Printing Paper and transporting it every day to you is costly. And back then, content was generally more expensive, because there was no elaborated online-crowd who delivered you half of your content for free. Today you have wikipedia, reddit, google, twitter, e-mail and many more which allow you to research many stuff from home. Back in the days you were forced to go around physically, talk to people face to face, visit libraries, maintain your own library. That was far more expensive than what you can do today.

At the same time, because of the high quality free knowledge we have today, you can externalize knowledge and let people research it themself if they wanne know, and get away with lower quality of writing, meaning you can do it faster and need less people to pay. Meaning you can offer a lower price, because it's neccessary to compete in a world of massivly free information.

> Printing Paper and transporting it every day to you is costly.

The whole "technology tree" for newspapers like the New York Times was actually really fascinating. Paper and Ink by the trainload and delivery trucks making their way across the nation in the wee hours of the night.

do papers even have print editions anymore?

Uh, yes? NYT, LA Times, WSJ are examples of some that have running print editions. Even more common in the old world.

> A subscription to the NYT cost >$500/year? Who the hell pays that much for a newspaper?

Eh? That's less than $1.50 a day?

That's how much it used to cost to get it delivered to your door daily.

But it's a daily Newspaper, that's a bit less than 1.50$ per day for a lot of written paper. (Some online magazines charge that per article...) I would go for that if I just read daily news from one source. Instead I have a varying number of subscriptions, nowadays mostly digital.

It used to be that print newspaper subscriptions were quite expensive. Now that news is so heavily devalued subscriptions are a lot cheaper but even in the early 2000s a premium daily newspaper subscription could easily be $50 a month.

I pay £33 per month for the digital version of the Financial Times: https://www.ft.com/products

If you're into that niche, it's great value for money. But even with those prices, FT still runs ads on their pages.

Unfortunately in today's world, where people get their news "for free" from fb.com or twitter.com or news.google.com, it seems like a huge price to pay.

FT is a great newspaper.

I’ve been a long time reader - My only complaint is that I feel like the number of puns has declined considerably since the Nikkei acquisition.

One favorite was a headline to the effect “Boat builders weather the storm.” I had come to expect multiple puns per article towards the back of the paper. Today I feel lucky if I pick up one or two per paper.

If you like puns, the Economist is the way to go.

$1.50 a day? It’s about what you’d spend on a physical newspaper.

Yes, those are yearly figures for an all-in subscription (no paywalls on their site, daily paper, weekend edition, access to all apps). And they are in range of what you'd expect. I just checked the current subscription price for the NYT. Where I live, it would set me back EUR 715 yearly. I compared that to one of the big newspapers in my country, a similar all-in would cost me EUR 480 (that's USD 580) yearly.

You'd think that's expensive, until you start to dig into the economics of running a modern newspaper. The operational side is massive and complex. There's the newsfloor (NYT employed 1.300 staff writers in 2016), digital infrastructure to maintain and evolve and logistics for actually printing and distributing of paper, and so on and so on.

I pay €2 a week for a digital NYT subscription.