moved to Bsky @garethideas.bsky.social. verto literary group, alum: @NYTmag, @BostonGlobe, @BostonPhoenix, @monthly, @ForeignPolicy
Jamaica Plain, MA
Joined July 2010
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I've moved to Bsky @garethideas.bsky.social. Thanks to everyone here, and I hope to see you on the better platform!
Gareth Cook retweeted
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.
Gareth Cook retweeted
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-w…
Gareth Cook retweeted
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.
Gareth Cook retweeted
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
My story on Elon Musk cutting safeguards at xAI is on the front page of today's @washingtonpost. I’m also among 100’s of reporters laid off. I absolutely love(d) my job, my brilliant coworkers & the thrill of reporting at the center of forces upending the world: AI & Silicon Valley’s political power
ALT cover of The Washington Post on Wednesday Feb 4, 2026. Headline on bottom, right: Musk wanted to hook users; his chatbot got more sexual
Gareth Cook retweeted
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
Gareth Cook retweeted
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.
This is an extraordinary post from a College professor about their students' lack of ability to focus and read books. Incredibly depressing. lnkd.in/eWQXYbn2
Gareth Cook retweeted
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.
Gareth Cook retweeted
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
Gareth Cook retweeted
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"
Gareth Cook retweeted
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".
Gareth Cook retweeted
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.
1. In our book The Invisible Doctrine, Peter Hutchison and I show how neoliberalism, by sucking the meaning out of politics, out of jobs, out of community and out of family life, paved the way for Trump. 🧵 penguinrandomhouse.com/books…
Gareth Cook retweeted
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.
NEWS: More than 200,000 subscribers have canceled their digital subscriptions to the Washington Post after the revelation that owner Jeff Bezos blocked an endorsement of VP Harris.
That's about 8 percent of WaPo's subscriber base - a staggering sum
MORE
npr.org/2024/10/28/nx-s1-516…
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."
This quoted post is unavailable.
Gareth Cook retweeted
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/med…
