[MaybiusStrip]

Twitter became the de-facto source of real-time news because there was no good alternative. Replacing a reputable institution like the NYT is a completely different game.

It's not even a good comparison. The NYT is a daily newspaper. The better-written pieces on medium have aspirations closer to what you'd find in The New Yorker or Vice. You have absolutely no precedent for thinking public curation will yield better results than the professionals who work for those institutions. In fact, most of the evidence so far (reddit, digg, etc...) indicates the contrary.