My personal experience has been diametrically opposite of this. NYT, WaPo, WSJ, and The Guardian are the best quality subscription news services I've used and they feel remarkably click-baity and noisy. They don't seem to take search or information retrieval very seriously and my customer experience being subjected to personalization or preference prediction algorithms on these sites is that they get it very wrong and then you get stuck with the story selection, layout, and recommendations personalized based on limited engagement with the sites.

Here are some pieces of journalism that have really been interesting to me over the past several years:

- https://magazine.atavist.com/the-mastermind
- https://www.buzzfeed.com/heidiblake/the-tennis-racket
- https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/03/paul-ma...
- https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/10/the-police-a...

The big point has been that journalism which actually matters for me is usually bespoke. Probably the only consistent author I read is Barney Ronay's soccer articles for The Guardian, which I hardly consider worthy of paying a subscription for since I can get similarly detailed analysis from dozens of other sites, podcasts, and sometimes even reddit's r/soccer (rare, but not never).

If I want to quickly understand a broad set of details about important breaking or daily news, I'll usually read the comment section of a related story at r/news or here on Hacker News or a similar discussion site, and only go to the original article for a handful of cases that seem either especially interesting for me or especially significant, and when doing this, I virtually never exceed the number of metered accesses allowed by paywall sites. I can safely say I've never missed a single important thing from fully paywalled sites.

The only news site I really would even consider paying for is The Guardian because their content is entirely free with no metered paywall limit. That way other people who might not be able to afford access can still read anything. I wouldn't view paying for a subscription to The Guardian (or similar sites without paywalls) as purchasing a service or content that I personally want, rather just supporting some type of "open" model (I realize this is a drastic oversimplification).

But man, when I scan headlines and front pages of NYT, WaPo, WSJ, etc., it's painful. You seem optimistic that because the larger media companies have been around for a long time, it means they are better at designing the customer experience, but in my experience it's just utterly the opposite way round. The older media brands seem way more focused on resting on their laurels and milking their brand name, trying to extract as much as they can (which is not much in such a low-margin business) from customers while investing very little in genuinely understanding the customer or upholding any particular values or mission-based ideals in journalism. Not to mention how much sponsored content there is to manipulate your perception of things.

These big newspaper brands are like the Walmart of their industry. Treat most employees quite badly, lots of bitter and poorly compensated layoffs. Cut costs, lack of serious investment. Embrace collecting data on customers to sell to third parties and use for auctioning off ad space. Allow political elites to have undue control over editorial process. And you end up with an end product that is deeply customer unfriendly and makes it actively difficult to find the content that I want.

In terms of my own news consumption, it has just been way better to scan around for bespoke, one-off pieces at a wider variety of sites. If there was a way to pay for that particular stream, I definitely would like to.