertisers. The largest news print paper mill company (which is actually a bunch of paper mill companies in both the USA and Canada) will be closing down its plants this year. The cost of newsprint-grade paper is going to skyrocket throughout Canada and the USA. Don't know if this has made the news in any papers in the USA. But the "mother ship" that owns those paper mills is in Europe and they are refusing to invest any more money in the North American paper mills. They also are not going to sell them. They'd like to sell them, but there are no buyers.
There needs to be a major paradigm shift in delivering quality print journalism, especially because the technology exists to deliver well-balanced news without printers ink and paper. I receive all of the magazines to which I still subscribe using Zinio. I get a link in a monthly e-mail notice and download a digital version of the magazine that displays and flips pages exactly as if I had the printed copy, but with the added advantage that a simple keypad touch zooms in just enough that I don't need to use reading glasses to adjust for mild astigmatism.
I seriously doubt, however, The New York Times will go under any time soon. However, if it did fold I wouldn't miss it as much as the International World Tribune (owned by the New York Times). But the only daily newspapers I buy are Clarín, Diario, Le Monde, and the Los Angeles Times -- depending where I happen to be in the world. The Reno Gazette and Las Vegas Sun are purchased by subscribers primarily for the classifieds. The Deseret News, despite being propped up by the mormon church at any cost, is always out sold by The Salt Lake Tribune which turns a profit on its own.
But the New York Post? I've never understood why New Yawkers pour over what is, in my opinion, the Regis Philbin of print journalism. As I've written many times in various posts, journalism majors are taught (among many other things) how to cast their writing so it's accessible by a reading audience with an 8th grade education. This is even easier for them to do in this "electronic age" by running their copy through a software that rates it with the Gunning FOG index and picks out sentences that require too much of an attention span to read and suggests alternate synonyms for seven-dollar words that an 8th grader might trip over. It's the editor's decision to "pump up" or "dumb down" accordingly. But the New York Post is written for those whose reading skills quit developing after the 6th grade (I'm not joking). The same FOG index is applied to USA Today, yet another 6th grade-level paper which is only good for lining the bottom of bird cages.
God forbid that the US newspaper reading public be required to sound out big words.