The likelihood that the New York Times is suddenly going to cease printing by May, even in this accelerated bad economy, are none, to less than none. However(!) that isn’t going to stop everyone from talking about it endlessly &#151 apparently it’s the new ‘web is killing print’ and/or ‘Google is killing journalism’ conversation. To wit: over at the NewYorker.com James Surowiecki picked up on Felix Salmon‘s post about why The Atlantic article that started the NYT end times ball rolling makes very little sense.

The New York Times is not a small newspaper. It has an enormous display-advertisement inventory, and sells most of it at high rates. It’s also incredibly well placed to go national, as smaller papers close, and become a replacement for people who’ve lost their local paper and who shudder at the prospect of ever reading USA Today.

Meanwhile over at Poynter Online Rick Edmonds concurs that the story has “flunked the basic math.”

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So now we know how much a front-page ad on the New York Time print edition goes for! According to the NYP a piece of that “sacred” action will cost you $75,000 on weekdays and $100,000 on Sundays and buyers are required to “commit to buying the ad 26 times during the year — for a total of almost $2 million.” So that’s all good, since like we said yesterday this is an idea that is long past due and the Times needs all the help it can get.

Of course, now the next question/controversy (which we touched on in this morning’s Menu) is who will be the first to try and buy that ad space and get turned down? As in, what if Al Jazeera decides that’s the best way to spend their money? Or Fox News? One imagines the PR generated by such a move would be well worth the money spent.

That being said, according to next month’s Atlantic there may not even be a New York Times in 26 weeks!

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Lots of New York Times news to discuss today! You may recall, way back in the early days of August before Sarah Palin was even a glimmer in John McCain‘s eye, that we told you how the NYT Co. was under increases pressure to cut its dividends (simply put: “it has to stop paying its shareholders so much money and use some of its finite cash to pay off its bonds”). Bloomberg is now reporting the company is considering doing just that, or perhaps even dropping dividends altogether(!) after “reporting a loss on severance costs and a steeper drop in advertising sales.” Keep in mind that the NYT Co. has a $1.1 billion debt and pays the controlling Ochs-Sulzberger family a $25.1 million a year dividend. Time for some belt-tightening we thinks!

But that is not all, by a long shot. Because if you were the national paper of record, as well as (by far), the best example of how a newspaper should go about transitioning to the online world, and you found yourself struggling, what would you do? Hire a celebrity for your op-ed pages, of course!

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