This is the New York Times we are talking about. Literally everything is within their reporting purview. Who can they possibly accept money from that won't present a potential conflict of interest?
National stories are also often regional and local stories. I just pulled up the NYT website. The top story is the Derek Chauvin trial which is certainly also a local story in Minneapolis. The second from the top Opinion piece is about the NYC mayoral race. Does that mean that NYT shouldn't be able to accept any advertising dollars from those markets?
What is great about the regional model is the large number of regions which removes the need to not accept from a regiin. In your example Minneapolis is one of many cities the pressure local ad dollars never makes it's way to the editorial board.
Their readers and only their readers otherwise no trust should be given to their reporting. News is worth what people pay for it, and if no one is willing to pay for it then we won't get any real reporting.
Sounds you have beef with the readers for not paying enough, and with non-readers who freeload off investigative journalism's social benefits, and with and plagiarizers like Business Insider. Has a major paper ever not been ad-supported?
