Overall, most press/journalism sites I use are terrible. Performance stinks, flash everywhere, ads that nobody clicks on. Horrible.
I basically enable every list in uBlock. Suprisingly it almost never blocks too much, when I get blocked it's consequently for being on a VPN.
Also, I won't go to a journalism site without NoScript or Focus, too painful without.
Got a NYT digital subscription to see if it was worth it, and I like it. Would be more likely to keep going if it extended to other publishers, and I could consistently access an ad-free, ad-blocker gate free experience.