2. For many events, it's not the writing I care about but the information. IMO Google realizes the difference and bets on information over writing, whereas NYT still wants to sell writing. All publications which are trying to stop Google from scraping their information are basically insisting that their copyrightable storytelling is being ruined by Google's information extraction.
3. For general news, I often don't know what I want to know. This is where news aggregation is way better than individual outlets, at least most of the time, with exceptions going to specific domains like food or games. If WION gets the exclusive interview, then WION is where I want to go and everyone else is just re-reporting. News aggregation also allows you to take in a sense of inter-rater reliability on a per-story level. But this is all playing into Google's strengths.
Given this, I don't understand people saying this or that outlet sucks; for example, does Buzzfeed News suck? Just the name alone makes it sound like celebrity news gossip. But then once and awhile Buzzfeed News gets an exclusive interview (such as on Palantir matters), and guess what, I want them to show up on my aggregators.
But if you found only one relevant article in the NY Times then either you were consuming radio/TV news, or just don’t care about current events.
Which is fine, it just means you weren’t the target audience.
A 10th grade reading level doesn't mean they only cover stories of interest to 10th graders or younger. It just means they they use a 10th grade vocabulary and sentence structure. Most stories in the NYT could be covered at a 10th grade level and still convey most of the important information.
[1] From https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/27/us/politics/us-debt-ceili...:
> All of this drama raises the question of what the debt limit really is... > > What is the debt limit? > > The debt limit is a cap on the total amount of money that the federal government is authorized to borrow to fulfill its financial obligations.
[2] From https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/09/18/every...:
> What's a continuing resolution? > > It's a bill that tells the federal government's agencies, “Keep on spending like you've been spending till we can actually come to some agreement on how much you should be spending.”
Maybe the problem wasn't the paper.
The New York Times' target audience isn't grad students. I don't think it's all that surprising that you weren't all that interested in it.
As we get older, we change. We learn more. We become interested in more things. Depending on how long it's been since grad school, you may be interested in what's in the Times now.
I know that I don't like the same thing I did back in grad school. I certainly know that I'm interested in more things than I was then.
When I was in grad school, I couldn't stand the taste of tapioca. Now, I love it.
No. Middle-career and beyond because you probably can't afford tickets to the Met gala if you're <35.
Like I'm basically exactly the right blend of pretentious artsy liberal yuppie but I've found my niches other places.
But the actual problem with your statement is that it implies some alternative to "the media", and/or that it's said as if the world without the news media is somehow similar to the one we currently life in. There isn't and it wouldn't: a democracy is a regulatory system that needs the feedback loop just like your AC needs to get measurements from a thermometer to adjust its settings. Take out that part, and democracy is done for.