Nobody pays for news from the NYT. NYT is a game developer that also provides news on the side. Their games are their main draw; my gf subscribes and never reads the news.
The legacy media were advertising companies who also happened to provide news. People aren't willing to subscribe for advertising, but they will for games.
If we're going by anecdata, here's another data point: I subscribe to NYT and don't play any of their games. Yes, I read it for the articles but also, to a large degree, for the subscriber comments as well. Similarly to the reason I frequent Hacker News. And to stay up to date with what has been my home for a long time. And also NYT Cooking, though I only access that once in a blue moon.
It's fascinating to me that people would pay to read obvious political propaganda.
I get that the state-sponsored "news" in many EU countries is heavily politically coloured, but why would something like NYT be if they have paying subscribers? I never did the research, but I'm guessing they must have huge additional streams of income besides payments from readers?
Don’t take it too seriously. NYT reporting contrary to the reader’s politics = propaganda/shilling. NYT reporting in line with the reader’s politics = hard hitting journalism speaking truth to power.
You think nobody accused the NYT of propaganda during the Pentagon Papers years? Or ultimately, any other publication during any other period? What's new?
It's a form of tithing. You give to the propagandists providing the slant you align with, even if they're wealthy billionaires. It's been common for belief communities for centuries. Poor people do it for access to wealthy individuals or as a form of gambling on the promises of the propaganda, and wealthy individuals, when they give, are also doing so for influence (access to poor people en masse). Its propaganda all the way down.
Traditionally it was ads that contributed most of the money a newspaper took in, but the fact that people were paying for the paper re-assured the people buying the ads that the papers were actually being read.
NYT is an exception, or more specifically it's much bigger than most other news shops and has the luxury of having a large loyal customer base, a brand reputation to defend, and a full time business analysis and data science team to upkeep its excellence. Your local papers are barely scraping by and are mostly owned by hedge funds whose primary objective to squeeze the consumer via judicial usage of paywalls and clickbaits. A commitment to truth and deep investigative reporting for them does not keep the lights on. The other papers and magazines are all subsidized by billionaires or other vested interests. The price for those is indoctrination.
Just like the old days, when people would subscribe to the daily newspaper for the crossword, the comics, the TV listings, the want ads, or the ads and coupons with the Sunday paper.
NYT is really just making the old newspaper model work in the new age, albeit with higher reliance on subscription revenue and less an ad revenue.
I’m reasonably sure that most of the national-level news media companies have been owned by millionaires (and now billionaires) for the last century. William Randolph Hearst, E.W. Scripps, the Ochs-Sulzberger family, Raoul H. Fleischmann, Cyrus H. K. Curtis are a few of the prominent wealthy owners of nationally-distributed news outlets and publications in 1925. Back farther to the Civil War you find more “independent” publications but it’s a challenge to determine which of them were privately owned by individuals of considerable wealth vs. those owned by their publishers who may or may not have been wealthy.
That's no different from the other papers and magazines.
Paid subscriptions have never been a significant source of revenue to newspapers. They relied on advertisements, just like the websites that killed them.
That's not entirely true for NYT as OP mentioned. NYT is 170 years old. They have been through many phases and models.
Luckily NYT is a public company and you can look up their revenue split on the SEC website going back to 1994. In 1994 they had 35% revenue from circulation vs 65% from ads. In 2021 it was 24% ads and 68% subscribers and 8% "Other"
The Washington Post is also a public company (before 2013). In their 2009 filing, they state that the newspaper's revenue (in 2008) was 51% ads, with the other 49% not attributed.
At that time operating expenses exceeded revenues by 25 million dollars, though this was not an immediate problem for them because they owned several other more profitable companies.
By contrast, in that same year the New York Times announced that they had managed to stave off insolvency by securing a large personal loan from Carlos Slim, who went on to become their biggest shareholder.
How are we distinguishing between these two newspapers? What's supposed to be "exceptional" about the New York Times?
https://www.axios.com/2024/01/29/wordle-nyt-games-news-media...
The legacy media were advertising companies who also happened to provide news. People aren't willing to subscribe for advertising, but they will for games.