> professional audience, not the general public.

Yeah but that doesn't help when the entire purpose, when what we need, is an informed general populace.

Financial Times has shocked me many times over on the quality of its reporting compared to other outlets. Even media critic Noam Chomsky says FT is often an exception in western biases

I don't think that's a useful model for a "paper of record" model like the NYT or formerly Washington Post. There's so much good to be had with a strong paper that isn't captured by it's ownership.

Business news still has paying customers, its everyone else that is flailing

I work with many people who pay for the subscription to play the games

I don't have numbers in front of me, but yes, NYT has basically said exactly that. Their games portfolio is a major driver of digital subscriptions.

They have a games-only subscription option: https://www.nytimes.com/subscription/games/

Their recently shipped scrabble clone is excellent! One of the cleanest scrabble / words-with-friends implementations I've played.

There's a joke in the news industry that the NYT is a games company with a loss-making news organization attached to it as a side-project.

I'm not sure about all of the ones they host, but for the crossword app you need to subscribe for full access.

The modern NYT has been described as a games company that occasionally engages in journalism

I mean, why not? Sometimes it seems to me that airlines make their money not on flights but on branded Credit Cards.

The Guardian has turned into Gawker with better spell checker. Everything I have read from them is culture war and extremely shallow lately.

Agree, if Bezos hadn’t alienated the readership, they’d probably be doing well.

I used to look up to him before he became an obsequious traitor.

> They historically had the best political coverage of DC

And then Bezos replaced veteran leaders with ideological leaders from the Murdoch empire. Then Bezos put his thumb on the scale and vetoed the paper's presidential endorsement in 2024, and 250,000 subscribers cancelled. Then Bezos dictated that the paper's opinion section will censor any idea that does not support conservative/libertarian/free-market ideology and 75,000 more subscribers cancelled.

Maybe the ideological reorientation along with savage cuts to the newsroom has something to do the loss of subscribers and the dire financial straits used to justify even more cuts to the newsroom?

There is a market for quality, fact-checked journalism that you can't get on podcasts and social media. But when you force that journalism through a right-wing ideological filter, you destroy the intrinsic value of independent journalism.

Of those only the journal is a newspaper. The Atlantic is a magazine and economist/politico are focused on a single news sector

The network effects. The strong get stronger and grow larger, creating a fly wheel. On X.com there are citizen journalists publishing and reposting tons of hyper local news, and I assume it also hits FB but I don’t use that. We don’t need as many proper media companies as we did decades ago. The Tier 3 media outlets died long ago, now WaPo tried to be tier 1 but it failed, and will die as a has-been slowly. Probably should switch to Washington DC gossip and scoops as its forte.

Subscribing to FAZ is closer to getting a new phone line or a gym membership than paying for a newspaper. Do they accept credit card now?

This is the modern media criticism equivalent of "I don't even own a television."

> I gave up on the NYT as a news source in their handling of the Iraq War. Prior to that it was a daily purchase.

That was more than 20 years ago. It's hardly relevant to the journalism landscape in 2026.

It's not inconceivable that in the near future, if you give up on the NYT, you give up on having a news source, period.

I don't understand the downvotes to your comment (and the few replies are grotesque...), but I definitely support the sentiment. If dropping the NYT over Iraq is not justified, then the concept of red lines loses its meaning.

You didn't lose much by the way, their handling of Gaza was equally despicable.

they are not an unbiased news source, they profit from being biased toward what elites with money for a subscription want to hear