MWD

[MWD @markwpdoyle]

@SamaHoole The greens have a lot to answer for

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

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.

[David McKelvey @aylon14]

It seems a fair way to deal with student debt, especilly Plan 2, is be to scrap the 3% interest. And repay the 3% to those who have paid. RPI is not a great inflation, but it is close to a free loan. Better still switch to CPI. Few seemed to understand what they signed up to.

[Sarah Parry @SarahWoods66]

‘It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade,’ Charles Dickens

[OurFightUk @OurFightUk]

With each year that passes, the memory of the Holocaust seems to fade, and with it, its significance.

Survivors are getting older, and their stories are heard less and less. Popular culture seems to focus on brave individuals who saved Jews, but is unable to capture the enormity, the barbarity, and the depths to which our civilisation sank.

In many ways, this year feels worse than previous ones, because in the midst of a war in which Jews are literally fighting for survival, we are seeing attempts by many groups to re-write the Holocaust as not about anti-Semitism, but as just one atrocity amongst many.

On this Holocaust Memorial Day weekend, supporters of Our Fight and @StopTheHate_UK took the @yadvashem exhibition 'The Auschwitz Album' to the streets of London, to talk to the public directly, and to make a contribution to reversing this worrying trend.

Photos @elliottfranks.

[StandWithUs @StandWithUs]

Today, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we remember the 6 million Jews, and millions more, who lost their lives at the hands of the Nazis.
As antisemitism rears its ugly head once again, and especially as we grapple with the atrocities of the October 7th Hamas massacre, we must speak out and send a clear message against hatred and terror to ensure that "never again" means something.
In the face of darkness, be the light.

[Susie Dent @susie_dent]

Word of the day is ‘matutolypea’: extreme grumpiness in the morning.

From the Latin ‘Matuta’, Roman goddess of the dawn, and the Greek ‘lype’, ‘grief’. Put them together and you get ‘morning grief’.

[Emil Jacobs @collectifission]

Imagine waiting 15 years for the opportunity to say this line.

[Benny Johnson @bennyjohnson]

Hang it in the Smithsonian NOW!

[Francisco Ribeiro @fraveris]

Thomas V

[Christopher Snowdon @cjsnowdon]

A letter in the Economist from someone who has enough of the ultra-processed food quackery. 🙌

[Paintings of London @PaintingsLondon]

'Trafalgar Square at Christmas' by Stanley Roy Badmin (1906-89)

(Private Collection)

[Francisco Ribeiro @fraveris]

"Cold night in Vienna"

by Jennifer Albert

[Helen Day @LBFlyawayhome]

Ladybird Artists Advent Calendar, window 16

No one does bleak-but-beautiful-winter like
artist Rowland Hilder

[Helen Day @LBFlyawayhome]

Ladybird Artists Advent Calendar, window 6
‘The village’
Artist: SR Badmin

[Emily Jane Rothwell 🖤🌸🖋️ @emjanerothwell]

Some of Monet’s wintery magic: ‘The Magpie,’ of 1869

[History Girl @HistoryGirlBW]

National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, 1st December 1948.

[Archie Hall @ArchieHall]

Phenomenally good read on the realities of how lots of property crimes are now all-but-legal in London.

Pretty much every detail chimes with my own dog theft and DIY crime-solving experience a few months ago.

https://t.co/AeSPlrRB6v

[Adrian Wooldridge @adwooldridge]

All this "working people" nonsense has a very 1970s feel. When Vanessa Redgrave (WRP) appeared on the Morecambe and Wise show, she tried to persuade them that they, too, were "workers". "Do you own the BBC?" "No, but we're willing to make them an offer".