Another thing that’s in play here that you don’t mention: The Times likes to think its value is in the unprecedented quality of its reporting and editing, its role as the last bastion of good journalism amidst a digital race to the bottom. In fact, the Times is just good enough, not orders of magnitude better than all the others or even most of the others, but just good enough to be the last paper of record in the U.S., and maybe a broader part of the English-speaking world. The Guardian might play that role as well, so say one of the last in this regard.

If not quality, what makes the Times the Times?

Like everyone else publishing online, the real value of the Times is its readers. The Times is important because everyone important in the U.S. reads it. Every day. It is perhaps the last shared common bit of culture we know we can reference with the expectation that everyone is already up to speed, and it is losing that bit by bit everyday without even seeming to realize it. And paywalls are simply going to be the end of that, especially at the rates you point out. Even if they succeed in making enough money off it, it will most likely kill the Times as we know it today.

It is a common conceit in media that we are important because we are so good at what we do. This applies literally to a handful of rockstar journalists, individuals down to the last. No brand gets the same pass. The Times needs ubiquity far more than it needs margin, a fact it realizes and practices with its hilarious leaky paywall practices — everyone knows you can evade paying for the articles if you surf in private mode. The way to capture those readers, as you say, is to cut prices drastically.

The Internet broke local city news monopolies and forced everyone to compete with everyone else in the world pretty much overnight. The good news is there is demand for one or two news brands at the top of the pyramid to own whole national markets, and there’s none better positioned to play that role in the U.S. than the Times.