Perhaps in the US it is considered the paper of record. In the land of shoddy journalism it is pathetically easy to be the best print paper. However, the rest of the world has significantly better news and papers- Spiegel, Le Monde, FT, Economist, Haaretz.
I read three out of those five plus the Times, and I am not convinced they're significantly better - in the contrary, the New York Times does a lot of things better.
There are some advantages these papers have - for example, Haaretz is more willing to put good analysis on its (web, Hebrew-edition) front page, but I think that reflects an American culture of journalistic caution about mixing even vaguely editorial content with news, which I generally enjoy. (e.g. however much I disagree with the WSJ editorial board, I generally regard their news as credible and well-reported; I cannot say the same about e.g FAZ's straight reporting on Greece.
Perhaps it would surprise you that we have those publications here in the US too. You might also be surprised that the rest of the world has the New York Times.
While Der Spiegel and Le Monde have both broken many major stories (I believe the participated in the Snowden publishing along with the Guardian and the NYT), Does the Economist do any investigative journalism? There's some nice commentary on news, but I've never heard of anything break by them
If you're going to include The Economist then you should also include states-side The Atlantic, New Yorker and increasingly Vice. There's also the Washington Post and the Christian Science Monitor.
