NYT has no cancel button on your subscription, heres a workaround

This is definitely intentional. There is no way implementing a cancel button for subscriptions would cost more than doing it via customer care.

is there any research on economics of journalism?

Journalists don't seem to get paid well, companies regularly go through cost cutting and shady practices (click baits, atrocious tracking and like above). We don't seem to value good journalism as much as we should.

We should dig into the problems of bigger companies and see if completely public funded companies may be better operated.

BBC was good until it recently deteriorated in quality. What happened?