What I Found (WIF). #2 (Crosswords, Puzzles and NYT)

Alex Fitzpatrick from Axios wrote that readers played NYT's puzzle and games 8 billions times. Wordle exclusively had 4,8 billions games played. That's a lot! Moreover, this "gamers" help NYT to thrive in a very tough times for news media (unfortunately any times are tough for news media).

So let's look at What I Found about the modern history of puzzles and crosswords and how these puzzles landed in NYT. Here is issue #2 of my weekly newsletter.

### How it all began: 1913 – 1942

The first published crossword was spotted in The New York World on 21 December 1913. The editors put it in "Fun" section. Here how it looked on the page.

The author of this crossword — Arthur Wynne , British journalist who emigrated in USA in 1890s and worked in the newspaper. Mr. Wynne called his invention "Word-Cross Puzzle", but because of a typesetting error the name was printed as "Cross-Word Puzzle". This is the name we use it up to day.

Two years after the publication of Arthur Wynne's invention, the British Pearson's Magazine published its version of the crossword puzzle. As they say, it was much more complicated than the American one, but this did not prevent the new game from winning the love of readers. In fact, 1922 can be called the start of British crossword mania, which has not ended yet. Almost from the very beginning, British crosswords were distinguished by the fact that they were more complex; moreover, a special type of crossword was even invented — cryptic. This means that the question consists of two parts: the first is the question itself, and the second is a hint using a play on words (by the way, the Wall Street Journal once published a guide on how to create this type of crossword). The first cryptic crossword was published in 1925 in The Daily Telegraph.

Today, almost all major British newspapers have special crossword sections on their websites and apps: Guardian , Mirror , Telegraph , The Independent , etc.

What about USA? The first book of crosswords was published four years later (in 1924). Richard Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster would like to please Schuster's aunt and ordered the set of crosswords, making a whole book. And with that book there was a pencil to write down the answers. The author of this set, having received a $25 advance, was Margaret Petherbridge Farrar . But the crosswords were untested, the printing quality left much to be desired, and the publishing company was so unsure of the product that it even removed mention of itself from all pages of this book. Only 3,600 copies were printed.

But the circulation was sold out so quickly that Simon and Schuster (yes, it was that Simon and Schuster) decided to print another 100,000 and make it regular. Margaret Farrar was named as an editor of this series. For better promotion, they created the Amateur Cross Word Puzzle League of America. This played an important role in the popularization of crosswords. And by the end of the 1920s, almost every newspaper in the United States published its own crossword puzzles.

Except New York Times. The “Grey Lady” held out to the last; the newspaper resisted until 1942, considering crosswords a “primitive mental exercise. ” But with the start o the Second World War, the perception has changed. Two weeks after the United States entered the war, NYT Sunday edition editor Lester Markel wrote to the publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger (who was a big fan of crossword puzzles, by the way), proposing to publish a crossword puzzle to “give people something to do during blackouts.” Thus, on Sunday, February 15, 1942, a crossword puzzle page appeared in the Sunday edition of the NYT. The editor was the same Margaret Petherbridge Farrar.

It's interesting that since the launch of the crossword section there were only five editors:

• Margaret Farrar edited 7,085 daily crosswords from 1942 to 1969.
• Will Weng edited 2,975 daily crosswords from 1969 to 1977.
• Eugene T. Maleska edited 5,947 daily crosswords from 1977 to 1993.
• Mel Taub edited 76 daily crosswords during three months in 1993.
• Will Shortz edited 11,029 daily crosswords from 1993 till today. By the way this is 40.7% of total number of crosswords published by NYT since 1942.

