It is hard for me to feel bad for newspapers when they have been slow to adapt to the changing world around them. NYT & WP have had plenty of time to come up with a better business model. Instead, they spent their time building useless registration systems to trap users without adding any real value to their user experience.
There are two business models for content: paid content and advertising. Both were tested. What else should they do?
Last time I checked, the NYT registration system didn't actually charge you anything -- it just added a hoop you had to jump through to see their content.