Quite conservative, more representative of the rural central Illinois communities it serves than the Champaign-Urbana area. Locally, most would refer to it as "center-right" on editorial policy. Many parts of the country might say "far right". This might not be such an issue if they weren't the only newspaper for a huge swath of the state.
The much bigger problem, in my opinion, is just plain terrible journalism. I was interviewed years ago about my work in a scientific area. The resulting article was extraordinarily bad, it would have been better if it had never been written. One of my quotes was paraphrased so badly, it ended up saying in the article the opposite of what I had said during the interview. If they don't have anyone scientifically competent on staff, they have no business writing an article about science. They also have a tendency to uncritically parrot press releases from the university, government, etc, instead of actually doing investigative reporting. This is an endemic problem in American media, but it is really a shame when they are the only ones who have the chance to do such reporting locally.
Oh, and they just started charging for online access. Sorry buddy, if I'm not willing to pay for the NYT, I'm definitely not willing to pay for the N-G.