Risks Abound as Reporters Play in Traffic

Not to come off as green ink, but this narrows the implicit incentive to find news (eg mostly gossip) and perhaps even incite a little drama to make quota now and then. It's like the investment timescale of a stockbroker vs Warren Buffett (G.G.). Basically this trend kills off more potential investigative journalism stories that would actually matter, or requires a bunch of popular crap stories to fund them.

This kind of parallels the world programmers live in. Most journalists are like the mobile app developers pumping out games with ads and micropayments.

Other journalists like Glenn Greenwald are the tech co-founders of the world, carving out their own independent and rewarding path to making money.

Maybe NYTimes, etc journalists can go the way of many programmers working at large orgs, get hired by a company with a good B2B product. I would guess if those journalists thought hard, they could find a way to sell their writing for a much higher price to a much smaller audience. E.g., writing an industry-specific newsletter or offering advanced analysis of certain topics.

When people hire freelance programmers, they're very aware of the fact that for however many weeks on a project, that's likely the majority of income for the worker. I would hope a credible journalist could approach someone like an investor, politician, think tank, startup, etc., and offer to write a novella-length article on something relevant to their business.

Slightly off topic, but I like what they have done with the site design. Would look more homogenic across platforms when viewed in the browser. Of course there is more space on desktops to display more stuff which should be utilised. This, imo, is a good balance.