If those were the only two options, sure, NYT wins. But there are plenty of free options better than Breitbart. BBC News, NPR, and The Guardian are all decent, on par with NYT in my opinion. For local news, I've mostly found small sites that follow specific local issues to be better than the newspapers, e.g. in Houston the best weather news is Space City Weather [1], and in DC the best source for transit/urbanist news is Greater Greater Washington [2]. There are pretty good smaller news sites and blogs for specific issues too, e.g. I read SCOTUSblog for Supreme Court news, and FiveThirtyEight for stats-oriented sports and US politics coverage. For "ongoing" world-news events, I usually just read what Wikipedia has synthesized. None of these have paywalls, though some do ask for donations.
(I do subscribe to a few magazines though, just not newspapers.)