From a story on semafor.com by Ben Smith headlined “Inside the identity crisis at The New York Times”:

This August, a former New York Times reporter named Riva Atlas called to ask me some questions about The Times on behalf of an unnamed institutional investor.

“Is the Times always going to be fundamentally a news company expanding into these ancillary tech products?” she asked. “Or is it trying to morph into something like a tech company with an ancillary news product?”

My caller was raising one of the great questions hanging over the Times: What do they want to be?