The NYT has held their quality standards up pretty well, but most of the newspaper industry had already raced all the way to the bottom by the time Amazon ever

The NYT has held their quality standards up pretty well, but most of the newspaper industry had already raced all the way to the bottom by the time Amazon ever launched the Kindle newsstand. That ship basically sailed away a long time ago. Newspapers gave everything away for free, raced the content to the bottom, and then after nearly 20 years of that finally realized it didn't work. The content in your online newspaper needs to be very, very good if you want $20-30/month to read it versus the aggregated news services wanting $9.99/month to read news from a wide swath of sources. NYT is good, but it's terrible at replacing your local news sources.