Okay, so this one requires some credits before anything else.

1. I modified Brian Renshaw’s shortcut which saves the page as a JPEG to Day One.
2. His was modified from one by Matthew Cassinelli.
3. His was modified from this one on Reddit.

The Shortcut

Download it here.

Before anything else, make a folder called "nytimes" inside your Shortcuts iCloud folder. Otherwise the shortcut will error out because it doesnt know where to save the file.

You can run this from the Shortcuts app, or you could run it from the home screen widget, or you could even set it up on an automation to run every day automatically. iOS still requires you to confirm you want it to happen, but it gives you a persistent notification on your iOS devices to make it happen.

What it Does

1. Downloads today’s front page of the New York Times
2. Saves the file to iCloud Drive (/Shortcuts/nytimes/2020-03-29.pdf, for example)

And that’s it…it’s pretty darn simple. My contribution was simply to make this a little cleaner and save the file named nicely with no usr input: simply tap the shortcut and it will be done in a second. Forgot if you ran it already today? No worries, just run it again and it will overwrite today’s PDF if it exists already.

Saving the file as a PDF takes up a little more space than the JPEG version in Brian’s version, but it also means you get high quality, indexable text you can use to find things at a later date. I don’t use Day One anymore, but I suspect the reason for the JPEG was because Day One doesn’t support PDFs for diary entries, but I’m not sure.

Bonus Shortcut

This one is embarrassingly hacky, but I used it to get all of the 2020 covers in one go.

Download the Jan 1 - Mar 29 covers with this shortcut.

If you know of a better way to do this, please let me know! Better yet, update it yourself and share it so more people can enjoy it.

UPDATE: Jimmy Little improved this version of the shortcut to return however many days of results you'd like. This is way better, so use it instead! Download here.