[athenot]

That's a podcast, not a news article. It's designed to be more entertaining, not just dry facts. The link of the podcast you give, however, has 6 links to background information.

Full disclaimer: I subscribe to the NYT. The paper+online editions. But any newspaper has different sections: dry reporting, rushed breaking news, in-depth analyses, op-ed commentaries, etc. The style of each is different. More importantly, the purpose of each type of article is different.

A lot of us got used to only reading newspaper articles via google or via our social media feed—appearing between a cat video and a political meme. After a while we start to all consider them the same. Context is lost. To me that is the greatest harm of social media. We strive for efficient use of our time but in the process we lost the context of what we're reading.

That's why I'm ok with paying a paper to compile and organize the information for me. Do I agree with every article the NYT puts out? Nope. Do I get irritated at articles written from particular biases? Yes, it happens. But overall the info is of quality and organized in such a way as to be the most efficient use of my time.

As a side-note I picked the NYT because I happen to like their in-depth data visualization group (another disclosure: I happen to like d3.js and its creator used to work there). But there are plenty of other quality papers out there who also do original journalistic work.

[neoburkian]

"This is an opinion show, and not part of our news program" is an excuse used to justify FoxNews conservative propaganda for years. I expect the NYT to be better than that.

Nobody should be in a position where they have to say "that's a podcast" in order to defend the NYT.