The Stylist Effect: Real Publisher Data On What Happens When You Add a Puzzle

by Dave | Jun 10, 2026 | Research

"The publisher becomes associated with a daily ritual that feels good.

The Stylist Effect: Real Publisher Data On What Happens When You Add a Puzzle

Puzzle users at The Stylist read 31 percent more articles per session and 69 percent more per week than non-players. This is not a marketing claim. It is cross-publisher engagement data — and the mechanism it reveals works at any scale.

The data in full

The Pugpig 2025 Media App Report is one of the more granular analyses of publisher app engagement published in recent years. It draws on actual engagement data across multiple news publisher apps, not on surveys or self-reported behaviour. And its finding on games is striking enough to be worth stating plainly: game-focused publications drove the highest session frequency and longest session duration of any content format studied. Game users were the most engaged users in every publisher's app.

The Stylist's data is the headline number: puzzle users read 31 percent more articles per session and 69 percent more articles per week than non-players. This is not a small uplift. It is a categorical difference in engagement behaviour between two groups of readers who are, in every other respect, using the same product.

The only structural difference between them is the puzzle. The puzzle users are more engaged with the journalism. The causal arrow is hard to reverse: puzzle users are not people who were already reading more articles and then happened to play puzzles. They are people whose reading behaviour changed because they were playing puzzles.

The Times Live case

The Stylist data is compelling, but it is not unique. The Times in the UK relaunched its app with an expanded games section, including a seven-day catch-up window for missed puzzles and a new entry-level game called Quizle designed to attract casual players.

The results, as reported by Press Gazette, were immediate. The Times Live app now has the highest engagement of any UK news publisher, with readers spending nine hours and 23 minutes per month in the app. Article reads rose 6 percent. Topic-in-page readership — the share of readers who engage with embedded article content — surged from 2 percent to 17 percent. Puzzles played rose 18 percent.

These are not marginal improvements. They are the kind of step-change engagement numbers that most publishers see only when they fundamentally redesign their product. The Times achieved them by adding games to an existing app.

What the NYT numbers add

The NYT data operates at a different scale but confirms the same pattern. In 2024, NYT puzzles were played more than 11 billion times. In the UK alone, four million people play NYT Games weekly. The games product has more single-product subscribers than the news product. Games is, by time spent, the largest product the Times operates.

The pattern from the Stylist and The Times is visible at NYT scale: game users are more engaged, more loyal, and more likely to convert to paid subscribers than users who arrive through any other channel. The mechanism holds regardless of the size of the publisher. It is not a function of the Times's marketing budget or brand recognition. It is a function of how the daily game habit works.

Why the mechanism makes sense

The Stylist effect — more articles per session, more articles per week — has a clear psychological explanation. A completed puzzle puts the reader in a state of satisfied curiosity. They have solved something. They feel good about it. They have been exposed, through the clues, to stories they know something about but want to understand more fully. This is the ideal mental state for reading a news article.

It is the opposite of the mental state that follows a doomscrolling session on a news app, where the reader ends up feeling worse than when they started and has no desire to read further. The game creates a different affective experience of news contact — one that is associated with positive feelings rather than negative ones. Over time, this changes the reader's relationship with the publisher.

The publisher becomes associated with a daily ritual that feels good. The journalism, encountered through the puzzle clues and the article links, is experienced as interesting rather than overwhelming. The subscription, when it comes, feels like joining something rather than paying for access.

Translating this to a small newsroom

The Stylist is not a hyperlocal community paper. The Times is not a solo publisher operation. But the mechanism they have identified — a daily game that primes the reader for journalism and sends them into articles with genuine curiosity — does not depend on scale. It depends on editorial integration.

A community newsroom with 5,000 monthly readers can see the Stylist effect if the game is built from its own stories and the clues link back to its own articles. The proportions will be different. The underlying dynamic will be the same. Game users will read more articles per session and per week than non-players. That is the pattern. It holds at the Stylist. It holds at The Times. It holds at the New York Times. There is no structural reason it would not hold at your paper.

