The New York Times Is Now Supported by Readers, Not Advertisers

That's only as true as long as the source in question can continue to exist without the support of the advertisers. As supplemental income (like NPR does), it's fine, because if an advertiser tries to throw their weight around, the outfit can just tell them to get lost.

However, if advertising is a primary source of income, that gives the advertiser a disproportionate amount of power over the content of that source, because every battle can become "Do this or we drop funding".

This works extremely well with small publishers or niche markets: Mother Jones can criticize Monsanto while publishing ads for organic food, and Penny Arcade can make fun of Blizzard while still running Blizzar ads (they can always run ads from Valve instead if they don't).

But for a mass market publisher like NYT, a large advertiser with a steady ad budget absolutely wields an influence over content, even if they never say a word. Suits at media companies have every incentive not to rock the boat, and so soften stories, or simply focus more effort on news that is unlikely to threaten ad revenue (ie, crime and celebrity news). Occasionally, this kind of self-censorship is blatant, like the infamous Fox/Monsanto milk hormone story, but usually the effect is subtle, like the warping of a gravitational field.

Admittedly, readers do create their own distortion effect on news, perhaps even bigger than advertisers. But since that's a factor either way, I still see reduced reliance on advertising as a positive trend in mass media.

Not that I have a problem with this exactly, whenever ad dollars start falling many large scale web properties have historically reacted in one of two ways: (1) providing a premium based subscription service that forces quality content or users will drop (the opposite of this being a free, impression driven, quality agnostic model by splitting up articles over multiple pages) or (2) increasing ad costs which in turn results in more scrutiny in what is being fed through the ad engine.

These aren't the gold standards, please keep that in mind; it's purely anecdotal. I threw this observation over at a friend who is a professional affiliate marketer and has his own four man firm, he concurs. When ad dollars drop, media companies fight for whatever revenue normalcy they can get by improving quality in the two areas users have the biggest impact: interacting with your media and interacting with the ads supporting said media.

I'm optimistic here.

Or in other words, the package deal in which I have to pay for content that is 90% irrelevant to me, distributed (even online) in a way I consider quite inconvenient.

Which is exactly why I only read a very small subset of NYT's content via HN. Unfortunately, there's no convenient way to pay for that kind of usage.

But I don't feel sorry for the newspapers about that. They've had decades to invest in solving that problem, and most of them have invested exactly 0 cents. They've thrown millions at online publishing and keeping their offline business going, but when it came to investing in the one thing that could possibly give their future readers what they actually want, they just bitched about "the market" not providing them with a convenient solution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC#Revenue