Why does cURL return an empty string?

My guess is that a site like the New York times has protection against such behavior. Most likely this is based on the user agent, which you can fake as so:

curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_USERAGENT,'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/24.0.1312.52 Safari/537.17');

This is the most common agent btw.

These 5 lines did the magic for me.

   curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT,'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/24.0.1312.52 Safari/537.17');
   curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, true); 
   curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
   curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
   curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 1);