Comment by Onavo
2 days ago
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.
Also NYT has spent a lot of time and energy into diversifying into things that are not news.
There is a subset of its customers that is only really paying for the games like the crossword. There is a subset only really paying for Cooking. etc.
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.
For a current breakdown, see: Index of News Media Ownership: https://futureofmedia.hsites.harvard.edu/index-us-mainstream...
> The problem is that nobody would pay for it
User "api" said "nobody", so that is enough to refute their point. Some people would might pay for it, it seems.
> NYT is an exception
> The other papers and magazines are all subsidized by billionaires or other vested interests.
How is the NYT an exception?
a large paid subscription base
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.
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