Earlier this year, I ran into A. G. Sulzberger, the still young-ish New York Times Co. chairman and publisher (must be the vegan diet), at a party in northwest Washington. During our brief chat, I thanked him for providing me, an intermittent news media diarist, with a rare success story in an industry besieged by gale-force macroeconomic headwinds, visionless leaders, and an obstinate dependence on dying business models. This was right around the time that seemingly every news organization except the Times was laying people off, or turning the lights off altogether, and media analysts were responding to the moment with alarmist terms like “existential crisis” and “extinction-level event” (not quite).