We’re Michael Bender and Maya King, reporters for The New York Times covering the 2024 presidential election. Ask us Anything.
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Hello, ElPlywood. Thanks for participating, and I appreciate your passion! I'll try to answer the first few here as best as I can. 1 Why do you...

“I think what you’re reacting to is that, at the moment, Biden is an unpopular president seeking a second term while Trump is a popular figure inside his party who is winning primary races. I wouldn’t necessarily compare the two.”

Credit to @JoshuaHolland

    • mozz@mbin.grits.devOP
      0·
      8 months ago

      So most of my assertion that the Times is the only profitable one comes from this article.

      But places like the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times now face similar crises: How does a newspaper make money in 2024? People looking to answer that question invariably turn toward the New York Times. At the end of last year, as scores of journalists were getting their pink slips, the paper announced that it had passed ten million total subscribers.

      “There is like one place you can work right now with any kind of job security and it is The New York Times and that’s only because they have a shitload of recipes on a nicely coded little cooking app that you can subscribe to and also because your parents are hooked on Wordle.”

      NYT not the only big outlet doing “actual journalism” — not sure about WSJ’s profitability quarter to quarter, but I don’t think they are actively sinking.

      The Facebook Files story is not exactly the victory for journalism you’re saying though… my immediately takeaway from that is that the journalistic impact of the (surely accurate) information in it will probably be exceeded by the propaganda impact of adding weight to the “Twitter Files” mythology by simply running the story and calling it that. Maybe I am wrong in that but that’s my immediate takeaway.

      So doomsaying stories about how all their readers are dying notwithstanding, I guess I should admit that WSJ is consistently making money (even during recent quarters when NewsCorp has dipped into the red overall). My own internal compass categorizes them not quite in the journalism category because they have such a right-wing-friendly perspective but I’ll admit that’s 100% based on ideology. They are journalism I guess, yes; it’s not like they print lies or made up stuff or anything.