How is it "lame"? It's common knowledge that media is a significant influencer of those who consume it (pretty much everyone), so it follows that writing an article suggesting that X may be superior to Y (because Y is bad) would influence many into thinking similarly if they hadn't been thinking that already, or further reinforce that feeling if they had.

All it had to take was for anyone at the NY Times to bring up in a meeting "hey, we'd like to try to get our paper subs up a bit, someone write an article about unplugging from the net (something tons of people talk about but never actually do) about how newspapers are actually better".

Worst case scenario it doesn't work out, it was a nice experiment and at least you brought in a lot of clicks and got to bring up fake news and Russian Twitter bots in another story, right?

Media is always biased and always has an agenda one way or another, I'm not sure why in this case it would have to be any different.