We know that, in general, the papers have been talking about ways to make more money from their products, including subscriptions and microtransactions, and have been talking about this for months. And we know, via the Atlantic’s James Warren, that the subject of yesterday’s meeting was “Models to Monetize Content” and that the agenda included sessions titled “Journalism Online: Presentation on proposed service to charge for access to newspaper content and to license that content that (sic) online aggregators” and “Fair Syndication Consortium/Attributor.”

That first session sounds pretty straightforward. What’s that second one about? I asked the PR firm that reps Attributor, the content-tracking service referred to in the session’s title, and it declined comment. But it did refer me to the Web page for the Fair Syndication Consortium, which it turns out is the name for the Attributor-led program that wants to get the likes of Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO) to share some of the ad revenue they make when they sell ads against copyrighted content.

You can read more about that in this Wall Street Journal story published in April. See? Not so mysterious, after all.

Back story: Hirschorn, a former Viacom executive (and general NYC media star–New York Magazine, Inside.com, etc.) published a widely noticed column this month that took a gander at the New York Times’s troubled finances and concluded that it was “plausible” that the paper could go out of business in May.

This week, the Times responded with a lengthy letter tut-tutting Hirschorn for breaches of protocol–”It’s not unusual that a journalist calls the subject of a piece before actually publishing the article or column. In fact, in some areas of journalism that’s standard practice.”–and arguing that he’d overstated his case.

Today, Hirschorn responds with a mea-sorta-culpa of his own, which you can see at the The Atlantic’s site (which is really good these days). Part of the problem, he says: The Times didn’t release some details about its financials until his article had gone to press.

Verdict: Both sides are correct! The New York Times (NYT) will not fold in May, when its $400 million credit revolver closes up. And the New York Times is in serious financial trouble. More details on the latter from my former employer, Henry Blodget, who did a nice job of explaining the Times’s credit crunch yesterday.

The big picture: This debate–will the New York Times exist by the end of 2009?–would have been inconceivable a year ago. That fact that it’s happening now underscores just how quickly the industry’s fortunes have declined.