Publishers like The Philadelphia Inquirer are bundling New York Times content into their subscriptions

Philadelphia Inquirer subscribers can now access Alison Roman’s Caramelized Shallot Pasta, Marian Burros’s Original Plum Torte, and Sam Sifton’s Oven-Roasted Chicken Shawarma without subscribing to The New York Times.

The Times is venturing into deals with other U.S. news publishers, similar to what it’s doing internationally. The current deal with the Inquirer, for instance, gives new Inquirer premium subscribers the Times Cooking app free for one year, activated via an access code.

Non-news products like Cooking, The Athletic, Wirecutter, and Games are a key element of the Times’ success story. The publication has just over 11 million digital subscribers, according to its most recent earnings report, and over half of them pay for at least two Times products. Nearly a third pay only for a non-news product. Deals with publishers like the Inquirer benefit the Times by increasing awareness of its offerings, potentially hooking people who might not want a subscription to the main paper.

The Inquirer isn’t the only domestic outlet the Times is partnering with. In February, for instance, The Minnesota Star Tribune offered a year of access to NYT Games as a new subscriber benefit, and a Times spokesperson told me that over the last year, the company has “[engaged] other domestic news publishers to offer their subscribers digital access” to Times lifestyle products like Cooking. (Axios reported in January that the Times was working on this.) If you see any more of these deals in the wild, let us know.

In other New York Times news: Amazon is paying it “$20 million to $25 million a year” to license news, Cooking, and Athletic content and use it in AI products, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. That deal had been reported in May, but the amount Amazon is reportedly paying (“nearly 1% of the Times’s total 2024 revenue”) is new info.