Gareth Cook

I've moved to Bsky @garethideas.bsky.social. Thanks to everyone here, and I hope to see you on the better platform!

The New York Times made news the loss leader for a $2 billion digital revenue machine, and this chart is the receipt. News-only subscribers dropped 65% since June 2022. Bundle subscribers grew 227%. That looks like a news collapse. But the NYT deliberately killed its standalone news product. They stopped marketing it. They made it nearly impossible to buy a news-only subscription on their website. They priced the full bundle (News + Games + Cooking + Athletic + Wirecutter) at $2/month introductory, cheaper than a standalone Games subscription. News-only ARPU is $13.33. Bundle ARPU is $12.92. Single non-news product ARPU is $3.36. Those 4.3 million single-product subscribers paying $3.36/month? They’re not the business. They’re the funnel. The NYT CEO said it explicitly on the earnings call: single products are “funnels to get people to subscribe” to the bundle. Games now accounts for over 50% of time spent inside the NYT app. Wordle, Connections, and the Mini pull 10+ million weekly players who never intended to read a news article. But half of all NYT subscribers now pay for the bundle, and bundle subscribers retain longer, engage more, and accept price increases. The bundle just went from $25 to $30/month. The result: digital revenue crossed $2 billion for the first time in 2025. Free cash flow hit $550 million. Adjusted operating margins reached 24% in Q4. Berkshire Hathaway just took a billion-dollar position. While the Washington Post cut 300 journalists last week, the Times added 1.4 million subscribers. This chart shows a news company that built an attention ecosystem where Wordle gets you in the door, Cooking keeps you at breakfast, The Athletic owns your commute, and by the time you think about canceling, you’d lose four products instead of one. The NYT figured out that the way to fund journalism in 2026 is to make sure you can’t quit the crossword.

Former Washington Post reporters launch GoFundMe to help repatriate international staff who was fired and now facing logistical challenges getting out of their countries and back home. gofundme.com/f/support-for-…

Have been too shattered to write this but for the sake of clarity — I have also been laid off by the Post. I was one of the few journalists still working inside Russia. My last story went on the front page and featured rare testimonies from wounded soldiers criticizing the war.

I feel furious and utterly devastated. I've looked up to Nitasha my whole career and have been jealous of her scoops for as long as I can remember

Vivid illustration of audience capture.

The Guggenheim Foundation has announced its 100th class of fellows, encompassing 198 artists and scholars across 53 fields. Miranda July, Nicole Krauss, Richie Hofmann, and Cynthia Cruz are among this year’s recipients. buff.ly/SZmVyXW

I literally – literally – don't know a single humanities professor, regardless of the kind of institution they teach at, who doesn't think students' reading abilities have fallen off a cliff. It's an emergency and in a sane world there would be Congressional hearings about this.

A big problem is that as people become more illiterate and attention-span-deficient as a result of technology, and deprived of any humanistic education because of The State of Things, those same people become unable to recognize AI slop as slop and so over-estimate its abilities.

President Trump rescinded an executive order targeting law firm Paul Weiss, as the firm bent to White House pressure and agreed to concessions to avoid a client exodus on.wsj.com/4ikLrDi

AOC: It is almost unthinkable why Senate Democrats would vote to to hand the few pieces of leverage that we have away for free when we've been sent here to protect social security, protect medicaid, and protect medicare.

Rep Sarah McBride (D-DE) just now at Democratic party meeting: "We will not take a lecture on decorum from a party that incited an insurrection. I appear to live rent free in the minds of some of my Republican colleagues. I wish that they would spend even a fraction of the time that they spent thinking about me thinking about how to lower the costs for American families"

This is insane. If you wonder why some of us think the rule of law is about to fall, it's this. The U.S. Attorney for DC is not "President Trump's lawyer" and its job is not to "protect his leadership" nor prosecute people who "refuse to put America first".

Via our parent company @GlobTetrahedron CEO @BryceTetraeder: theonion.com/heres-why-i-de…

This is the book, more than any other, that has helped me make sense of the Democrats' catastrophic defeat. It traces a direct line from neoliberalism to fascism, and shows us how to get out of this doom loop. I urge people to read it, especially at this moment.

UPDATE: The number of cancellations since Friday’s revelation now exceeds 250,000, NPR can report. That represents approximately 10 percent of all paid circulation.

The original decision was a betrayal of journalism, but this op-ed is just insulting. It's safe to say that canceling the endorsement, this close to the election, was not a good way to earn "reader trust."

New -- Two WaPo editorial board members resign from board over last minute Bezos decision not to endorse a presidential candidate: 4-decade Post veteran David Hoffman, who won Pulitzer last year for editorials on autocracies, & @mollylroberts , who writes about technology and society. from @RoigFranzia washingtonpost.com/style/media/20…

As of yesterday, I have decided to resign from my role as a columnist for The Washington Post — a newspaper that I love. In a moment like this, everyone needs to make their own decisions. This is the reasonfor mine. 🧵