The job the Times has is at least an order of magnitude harder than the Economist.
I enjoy reading the Economist, but I don't know if I'd say well researched. A few times I've come across articles in my own field that seem really off, which makes me uneasy about the articles on banana plantations in Uruguay.
AFAIK the gold standard in copy editing and fact checking is the New Yorker.
The Economist has a writing style where they present the 'facts' that make their case but never state the uncertainty over those facts. It makes their articles look really persuasive until you do your own research at which point they look really, really shaky.
The New Yorker has a sterling reputation what it comes to copy editing, not sure if they have the same reputation regarding fact checking. The New Yorker isn't a destination for me though whereas the Economist most certainly is one of the few sites I will directly type into the URL bar in a browser, I buy their end-of-year year in review religiously, I am neither politically nor economically aligned with them but they cover the shit that matters most in a timely fashion with their ideology in plain sight.
The New York Times has great writers but it is incredibly biased even though it pretends to be impartial -- really it is only a notch up from Pravda and whatever that mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party is called. There have been numerous scandals over the past decades involving journalistic integrity. It is telling that Snowden's revelation broke in the Grauniad (as Private Eye nicknamed it) and the WashPo (dunno). Journalism is in an _amusing_ place right now what with Al Jazeera (in English!), Russia Today, The Intercept, and others. Don't know where I'd class the BBC News.
I enjoy reading the Economist, but I don't know if I'd say well researched. A few times I've come across articles in my own field that seem really off, which makes me uneasy about the articles on banana plantations in Uruguay.
AFAIK the gold standard in copy editing and fact checking is the New Yorker.