This is my impression as well, about NYT's business.
The "internet person" knee jerk response about paywalls, does have a certain degree of truth about relevance of journalism though, but that's a longer term loss of a commons rather than a business model issue, at least right now.
Soft paywalls often allow you to read a few articles when you click through to google, but then you share an article with someone who's wrong on the internet. And you end up looking like a ding-a-ling because a paywall is presented when the user opens the article url directly with no google referrer, and no normal person is going to google an article to be allow to read an opposing view.
Essentially, it's a shame that the open web business model didn't work for 'real' journalism, because there's plenty of dogshit-tier content to happily take its place.
Here in Finland, public service broadcaster Yle has been a good source for good information in text form, but the media industry has fought tooth and nail to try and impose limits like Yle only being allowed to publish certain types of longer-form journalistic text, like investigations when enough rich media is included.
I can appreciate the argument about public service distorting the market in this case, but I'm really worried about the local information that's going to be available sans paywall on search engines in the long run with these restrictions.
It's unclear how big the impact of the above is going to be, but remember, this is a small market, too. Especially if Yle's budgets are slashed to allow less longer-form journalism that qualifies for web publishing with the rules, it might get hairy.