Unlike The Washington Post, which has put much of its editorial and business energies into dominating its local market, the Times's strategy—a doomsday scenario, foreseeing a one-newspaper nation, a last-man-standing paper—has been to make the paper national. Hence, The New York Times is no longer principally a metropolitan paper. With a daily circulation of 260,000 in the five boroughs, it's no longer even creditably a New York paper. (Its two tabloid competitors, the Daily News and the New York Post, have far more readers in New York City.) It's an Everyman suburban daily.
You can see this strategy in liberal Montgomery Country, where blue newspaper bags (New York Times) outnumber the orange (Washington Times) handily in many neighborhoods. The New York Post would make a better Everyman national newspaper, though.
