Articles for the period from 1987 to present are available without subscription. Their copyright notice is web scraping friendly:

“… you may download material from The New York Times on the Web (one machine readable copy and one print copy per page) for your personal, noncommercial use only.”

Why waste the opportunity to download these articles then?

Please read their terms of service here.

Please subscribe to The New York Times here.

Next time, I’ll modify the code so you can download articles from some other major online newspaper.