[malvosenior]

They do threaten it though. They could elevate competitors voices or choose to filter the NYT from results of weigh them lower. I'm sure social media and search both drive a huge amount of NYT traffic. The only time I ever read it is when it's linked here.

[Despegar]

Facebook already made that change a long time ago to emphasize sharing of photos, status updates, etc over news.

NYT, WaPo, WSJ have all done fine while other publications that were founded on the premise of social traffic have gone out of business.

They're destination sites and brands in and of themselves, they don't rely on third party referral traffic.

[malvosenior]

This is incorrect. I assure you they get a large porition of their traffic from referrals and Google search results (and Google News). They were literally just complaining about this yesterday:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/09/business/media/google-new...