All good questions, Bill. Unfortunately, getting usable data is difficult, even in the financial statements of the public media companies. In many cases, they use different (legal) accounting practices with their online operations. They also use different pricing and access strategies for their online subscriptions, which impact their results.

That said, I started tracking NYT operations years ago and saw back then that they developed a strategy based on growing original content for their website. The San Francisco Chronicle did the same thing with content but prices online subscriptions more aggressively, which usually means fewer subscribers.

Although not newspapers, Forbes and U.S. World and New Report magazines did the same thing.