With regard to decreasing traffic to the front page, I did not see the elephant in the room mentioned in the summary article -- the Times started limiting free access to 10 articles per month a year or so ago. I love the NYT. Since 1996 or so I would visit its front page way too much and then click through to the articles, and they no doubt got advertising money from my pageviews. Now I'm careful about which NYT links I click on so as not to waste an article. In this context the front page is less enticing. I now read a much larger variety of news sources, which has been a nice development.

Whether the choice to limit free access was a wise one is not for me to say and is something their business people will be more on top of.

(I realize that there are easy ways around the limit, but I haven't wanted to use them.)