The U. S. newspaper market is projected to decline to $20.8 billion in 2025 and continue to fall further through 2030. The contraction has hit local newspapers hardest, and by 2025, that market has lost approximately a third of its newspapers and two thirds of its journalists. It has helped create “news deserts” across the country. However, the demand for digital newspapers is projected to grow with major national publications like The New York Times adding up to 12.33 million total subscribers to all its products and 50 million to 100 million users per week (it is the largest digital subscription news organization in the world). The diversified products include the news report, Cooking, Games, Wirecutter, and The Athletic. Digital growth has helped to offset print losses, and now The Times has become financially successful. In addition, its website receives more than 30 million unique visitors per month. The company has publicly said it is aiming to get to 15 million subscribers by the end of 2027.
It is interesting that circulation revenue has become a more significant source of income than advertising revenue, a reversal of past historical trends. Advertising, especially print advertising, has moved to digital platforms like Google and Facebook.
Reading The Times daily, I am often struck by the range of its political coverage, especially its ability to deal with often ignored news from the war zone in Sudan and news from our neighbors—Mexico and Canada—that is rarely touched on by TV and radio news. There are also pieces that delve into Western European politics where the political and social dynamics of not only England and France but the Netherlands, Denmark, and Belgium are analyzed in depth. On Sunday, November 9, there was an article on Vietnam that informed me that globalism is being embraced there while most of the world becomes more insular. It is an example of reporting that appears often in the News section of The Times that takes a long view of what is happening in a particular country. Another human-interest-oriented article fascinatingly examined the role social class played in small town in French Canada.
The Opinion section itself tries to balance the Times’ generally liberal outlook with some conservative columnists. Clearly, David Brooks had become too moderate to be the paper’s conservative voice. One of their conservative columnists is Ross Douthat—a Catholic convert whose “primary commitments are what gets called ‘religious conservatism,’ a sort of pro-life, pro-family, socially conservative worldview.” I rarely read Douthat, but that may be my loss, for his perspective is so different from mine. Though when I dip into his columns, their arguments seem tortured. The other conservative is Bret Stephens, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist who can be sharp and incisive, who as a long-time neoconservative has advocated military force to promote democracy, especially in the Middle East; was a prominent media supporter of the 2003 Iraq War; and was strongly opposed the Iran nuclear deal. He is usually critical of Trump, but he is uncritically pro-Israel and a strong defender of free markets. He is a columnist I dislike because he is arrogant and rarely questions the positions he takes, but I still feel a begrudging intellectual respect for his pieces.
My obvious preference is for the liberal opinion writers whom The Times carries, from the feminist, left-liberal Michele Goldberg to the more historically oriented Jamelle Bouie, as well as, in my opinion, their most gifted writer, Maureen Dowd, who sometimes gets lost in pop culture references and her family history. There is a slew of other columnists writing for The Times that include Frank Bruni, Michele Cottle, Ezra Klein, and the gifted New York City columnist Ginia Bellafante, whom I read with pleasure.
Recently, The Times city coverage and analysis has expanded with Zohran Mamdani’s dramatic winning bid for the mayoralty. Still, the paper is much more of a national and international paper than a local one. Its municipal coverage could be more comprehensive and analytic, and some more detailed neighborhood coverage seems to me an imperative. One does not want to depend on tabloids like The Post and The Daily News, which overemphasize crime news and gossip to learn what is happening locally.
The Times arts and culture coverage has in recent years been impressive, with arguably the best newspaper film critic writing, Manohla Dargis (“I am interested in beauty and feeling, style and form, culture and history”); a perceptive and knowledgeable book critic, Dwight Garner; two art critics with differing aesthetics, Roberta Smith and Holland Cotter; and a myriad of other first-rate culture critics (e.g., the wide-ranging Wesley Morris and A.O. Scott), theater critics, music and architecture critics, and a number of competent second string critics backing them up. The Times also provides substantial space for business, health, fashion, sports (more essayistic than reportage), and science coverage. It is a paper that cannot be skimmed, and it usually takes me more than an hour to read it, and that is with my skipping sections I have little interest in.
No newspaper achieves perfection, and The Times has its flaws. Some critics of the newspaper feel that at times its biases undermine its integrity. One critic writes: “In an era when polarization and social media viciously enforce rigid orthodoxies, the moral and intellectual courage to take the other side seriously and to report truths and ideas that your own side demonizes for fear they will harm its cause.”
Yes, The Times’ bias sometimes shows and distorts the news, but given how demonic and corrupt the other side is, I am little bothered by a modest loss of integrity when it criticizes and inveighs against Trump and his minions.