Sources

The Five Design Decisions That Make a News Game Work — and the Three That Sink It

by Dave | Jun 10, 2026 | Research

There is a difference between a sundicated game, and one built especially for a local publisher

The Five Design Decisions That Make a News Game Work — and the Three That Sink It

Not all games drive publisher outcomes. The ones that do share five specific design choices. The ones that fail tend to make the same three mistakes. This is what to look for when you are evaluating a games product.

Decision one: daily reset

The single most important habit mechanic in any news-adjacent game is the daily reset. The game must be new every day. Not weekly. Not on-demand.

Not randomly generated when you choose to play.

Every morning, at the same time, a new puzzle appears, and yesterday's is gone.

This sounds simple. It is also the reason Wordle worked when similar word games had existed for years without achieving the same cultural traction. The daily reset creates a shared experience - everyone playing today's puzzle is playing the same puzzle - and it creates urgency. There is a reason to play today that will not exist tomorrow.

For a publisher, the daily

reset is the mechanism that turns a game into a daily visit. Puzzle games with daily challenges show 40 percent better retention than those without. The reset is not a feature. It is the foundation.

Decision two: shared score

Wordle's shareable grid of colored squares was not incidental to its success. It was the distribution mechanism. Every player who shared their result on social media was, effectively, a free adve

rtisement for the game; one that came with a social proof signal (my friend plays this) and a challenge (can you do as well?).

For a local news game, the shared score has an additional dimension. Sharing your result on a crossword about your town is sharing something about your town. It is a community signal as well as a game signal. Local publishers who have integrated shareable results into their games report meaningful organic reach within their communities — reach that is qualitatively different from standard social media promotion because it comes from within the community, not from the publisher.

Decision three: difficulty gradient

A puzzle that is only difficult loses casual players before they develop the habit. A puzzle that is only easy loses the deeper engagement that drives article click-through. The right design uses a gradient — easy clues that get players started, medium clues that require reading, hard clues that reward close engagement with the coverage.

The three-level model maps directly to engagement depth. Easy clues (answered from the headline or first paragraph) expose the player to the story without requiring them to read it. Medium clues (requiring article body text) drive traffic. Hard clues (implied, requiring context) create the most memorable solves and the strongest motivation to understand the underlying story. Every difficulty level is a different kind of journalism engagement.

Decision four: the link as reward, not penalty

The article link cannot feel like homework. If the game interrupts play to say "you need to read this article to continue," most players will close the tab. The link has to feel like the payoff; the thing you want to click after a satisfying solve, because the clue made you curious about the story behind the answer.

This is a design and sequencing question, not just an editorial one. The link appears after the solve, when the game is done. It is presented as the source of the answer the player just found; not as a requirement, but as the explanation of something they now find genuinely interesting. The curiosity the clue created, the game satisfied. The article deepens it.

Decision five: the email ask

There is one moment to ask for an email address, and it is immediately after a successful solve. The player is at peak satisfaction. The game has just given them something. They are, briefly, in a state of mild gratitude and goodwill toward the publisher. This is the moment to ask. Not before, not during, not in a separate prompt later.

The ask should not be a gate. Anyone who wants to skip it should be able to. But it should be present, visible, and paired with a clear newsletter opt-in that describes what the subscriber will receive. A well-designed email capture at this moment can achieve conversion rates that most publishers have never seen from any other acquisition mechanism.

The three mistakes that sink news games

The failures are as instructive as the successes. Three mistakes account for the majority of news games that fail to produce publisher outcomes.

First: unrelated content. A game that has no connection to the publisher's journalism (such as a generic puzzle syndication) passes the time but creates no editorial value. The player builds a habit around the game, not around the newsroom. When the publisher asks for a subscription, the game provides no reason to say yes.

Second: mandatory login before play. Requiring an account before the first game destroys the top of the funnel. Most potential players will not create an account for something they have never tried. The NYT's decision to keep Wordle free and ungated was the correct one. The email ask comes after the solve, when the player has already received value, not before.

