Washington Post lets you cancel through their website without talking to anyone. It's also significantly cheaper than NYT last I checked. I'm a subscriber, and I think it's a pretty solid paper especially for national politics coverage.
I subscribed for a while, and really liked the news! However, a little off topic, there was a very strange several day period where I got repeated auto-playing audio-only ads that I could not stop from playing. There were no audio/video controls anywhere, but I could turn my phone volume down. For days, the ad was always this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYUvgxwuJbA (Dietz Nuts ad, the joke is that Dietz sounds like "deez" or "these")
I called their support asking if this is a known type of ad that they do for paying subscribers. It seemed like a bug, so thought they'd want to dig into it. They told me that this is indeed a thing they do, and that I am not exempt from autoplaying unstoppable audio ads just because I pay. I told them to double check, since otherwise I'd be canceling, and they confirmed that it's a thing, so I canceled. (I'm 50% sure the support person just didn't know what I was saying. Maybe my ad blocker was being screwy somehow.)
In my experience, the Post is basically New York Post/Fox News tier when it comes to the outrage baiting. Sure, a lot of those articles are in the "opinion" section, but even then, the lines between the opinion/news sections are almost non-existent at this point. The comment section is also beyond toxic; it's filled with unhinged conspiracy stuff but from the blue side. At least the New York Times, as much as it's flawed, still has a much better "normal news" section and it's opinion section isn't filled with the most outrage baiting low tier tribal articles. Its international coverage is miles ahead of the wapo, too. The WP is cheaper for a reason.
The op-eds are clearly labeled as such (which I'm thankful for because I have no interest in reading them with the occasional exception). There are also clearly labeled "Analysis" and "Perspective" articles that can sometimes blur the lines between news and opinion, though the Analysis articles are some of my favorite because I find they are trustworthy, and I don't have time to analyze and interpret everything happening in the news myself.
Outside of that, I find the coverage to be pretty neutral or maybe center-left, but definitely factual and not outrage baiting. WSJ is even more neutral, but I find that WaPo has better politics coverage (while WSJ has better business coverage). NYT is similar to WaPo, but IMO a little less neutral with the way its headlines are written. NYT is still a great paper though.
Lots of stuff. For "pure news" New York Times, Seattle Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Economist, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian. Lots of somewhat more general interest subscriptions also have news angles like Slate Plus, The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, Harpers, Literary Review, ProPublica, New York Magazine, some Substacks. I realize this is a lot (and is only a partial list) but pretty much all of these listed ones have various interesting pieces I wasn't finding anywhere else. Whereas WP felt very "cable news" to me, just giving article after article on the latest stuff happening at the White House. I can get that elsewhere and am already not interested in most cases.
