Is The New York Times Still a Newspaper?
The New York Times Company just reported a very good quarter. Revenue up 12% to $712 million. Net income up 77%. Digital-only subscribers at 12.5 million. By every metric the company tracks, the business is thriving.
Reading the earnings release, you would never guess that 75% of Americans don’t trust the news, that the Reuters Institute just measured US trust in news at 25% — its lowest reading in eleven years of tracking — and that the establishment press is in the middle of the longest, deepest credibility collapse in its history.
How does a newspaper post record results during a record collapse of trust in newspapers?
The answer is that the New York Times Company is no longer primarily a newspaper. It is a lifestyle subscription bundle that includes a newspaper as one of its products. And the newspaper is not the part that’s growing.
What They Actually Sell
The Times reports its subscription numbers as one big aggregate, but the components are listed plainly in their own filings: news, The Athletic, Cooking, Games, Audio, and Wirecutter. Five of those six products are not journalism in any traditional sense. The Athletic is a sports site. Cooking is a recipe database. Games is Wordle, Connections, Spelling Bee, and the crossword. Audio is podcasts. Wirecutter is product reviews — essentially a comparison-shopping affiliate site.
The company’s own commentary on what’s driving growth tells the story without subtlety. CEO Meredith Kopit Levien describes the business as playing in “five spaces that marketers want to be in” — news, sports, games, cooking, and Wirecutter. Four of the five are not journalism. Their bundle pitch — the All Access subscription that most new subscribers now take — works because the non-news products are individually compelling. Wordle alone has the kind of daily-habit hook that the news product hasn’t had in decades. People open the Times app every morning to do the Spelling Bee, glance at a headline on the way out, and close the app.
The Times itself markets this. The bundle is “the essential subscription for curious people.” Curiosity, here, means puzzles, recipes, sports analytics, sleep tracker reviews, and twenty minutes of podcasts on the commute. The news happens to be in the same app.
Sold standalone at the bundle price, the news product would lose subscribers in months. The bundle carries it. As a newspaper, the Times sits in the basement of public trust along with the rest of the industry — the public has stopped buying it as news. Management cannot say this out loud and continue to claim what the institution claims about itself, so they don’t say it. But the financial statements say it for them.
Buffett Weighs In, Quietly
The most telling vote on what the Times actually is came from the one investor whose opinion on newspapers should carry more weight than anyone else’s. Warren Buffett spent four decades as the largest outside shareholder in the Washington Post Company. He understood the newspaper business cold, made a fortune on it, and watched it die in slow motion. The Graham family sold the actual paper to Jeff Bezos in 2013. In 2020, Buffett unloaded every remaining newspaper Berkshire Hathaway owned — dozens of regional papers acquired over the years — and pronounced the industry “toast.” He was done. He had no intention of ever owning a newspaper again, and he said so plainly.
Then in Q4 2025 — Buffett’s last quarter as CEO before stepping down — Berkshire disclosed a brand new $352 million position in the New York Times. Just over 5 million shares. The financial press treated it as a surprising reversal, a “vote of confidence” in journalism, a sign that maybe the news business wasn’t dead after all.
Then in Q1 2026, Berkshire tripled the position to 15.1 million shares, worth more than $1 billion. That’s not a vote of confidence. That’s a thesis.
Buffett did not get back into the newspaper business. He got into a games-and-lifestyle bundle that happens to ship with a newspaper. The man knows exactly what he is buying, and it is not what the Times claims to be selling. He’s buying recurring revenue from puzzle subscribers, recipe-database engagement, sports content with the highest paid retention rates in digital media, and an affiliate-commerce site sitting on top of one of the strongest consumer brands in America. The journalism is, for the investment thesis, an overhead line item.
Even the bullish Wall Street coverage of the Berkshire trade quietly acknowledges this. The pitch decks talk about “the moat” running through bundling. The CEO’s own quoted language in Q1 was “uncompromised journalism and premium lifestyle content.” The “and” is the entire story. Buffett doesn’t pay billion-dollar prices for prestige assets. He pays for predictable cash flow. The cash flow is in the puzzles, recipes, sports, and Wirecutter affiliate fees. He read the same 10-Q everyone else read and acted accordingly.
When the most disciplined capital allocator of the last fifty years looks at the New York Times and decides it is now a buy — after publicly declaring newspapers dead five years earlier — the conclusion is not that newspapers came back. It is that this isn’t a newspaper.
Is the Times “fake news”?
There’s a separate question worth addressing on its own. Does the Times deserve the “fake news” label that Donald Trump pinned on it and has been swinging like a club for a decade?
What does “fake news” even mean? The label is imprecise. The accusation behind it isn't.
When Trump arrived on the political scene with a loose-at-best relationship to verifiable fact, the press responded by building out a fact-checking apparatus. PolitiFact, the Washington Post Fact Checker, the Times’ own fact-check desk, dedicated annotated transcripts of speeches and debates. That was a legitimate response to a real problem, and it largely worked on its own terms. When a politician says a thing that isn’t true, somebody now says so on the record, in real time, with citations. That infrastructure didn’t exist twenty years ago and it should exist.
But fact-checking turned out to be necessary and nowhere near sufficient. A story can pass every fact-check on every individual sentence and still completely mislead the reader through what gets put in the headline, what gets buried in paragraph fourteen, which sources get quoted as experts and which get quoted as cranks, what context gets supplied and what context gets withheld, which adjectives attach to which actors, and which story angles get pursued and which get quietly dropped. And then there’s the ubiquitous use of anonymous sources — assertions no reader can ever fact-check because no one is told who said them.
All of it is editorial choice. And editorial choice, repeated story after story across a national platform, is how a worldview gets manufactured without anyone ever writing anything technically false.
Until recently there was no practical way to check this at scale. Identifying framing techniques required reading carefully, knowing what to look for, and having the time and training to do it across enough articles to see the pattern. Fact-checking scaled. Bias-checking didn’t.
AI changed that. I built a free app called Bias Unlocker that applies a structured framework to news articles and surfaces the specific techniques in use: selective omission, source asymmetry, loaded framing, headline mismatch, narrative laundering, false balance, and the rest of the catalog. The app grew out of an earlier op-ed of mine, The Modern Journalist’s Field Manual, which laid out the taxonomy.
There is no point now in arguing about whether articles are biased. You can feed it a Times story. It tells you, technique by technique, how the story is shaped. Then you decide for yourself.
A human doing this kind of work would themselves be open to charges of bias, and rightly so. The app isn’t — it’s run by AI with no political stake in the outcome, and the prompts driving the analysis are visible to the user. The check itself is checkable. Complete transparency.
The newspapers and mainstream media have been harping on fact checking.
Now the shoe is on the other foot.
The Question
When subscribers buy the bundle mostly for games, recipes, sports, and shopping advice — when 75% of Americans don’t trust the news product the bundle includes — when the institution itself reports that its growth is driven by non-news products and the news is the part that needs the bundle to survive — at what point do we stop calling this a newspaper and start calling it what it actually is?
A lifestyle subscription company that includes a politically aligned commentary product as a courtesy.
The Times will keep posting good quarters. The bundle will keep growing. And the institution will keep claiming the moral authority of a profession it has quietly stopped practicing.
Caveat lector.