The New York Times has announced it will collaborate with NBC News/MSNBC on 2008 presidential election coverage. The agreement will allow The New York Times to use NBC’s political videos on its NYTimes.com website, while MSNBC.com will be able to use national political content from NYTimes.com on its site.

NBC News and The New York Times will both have first access to breaking news from one another. (Of course, The New York Times is usually last with the news, not first.)

Meanwhile, Business Week’s Jon Fine has some wise advice to Times’s publisher:

Memo from Jon Fine to Arthur Sulzberger: Understand that no matter which road you take, the next few years will be awful. They will expose you, your family and your paper to scrutiny and criticism as never before… You can stay today’s course, toughing out investor dissent and market disgust and, eventually, land the Times on some currently unknown safer terrain. (That’s the best-case scenario, by the way.) Or swallow hard, sell a bunch of properties, find a billionaire angel or two, make an offer for the 81 percent of the common shares your family does not own, and go private.