NewsBeat

September 2022 NewsBeat 21 Duty victories. "You've solved eight Mon- days in a row!" reads a caption currently plastered to my subscription, residue of my girlfriend's dutiful morning crossword habit. Knight speaks openly about the Times' desire to reach 15 million subscribers by the end of 2027, which can only be realis- tically engineered by investing in terrain outside of the media's traditional contours. Case in point, the Times' Games-only sub- scription option, where you get access to the entire oeuvre of puzzles for $40 a year, has racked up over a million subscribers. Knight is helping the Times escape the boundaries of a news organization, trans- forming it into this omnivorous, all-con- suming platform with fingers in every pot. It's become a lifestyle brand rather than a paper, which is exactly what's allowing it to grow. "Our strategy is to be the essential subscription for curious people looking to engage and understand the world, and that goes beyond finding out what happened in the world and reading the news," Knight said. "We're having a lot of success with that strategy. The subscription bundle is about putting that front and center. We're saying, 'Hey, we know you're interested in at least some, if not all, of these products we have to offer.'" Knight's conclusions bear out across the industry. Liz Maynes-Aminzade, the puz- zles and games editor at The New Yorker, said that "subscribers who play the cross- word or quiz every day are more likely to renew," according to the magazine's internal research — which she imagines is mirrored in the analytics of every other me- dia company that has invested into a games section. (This gets to a larger point about the puzzle boom. Maynes-Aminzade noted that The New Yorker has a ton of data on the popularity and usage patterns of its digital games, which simply wasn't possible when the crossword was bound to ink and paper.) That's important ammunition, given how competitive the word-game wars have become in such a short amount of time. "The groundswell does mean that peo- ple now have more options to choose from. I think this will make it all the more important for outlets to establish dis- tinct identities for their games sections," Maynes-Aminzade said. "The bar is getting higher, and generic games won't necessarily be a draw if readers feel like they can do better elsewhere." There will be winners and losers in the games-section renaissance, in the same way there are casualties in any of the fiscal schemes that tell the story of digital media. Journalists tend to get cynical about the bailouts and off-ramps devised by upper management to juice flagging traffic num- bers or dwindling ad dollars — particularly when those strategies exist outside the work of reporting itself. One of the recurring, unavoidable facts of this line of work is that there is a hard ceiling on how many people want to read the news, and that contradiction, combined with the VC-honed mandate of expansion, has given rise to a wealth of bad ideas. The bloat and then the contraction, the hires and then the layoffs, the pivot to video and then the pivot to oblivion. I mean, The New Yorker's union earned a contract last year after 31 months of bargaining; I can under- stand how it might have been frustrating to watch the company fuss over the cross- word during those graveyard shifts around the table. But Maynes-Aminzade also reminded me that we've been solving puzzles in the newspaper for 109 years. Today, the games section doesn't reek of the same rot that has poisoned so many other, gross- er attempts to make money in the media (though, 100 years ago, some disagreed). Look around you: The Ringer is currently sheathed in sponsorships from sports- books, and Vice partnered with cigarette giant Philip Morris. The Austin Chronicle, the weekly I wrote for while studying at the University of Texas, recently got into hot water after publishing an advertisement for an "Asian mail order bride" service. "More and more media companies do seem to be catching onto the idea that games can help support their pub- lications as a whole. [But] I don't see the current interest in games as a bubble," Maynes-Aminzade said. "Game sections are pretty tried and true: Plenty of magazines and newspapers have had them for de- cades. It's not a new idea that lots of people like to mix crosswords into their media diets. Puzzles just pair well with reading the news, and that doesn't seem likely to change anytime soon." This article was first published by Nieman Lab. ACROSS 2. a kind of printing 4. the G in RGB 5. newspaper library 7. caption 10. kind of digital ad, and fish 11. what the Thanksgiving paper is stuffed with 15. portion of lower case letters that extends below the main body 16. the C in CMYK 17. opposite the editorial page 19. space between two letters DOWN 1. printed title of newspaper on A1 2. extra papers 3. partial page folded around newspaper 6. correspondent 8. space between lines 9. North Country publisher 12. a kind of binding stitch 13. space allotted to news 14. a print mistake 18. Journalism's favorite amend- ment A crossword puzzle created for NewsBeat readers

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