The New York Times receives more citations from academic journals than the American Sociological Review, Research Policy, or the Harvard Law Review. This paper explores the reasons why scholars cite the New York Times so much. Reasons include studying the newspaper itself or New York City, establishing public interest in a topic by referencing press coverage, introducing specificity, and treating the New York Times very much like an academic journal. The phenomenon seems to reflect a Mode 2 type of scholarship produced in the context of application, organizationally diverse, socially accountable and aiming to be socially useful as well as high quality as assessed by peers.