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...
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.