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The financial times is doing well and has a better model IMO: expensive with a professional audience, not the general public.
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> 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.

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Keep in mind, our parents (age specific) and/or their parents parents paid for news and didn't question that setup. Advertisors then went there because that's where the eyeballs were. What we're seeing is that left to their own devices and lacking a war or famine to force behavior change people would rather cut their news source in favor of fluff.

It's not something the market will solve. The post 1940's US Media landscape was a direct reaction to multiple, non-contained wars in short succession. The political class doesn't feel they've "lost" control in a long time hence no urgency to fix it.

In a lot of cases we're seeing Advertising warp and destroy the industries they provide money to. It's not evil, just that industries start to invert whether the people or the advertisors matter.

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Sadly, I fully expect to see the cover price of The Economist reach twice the federal minimum wage.

If the Fed goes back to cutting rates, it could be soon.

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Access to information is not a solution to that. You can’t educate people who refuse to learn.
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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
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The Noam Chomsky who told Epstein "I’m really fantasizing about the Caribbean island.", or a different one? /s
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Chomsky the propaganda theorist, 8th most cited academic of all time, author of over 100 books, and person who misjudged the character of Epstein—as many did.

You know you're taking that quote out of context. I don't defend Chomsky's misjudgements but I think it's important to state there's been zero evidence in the Epstein leaks of any sexual or illegal favors happening between the two

This Guardian article from yesterday gives a complete overview of all the links found: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/03/epstein-file...

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You mean Epstein confidant, Cambodian genocide denier Noam Chomsky? Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the paper.
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Yes, Chomsky, the propaganda theorist, 8th most cited academic of all time, author of over 100 books, and person who misjudged the character of Epstein—as many did.
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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.
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> for a "paper of record" model like the NYT

NYT being a "paper of record" is something of a delusion of grandeur.

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Business news still has paying customers, its everyone else that is flailing
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> And their solution was games.

For a long time, the solution of most newspapers was classified ads. They've always financed news with non-news services.

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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.
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This is the modern media criticism equivalent of "I don't even own a television."
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How so? Growing up most of the time my family didn’t have a television. What are you saying I do read the NYT? I have no idea what point you are trying to make. My comment was in response to the comment about how the NYT had to resort to games for sustainability.
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Not a good analogy
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> 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.

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The internet has provided tremendous access to news outside of the NYT. I have not seen the NYT editorial board doing anything to improve their status. Didn’t Paul Krugman leave the times for integrity reasons?
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That is a REALLY wild take considering what the NYT functionally is.

It's also exactly the sort of take you'd see propagated by what the NYT functionally is, so I guess have fun with that? For me, seeing wild talk like that only underscores my complete, utter, earned distrust of the thing. All righty then, the New York Times is the only information, full stop. How nice for it.

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> so I guess have fun with that? For me, seeing wild talk like that only underscores my complete, utter, earned distrust of the thing.

Then have fun reading takes on social media other kinds of cheap opinionating. Is that really better?

Letting the perfect become the enemy of the good is a problem a lot of people have.

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Do you believe the NYT is the only source of news? Do you believe everyone should read the NYTs. What is this Soviet Russia? Who said the alternative to reading the NYTs is getting news from social media?
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> That was more than 20 years ago. It's hardly relevant to the journalism landscape in 2026.

It is actually very relevant. If you read Chomsky & Herman's 'Manufacturing Consent', you'll get examples from the 1970s and 1980s, another 20 years earlier, and you will find that "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose".

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> It is actually very relevant. If you read Chomsky & Herman's 'Manufacturing Consent', you'll get examples from the 1970s and 1980s, another 20 years earlier, and you will find that "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose".

You're stuck in the past, and letting the (non-existent) perfect be the enemy of the good. However imperfect the newspaper industry may have been, it was a whole hell of a lot better than the mix of social media and outright propaganda that's come to replace it.

Pretty soon you may have no place to find out what's going on in your city, country, or the world; except via the rumor mill and works similar to Melania. But I guess you think that's fine fine, because Chomsky & Herman said the NYT wasn't perfect?

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> You're stuck in the past

Am I? I'm not the one claiming that

> the newspaper industry... was a ... lot better than [that which]'s come to replace it.

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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.

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Exactly why should I read a paper that I find is flawed. The editorial board lost my trust.
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they are not an unbiased news source, they profit from being biased toward what elites with money for a subscription want to hear
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NYT makes money from games?
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I work with many people who pay for the subscription to play the games
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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.
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I wouldn't be surprised to learn their recipes also drive a decent amount of revenue too. Their physical cookbooks are top notch (big fan of their no recipe recipe cookbook).
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Their recipe and cocktail repository is excellent. It's a large part while I'm a subscriber.
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I'm really confused. What is a "no recipe recipe cookbook"?
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It's this one:

https://www.amazon.com/York-Times-Cooking-No-Recipe-Recipes/...

Basically tells you have to make various dishes saying without specific amounts and just going more on feel and what tastes good.

I love this tip about adding anchovies to pasta sauce to get a very rich flavor on the cheap.

Honestly like to think of it as the "stoned but competent" cookbook because the directions are quite easy to follow and come out tasty :)

Also the material they used for the "flexible" edition is really nice to use as you cook.

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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.
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Like Harvard is a hedge fund with a school as a side project.
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They have a games-only subscription option: https://www.nytimes.com/subscription/games/
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Their recently shipped scrabble clone is excellent! One of the cleanest scrabble / words-with-friends implementations I've played.
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Yeah I'm hooked on it for the moment. The previous games are entertaining once a day, and we share results amongst our family for fun, but the Crossplay game is a lot of fun head-to-head.
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I'm not sure about all of the ones they host, but for the crossword app you need to subscribe for full access.
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The modern NYT has been described as a games company that occasionally engages in journalism
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Who has described them this way?
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I mean, why not? Sometimes it seems to me that airlines make their money not on flights but on branded Credit Cards.
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Which is, in and of itself, a problem: I feel like we're trending towards a US news landscape where the NYT and their editorial board are the only ones setting the tone and discourse of print media.
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Also The Guardian and The Economist.
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The Guardian has turned into Gawker with better spell checker. Everything I have read from them is culture war and extremely shallow lately.
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The Atlantic, WSJ, The Economist, Politico all come to mind as profitable.

I don’t think it’s anomalous to have a major national newspaper that’s profitable. And WaPo should have been absolutely primed for Trump II given its long time DC focus. They historically had the best political coverage of DC.

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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.

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Seems false. The Atlantic Monthly, to take an example --- another publication I subscribe to --- is an order of magnitude smaller than the Post. If the Post wanted to run the Atlantic's business successfully, they could; they'd just have to lay almost everybody else in the company off.
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Indeed. It's really, really something when I can even entertain the idea of 'I'll go to Wal-Mart, it's awful but at least it's a lot morally better than supporting Amazon'. Yikes!
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> 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.

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If your claim is that the Post had a viable business available to it as a sort of GoFundMe project for the political opposition, this makes sense. Otherwise, it's hard to see how an org with 2500 employees but without much more national appeal than Politico or the Atlantic was going to compete long term.
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Of those only the journal is a newspaper. The Atlantic is a magazine and economist/politico are focused on a single news sector
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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.
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in the English speaking world...

FAZ, Der Spiegel, NZZ earn money, too and their market is way more restricted.

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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?
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