Why not? The NYT, through embracing digitization, has been able to maintain one of the largest subscriber bases in post-Internet newspapers. An increasing proportion of their revenue is coming from subscriptions instead of advertising - if they can develop the right tools, they can pump these out with relatively low cost.

The paywall is more restricted now than when it was first enacted. I won't pay for much online, but I recently signed up for the weekend papers + full online access because I thought the journalism is better than most of the crap found online.

As Paul Graham says, "Do things that don't scale"

They've created quite a few stories like this now. I don't have any links but I've seen several appear on HN.