Not so long ago, the daily newspaper ritual involved three things: ink on your fingers, a coffee ring on page three, and the crossword puzzle you swore you would finish without cheating. Fast-forward to the age of smartphones and TikTok attention spans, and print’s old companions have found a flashy digital reincarnation. Online newspaper games, the Wordle, spelling bees, mini crosswords, and other brain teasers are no longer just a side dish to journalism. They are, in many cases, the main course keeping readers at the table.
The tradition of newspapers offering puzzles is hardly new. The New York Times introduced its crossword in 1942, largely to provide readers a distraction during World War II. But in recent years, these diversions have leapt off the back page and into the cultural spotlight. When Wordle went viral in 2021, players were not just guessing five-letter words – they were sharing little green and yellow squares like trophies across Twitter and WhatsApp groups. Suddenly, games were not just pastimes; they were social currency.
For newspapers, this was not just a happy accident; it was a lifeline. As subscriptions wobbled and ad revenue withered, the digital puzzle craze offered something even paywalls could not: habit. Readers who might otherwise dip into articles sporadically returned daily, not for breaking news, but for their puzzle fix. While they were there, they occasionally wandered into the news section, which is exactly what editors hoped for.
It turns out that readers love a challenge more than a headline. Games offer immediate reward: you win, you solve, you share. News, on the other hand, often offers stress, doomscrolling, or existential dread. Psychologists note that games trigger dopamine hits by offering achievable goals and instant feedback – a far cry from the murky, unresolved messiness of geopolitics or the economy.
There is also the element of community. Playing Wordle or the Atlantic’s Bracket City is no longer a solitary experience. People swap hints, share streaks, and even compete in office chats. Where the morning paper once united households, online puzzles unite group chats across time zones. Journalism, in other words, has found a way to be fun again.
People are willing to pay for their daily dose of brain teasers. The New York Times credited games as a significant driver of its record digital subscriptions in 2022, after buying Wordle for a “low seven-figure sum”. What once lived on the “back page” is now front and centre of their business model. The strategy is simple but effective: hook people with games, keep them coming back, and remind people that the news is also worth sticking around for.
In this sense, puzzles have become the unsung heroes of journalism. They subsidise the hard stuff. The investigative reporting that uncovers corruption, the foreign dispatches from conflict zones – these are expensive. Crosswords and spelling bees, however, are relatively cheap to produce, yet they fund the very reporting that democracy relies on.
This is simply the reality of modern media: audiences want to play as much as they want to read prose. The challenge for newspapers will be striking a balance, ensuring that the news does not become the side hustle to sudoku and crossword.
Still, in an era when journalism is constantly under threat, the unlikely saviour is not a billionaire benefactor or government subsidy, but the humble puzzle. It turns out that saving democracy might look less like storming the barricades and more like filling in little green squares over breakfast.
The next time you curse a crossword clue or agonise over whether today’s Wordle answer really counts as a word, remember you are not just killing time. You are, in your own way, keeping journalism alive, one puzzle at a time.
