I get the impression that your question is merely to raise FUD about The New York Times rather than to legitimately ask about quality control. I've downvoted you (as have others), but I'll go ahead and answer you in good faith all the same.
The way a publication can ensure its quality is to charge for it. That is, rather than relying mostly on advertising (which is per article), rely on subscriptions. The kind of audience that pays for news will appreciate higher-quality journalism. That audience also must stick around for the long haul.
That's why the best-regarded outlets tend to be newswires (AP, Reuters), business news (WSJ, Bloomberg), donation driven (NPR, PBS), and long-form stories (NYT, WP).
Indeed, a quick check of NYT's latest 10K shows that they got over $1B from subscriptions (and growing) with an additional $500M from advertising (and shrinking).
Ahh, no? I just used the New York Times and an example because it is by far the most popular newspaper in the country. It’s relevant to this post because they obviously won a bunch of awards, as the usually do.
News and quality of news has been a major part of my life since my first ever semi successful project, which was a news aggregator I started over a decade ago. One of the mechanisms we tried then (before reddit existed as far as I know) was a sortof economy where each poster got a certain amount of tokens to “spend” on submissions and comments, and you could earn more tokens when people “paid” you for your quality contributions.
Obviously it didn’t work.
Since then I’ve tried computational linguistics approaches to this problem, which solves a problem, but not the fitness checking one I’m talking about here.
And finally: my wife is a former political journalist, so obviously news and quality of news is a major topic in my life which I talk about, read about, and write about pretty regularly.
The way a publication can ensure its quality is to charge for it. That is, rather than relying mostly on advertising (which is per article), rely on subscriptions. The kind of audience that pays for news will appreciate higher-quality journalism. That audience also must stick around for the long haul.
That's why the best-regarded outlets tend to be newswires (AP, Reuters), business news (WSJ, Bloomberg), donation driven (NPR, PBS), and long-form stories (NYT, WP).
Indeed, a quick check of NYT's latest 10K shows that they got over $1B from subscriptions (and growing) with an additional $500M from advertising (and shrinking).
https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/71691/000007...