This, on its own, is not very interesting news. Apple News+ is a news aggregator, and every news site has pivoted to daily games. Have you popped ‘crossword’ into a search engine recently? I did, while I was bored on the train one day, and I was struck by the fact that almost every first page result brought me to a news site. The Washington Post, The New York Times, USA Today, The Guardian, The New Yorker, Vox, Vulture, The Atlantic… It seems that every big media company has gone all in on daily games.
News Has Long Included Games
This isn’t astrangepivot, historically. If you’re old enough to remember actually reading your news in a daily newspaper that got sent to your house and that you could hold in your hands, you may remember that puzzles like the crossword and sudoku made regular, if not daily appearances in their pages.
The crossword even has its origins in newspapers, with the first crossword appearing in the now defunct New York World.
The New York Times has always been at the forefront of ‘games’ – its crossword was famous even before it shifted online. But since 2014, the Times has leveraged its digital daily games more and more, culminating inthe purchase of Wordleafter the web game went viral.According to The Verge, NYT puzzles were played 11.1 billion times in 2024.Estimates saythat more time is spent on the NYT’s games than on its news.Axios reportsthat it’s the Times’ non-news products that are keeping it afloat as online media suffers. I regularly see jokes online that The New York Times is a gaming website with a news desk attached. This isn’t all that far from the truth.
But Money From Game Subscriptions Let News Organisations Off The Hook
When you’re only seeing Wordle, you don’t actually understand what you’re paying for. The problem, broadly, is less about what is actually being published and more about the fact the people paying for it are completely unaware.
It’s impossible to say how many people are consistently giving money and clicks to news websites whose editorial policies they disagree with. The reality of media websites becoming games-first, news-second is that they’re no longer as accountable to readers – the people they get the most money and consistent traffic from aren’t there for the news, after all. But journalism has tangible effects on the world we live in. Is your Wordle streak worth it?