### 1942 – 2006

During the World War II there were some weird events in UK, connected to the word puzzles. Some crosswords in the Observer started to appear with a bunch of words that could treat the national security. "Gold", "Sword", "Juno" — that were not just answers to the crosswords. That were the names of the Atlantic beaches for Allies troops. At the beginning British secret service did not pay much attention on this. But in May 1944 they spotted some much more alerts in crosswords: "Utah", "Omaha", "Mulberry", "Neptune" and "Overlord". And that brought secret service agents to the front door of the creator of that crosswords — Leonard Dawe, headmaster of a boys prep school. Agents asked Mr. Dawe to show his notebooks, but didn't find any suspicious information or connections to the nazis. If you didn't get too what is this all about — "Overlord " was the codename for the Battle of Normandy, "Neptune" — the code name for Normandy landing. Only in 1984 the mystery was solved. The boys from the school helped Mr. Dawe to construct the crosswords, and they often played near the military base where they could hear those code names. And the code names were really good for the structure of the crosswords as they realized. And by the way, boys took an oath not to tell anybody about it.

But let's get back to USA. Until 1950, crossword puzzles were published only in the Sunday editions of The New York Times. And in September of that year they began to be published daily in the 15x15 format. The first topic of the daily crossword puzzle was the reservoirs of New York (if you don’t know what they are, the entire system of reservoirs in the city is described here ). Since then, difficult puzzles have been released from Monday to Saturday, and the Sunday edition has been easier. By the way, until 2001, all crossword puzzles were published without attribution. Bylines appeared only in the 21st century.

No matter how much I looked for something interesting that had happened to crossword puzzles in the NYT for the period before 2006, I found only three interesting events worth mentioning:

• First. An extremely important event for the entire crossword industry happened in January 1996 - the first digital version of crosswords was released on the website nytimes.com . In fact, from this date we can begin to count down what crossword puzzles are now for publication.
• Second. In 1978, then 25-year-old Will Shortz organized and hosted The first American Crossword Puzzle Tournament , which has been held every year since then (except for the pandemic year of 2020). And as you remember, he became an editor of NYT crossword section in 1993.
• Third. In 1998, Bill Gottlieb (27 years old) proposed to his girlfriend using a crossword puzzle written by Bob Klahn. And the girl said "yes" (but who wouldn't?!). By the way, since then there have been at least two more similar marriage proposals.

And finally in 2006, the documentary Wordplay with the participation of Will Shortz was released. The film boosted the popularity of crossword puzzles, adding a huge number of new subscribers.

### The state of the Crosswords in NYT

Here are a few numbers that characterize the development of the NYT gaming section:

• In 2016, the number of subscribers to the crossword puzzle section increased by 69,000 (to 159 000). Revenue from subscribers increased by 49% (from $6.2 million to $9.3 million).
• In 2019, the NYT reported a new achievement - 400,000 subscribers. One detail to understand the importance of these subscribers. In the first three months of 2018, of the NYT's 139,000 new paid subscribers, 40,000 came from the crossword app and the Cooking app.

In January 2022, the NYT bought the Wordle , which, according to the publication’s management, brought in additional “tens of millions of users.” And as we can see from the 2023 results, this game is still a real smash hit.

The NYT gaming product development strategy at the beginning of 2023 was explained by the publication's head of games, Jonathan Knight:

“Our stated strategy is to be the essential subscription for curious people seeking to understand and engage with the world. And news is at the centre of what we do".

For now in the Games section of The New York Times you can find nine words and logic games.

The NYT Games app was downloaded 10 million times in 2023. And in August 2023 NYT Co CEO Meridith Kopit Levien noted that "Games has helped funnel subscribers towards the bundle".

And that resonates with what Jonathan Knight said :

“What we’re seeing is that for subscribers, specifically if a subscriber is engaged with both news and games on a given week, they just have a much higher likelihood of retaining over a long period of time than news-only subscribers – and frankly, than pretty much any other combination of products in our offering”.

PS:

It would be unfair not to mentioned that crossword puzzles in the newspaper became the cause of serious scandals. For example, in 2019, in one of the crossword puzzles, the author put the word BEANER, which means “whore” in Mexico. And in December 2022, on the first day of Hanukkah, a crossword puzzle shaped like a swastika appeared on the pages of the newspaper.

In addition, it suddenly turned out that among the authors of crossword puzzles there is a very strong bias towards older white men.

That's all for today. Hope to see you next time with What I Found.

Best, Sergei Yakupov .