Penelope Muse Abernathy of the University of North Carolina has written a paper in anticipation of an upcoming conference on nonprofit media at Duke. Her piece, “A Nonprofit Model for the New York Times?”, considers four possible nonprofit models for the paper:
- (1) establishing an endowment
- (2) support from a foundation
- (3) purchase by a university, and
- (4) purchase by a so-called “angel” investor.
You can read Abernathy’s paper 
and the New Yorker commentary here.