The New York Times is severely fucked even without Google messing with their rankings. They still make most of their money from dead tree newspaper subscribers

The New York Times is severely fucked even without Google messing with their rankings. They still make most of their money from dead tree newspaper subscribers who are almost all over 50 but are losing those subscribers at a massive rate. There is an internal initiative to basically double digital revenue by 2020 to make up for the losses on the paper side but, speaking as someone who worked there, it's not looking good. At all. They brag about how they just got 40k new digital subscribers in the month after Trump got elected but a lot of those are subsidized / deal subs and won't be sticking around in the long term. It also doesn't help that the NYT continually downsizes its newsroom and editorial staff to make ill-informed forays into tech (The NYT digital r&d department was a complete joke - like they paid 5 engineers high six figure salaries to basically jerk off and put a monitor behind a mirror - oh wow so innovative). Most of the bloat at the NYT is absolutely in the tech department but they rarely fire anyone there (I quit). They have big teams supporting legacy systems that are used by maybe a hundred people a month. They have an entire lexical / semantic team with a "sophisticated" (re: expensive, old, and clunky) tagging system that does essentially nothing for the NYT, because guess how many people use their "topic" knowledge base (e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/topic/person/hillary-rodham-clinton https://www.nytimes.com/topic/person/hillary-rodham-clinton)? I'll give you a hint: more than zero, but not by much. But there's like four or five full time engineers with six figure salaries supporting it.