By the same token, some tech companies, especially Twitter, basically ARE media companies.

I tried to analyze News Corp's annual report to find their R&D spending, the same way I did for six tech companies (https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/should-elon-lay-off-all-...)

Unfortunately, their accounting treatments of software are different, so a direct comparison was quite difficult.

NYT sells ads and also subscriptions; Twitter sells ads and wants to start selling subscriptions. Yeah, NYT pays an editorial staff, but they've been downsizing that pretty relentlessly. The hypothesis is that the two business models will be converging.

Exactly, aside from journalists the skill set of their employees broadly overlaps.

Exactly. They've got great investigative journalism when focused on direct competitors, who they assure us are all peddlers of misinformation.

It's also laughable to watch them do the daily Meta hit piece, pretending they're the good guys and were never advertiser funded. A gate-keeping, deeply-embedded mono-culture of an institution funded by 5M well-off subscribers, going after a platform that 2.9B people use on a daily basis to connect with each other.

It's not that they are doing it, it's that they do it and pretend they are taking the moral high ground.

To be fair, they did publish an op ed to that effect:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/opinion/data-privacy-trac...