As an aside: WaPo is cheap-as-free if you have an Amazon Prime subscription (several months free, and then the price goes up to something like the price of a cup of coffee every month), and they've broken a number of really important stories just in the past couple of years. I can't think of many reasons for folks who already have Prime to not have a WaPo subscription. It's good, neutral and well-sourced, journalism at a great price, so it's one of my national paper subscriptions.
I really wanted to get paper delivery, but the price was just too high. Also it would probably be unrealistic that I actually read the paper - as I do most of my reading when I have a few idle minutes.
A few years ago I subscribed to The Economist...you can find it at a good price on slickdeals once in a while. Their articles were highly indepth and provided a good international perspective...even in magazine format I couldn't read even half of the content.
They also have a history of compromising the integrity of their stories or editorial pages to suit the government (e.g. WRT the Snowden leaks, and war coverage) or corporations (e.g. on climate change). I still think they're a top-tier organization in the field, certainly above 99% of everything else out there, I just wish I could trust them more. That they're great 99 times out of 100 doesn't mean it's not really frustrating when their rare fuck ups are so monumental and occasionally disastrous in their outcome (Iraq war, President Trump; NYTimes didn't cause either problem, but they helped).
There would need to be some sort of model where you pay regularly to keep a whole team of people employed.
This goes double if you subscribe to something in addition to the NYT or WaPo — a ton of local stories have been ignored because the regional press was cut to the bone and there’s really no substitute for reporters who live in the area.
I do this!