Frankly, I welcome the news about the paywall since it will mean I see fewer links to their "journalism".
Has something changed in the last few years? Did they somehow turn things around?
[edit: Just wanted to point out that the events I'm referring to were about a decade ago. Concretely, before the acquisition, it seemed like the WSJ was driving something like 50% of the daily news cycle with a difficult to discern bias.
Upper management intentionally destroyed that, at least from an outsider perspective.
Reading the other comments and stories about the whole fake news phenomenon makes me think no one has managed to replicate the function they used to serve.]
But this conversation is a rat-hole. We can generate 1000 comments about any major newspaper. I think my point was just: pick one and subscribe to it.
This was one I read recently that actually made a good job of covering the real story in detail: http://blogs.wsj.com/indonesiarealtime/2013/08/26/the-strike...
NYT and WaPo's political slant is almost becoming unreadable for someone who's moderate and disinterested in either US party. I can't speak for WaPo but I've been reading NYT for a decade now and their total abandonment of any attempt at political neutrality was disheartening this past year.
My only problem with WSJ is it's very expensive compared to NYT. About 3-4x as expensive as a Canadian. So I've been using WaPo recently, they're slightly better than NYT but only slightly. Probably going to go full WSJ soon.
I prefer the NYT and think the reporting is better and broader - especially with regard to the fluffier sections like Sunday Styles, the Magazine, the Book Review and so on ... if I had to pick a single news source I think the A section of NYT would be my choice.
However, I have to say that I enjoy reading the Financial Times more because of their practice of condensing a story into a single page without a fold and without a jump to another page. They explore the story in more depth deeper in the paper, but you can read the front page headline column from start to finish without unfolding and page turning.
Also, the NYT has this habit of vastly over-backgrounding quotes ... a ten word quote will have 2-3 inches of comma-delimited background and qualifications and it just breaks the story and is hard to read.
(WaPo vs. NYT was basically a coinflip decision for me, but doing WaPo and then NYT would probably create a pretty significant overlap, and WSJ wouldn't. On the other hand, the NYT is a substantially better site than WSJ).
One axis of quality measures here, using the Foreign Policy Top 100 Global Thinkers list:
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist#Editorial_anonym...:
Is there any truth to that?
They don't seem to be significantly younger or more inexperienced than other journalists. However, they don't have journalistic heavyweights that do month-long investigations or pump out one price winning report after another. Those are rare anyway.
I know that they use a lot of stringers that remain unnamed. It is not unusual to have freelancers do research without naming them but as far as I know they also contribute whole articles. Likely these are people that also work for other news outlets.