My take on the New York Times as a business is that it’s a great publication with real value within the right structure (as part of Bloomberg, for instance), but it probably won’t flourish financially again as a family-owned, independent company.

Financial journalist David Warsh was perplexed by the Times’ internal “Innovation Report” that was recently leaked and has written a scathing article on the topic for Politico Magazine. The opening:

“For all the reporting about the unceremonious manner in which Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. replaced executive editor Jill Abramson with Dean Baquet, the strongest evidence that the needle on his tenure as publisher of the New York Times has reached the danger zone is the company’s internal “Innovation Report” that someone at the New York Times Co. leaked last week, perhaps in hopes of offsetting the bad publicity.

Prepared by an eight-person newsroom team led by Sulzberger’s son, Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, the glossy, 96-page report is likely to have the opposite effect. It amounts to a clarion call to blow up the 163-year-old business in order to go into competition with the likes of BuzzFeed, Vox, Business Insider, the as-yet unformed First Look Media and the Huffington Post. And what a recipe for disaster that would be: abandoning the great news and insight that is at the heart of the Times brand to chase after audience in a game it can never hope to win.

Astoundingly, the report doesn’t so much as mention the Times’ much more menacing digital competitors, Bloomberg News and Reuters, breakthrough innovators whose news-gathering resources are far greater than those of the newspaper company. On every page, the ‘Innovation Report’ betrays its authors’ failure to understand what the Times’ fundamental business is about.”