Sign o’ the Times (Premium)

I've had a troubled relationship with The New York Times for decades, dating back to its terrible, one-sided tech coverage in the early 2000s. But the problems have only escalated in recent years.

At a high level, I find it offensive that I pay a lot for The New York Times and it still displays annoying, often animated advertisements in its app. That sounds obvious enough, but there's more.

In addition to being expensive, the New York Times charges in 4-week increments for its main subscription, as opposed to the more typical monthly and annual time frames. This is an interesting strategy. We all know that subscription services are a gotcha of never-ending payments. And that every service seems to have gotten more expensive in the past few years without delivering more value, some of them multiple times. But the Times' four-week cycle means you're charged one extra time each year, as opposed to monthly (13 billing cycles per year instead of 12) as if there were 13 months in a year. At the current price of my subscription, that's an extra $20 each year, but it's about to go up to $23 because of a new price hike.

And while the ads all over the place are annoying, it's not just ads: The Times is addicted to animated promotional graphics that I can't stand, and there's no option to disable them. I came here to read, not get dizzy. Competing publications like The Washington Post support an iOS accessibility feature that disables this nonsense. The Times does not.

I routinely review laptops, as you know, and I also routinely move from browser to browser so I can keep up with those developments. And every time I sign in to the Times in a new browser, every single time, it tries to upsell me to something called "All Access" with a full-page ad I have to click through before I can access the content I came there to see.

The Times acquired The Wirecutter, which I love and recommend, some years ago, and I thought this would be wonderful, since I already pay for the Times. But it's a separate subscription: Access to The Wirecutter costs an additional $40 per year. Are you kidding me?

Wait, it gets worse. Like many, I read sports, and just about every day. And when the Times acquired The Athletic a while back, I thought that was great: It's a well-respected publication and there's no version of this story where the Times charges me extra for sports, right? Right? Wrong. It's extra. So I can't access any sports stories with my $20/$23 per four week subscription now. Seriously.

I mentioned these issues with the Times recently in From the Editor’s Desk: Reactive Change (Premium), and was nervous about even figuring out what it was, exactly, that I was paying this company, plus what I could be paying them. But in discussing this with my wife, who also reads this publication each morning, I finally decided to look, to dig a bit deeper into the true costs here.

The current subscription was costing us $260 per year, but it was about to...