Could the Baltimore Sun or some other vulture-pecked Alden Global Capital paper make such class-signifier magic work for them? Probably not.
How else to explain why people who complete the paper’s Sunday puzzle think they’ve done heavy lifting (you know who you are)? The snootiness of Times readers (I know who I am) compels them to think merely touching a Times product conveys a glow and this works to the paper’s benefit. The Times’ cultural identity is so refined, you could slap its NYT logo on some substandard puzzle and some people would still be convinced they were partaking of brilliance. The Times has a major advantage over its competition in marketing its fun and food verticals because it conveys high social status in some circles.
Were they misled by editors and reporters who told them that hard news coverage was the only drawing card? Did they not appreciate that the readers who desire the poison of hot news also crave the antidote of diversion? That the bundle is not an extravagance but an essential of newspaper health? The Times’ early successes with web-based entertainment and diversions indicate that newspaper publishers were too hasty in spiking so many features as they scrambled to avoid red ink. Now that the Times has gotten serious about being a game host and given that both chess and bridge attract tens of millions of viewers on YouTube, we can expect the paper to eventually exploit chess and bridge enthusiasts with Timesian, turbocharged paid apps on the site.
In 2014, the paper’s chess column was slipped over the side. The Times never bundled as much entertainment and news-you-can-use into its package as other dailies, but like its fellow newspapers, it dumped some bundle-like content when money got tight. What’s different about the Times approach to the bundle is that it sells it two ways: You can get all New York Times content for the price of one hefty subscription or you can buy the little bits of the bundle à la carte. Papers literally got smaller and there was less of everything inside. The bundle continued to grow until the early years of this century, when falling advertising revenues convinced newspapers to shrink their product. Once a news organ, newspapers now resembled home entertainment centers. In quick succession, newspapers added comics, advice, puzzles, recipes, games, and eventually columns on chess, bridge, gardening, hunting and fishing, retirement, and health. In some respects the Times is just reassembling the traditional newspaper “bundle” that dates back to the 1890s when William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York dailies widened the range of their newspapers beyond hard news to include soft stuff. But it’s really not all that new a concept, which is probably why it’s having success. Can games like Wordle save American journalism? In a six-letter word - surely.
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