Third: clues that are answerable without the article. If a player can guess the answer from general knowledge or context without reading the source story, the game has failed its primary editorial purpose. Every clue must be specific enough that it requires the article. That specificity is the editorial discipline that makes the game work.

Sources

Why Philanthropy Cannot Save Local News Alone — and What Sustainability Actually Looks Like

by Dave | Jun 10, 2026 | Research

FUNDING CRISIS

Why Philanthropy Cannot Save Local News Alone — and What Sustainability Actually Looks Like

After USAID cuts and shifting donor priorities, journalism funders at IJF 2025 were direct: project grants are not a business model. Audience revenue is the only durable floor. Here is what that means in practice.

The scene at Perugia

Every April, the International Journalism Festival in Perugia brings together the people who make, fund, and study journalism from around the world. In 2025, funding and sustainability dominated the conversation in a way that felt different from previous years — less diagnostic, more urgent. The USAID funding cuts had forced a reckoning that everyone in the room already knew was coming but had been able to defer. Now it was here.

The message that emerged from the funding-focused sessions was blunt: journalism that depends on any single funder, be it government, philanthropic, or corporate - is one decision away from a crisis. The dependency itself is the vulnerability, regardless of how well-intentioned the funder is or how important the journalism.

What the USAID shock revealed

The reduction of USAID funding exposed how many independent newsrooms had built their operating models around a single large source of grant funding. When that source dried up, the downstream effects were immediate and severe.

This is not a criticism of those newsrooms. Grant funding has long enabled important journalism that would otherwise not have existed. But the IJF 2025 sessions were explicit: long-term core support beats project-based grants as a sustainability model, and core support from any single source is itself a fragile foundation. The only genuinely resilient model is one where audience revenue forms the floor — the base that cannot be removed by a single external decision.

What journalism funders recommend

The sessions at Perugia identified several directions worth tracking. Impact investing — blended capital that combines financial returns with positive social outcomes — was discussed as a potential new frontier for journalism funding. Collaboration between newsrooms was identified as a mechanism to share costs and accelerate innovation. Taxing large technology companies to fund journalism was on the agenda, with several European jurisdictions already pursuing versions of this model.

But the thread running through all of these was the same: none of them work without an engaged audience at the foundation. Impact investors need evidence of audience relationships to assess the social return on their investment. Collaboration works best between newsrooms that are each independently viable. Tech taxes produce a pool of money, but the newsrooms best positioned to access it are the ones that can demonstrate audience value.

Audience engagement is not one pillar of sustainability among several. It is the precondition for all of the others.

If nobody is engaged with the news you are producing … what is the point?

Impact investing: promising but early-stage

The impact investing model is genuinely interesting for local journalism, but it is not a 2025 solution for most community publishers. The infrastructure — the investors, the intermediaries, the measurement frameworks — is still being built. The newsrooms best positioned to access this capital in the next few years are those that can demonstrate clear financial strategies, diversified revenue streams, and evidence of audience engagement.

In other words: building a sustainable audience-first model now is the best preparation for accessing impact investment later. The two strategies are not alternatives. They are sequential.

The audience revenue case

A subscriber who arrives through a daily game is different from one who arrives via a grant-funded audience acquisition campaign. Meanwhile, a game player has built a habit before they were asked to pay. Their subscription is the formalization of a relationship, not a response to a promotional moment. Churn rates for this kind of subscriber tend to be lower, because the habit the game created persists after the subscription begins.

The compounding nature of this matters. An email list built through a daily game grows with each new player. The newsletter open rates among game-sourced subscribers tend to be higher than those from other acquisition channels, because the daily game habit has already primed the reader to expect daily contact from the publisher.

And none of it depends on a grant cycle, a donor decision, or a platform algorithm. The Knight Foundation's Catalyst program has identified audience-first revenue models as a priority for local news sustainability precisely because they build the kind of durable foundation that grant funding cannot. The game is not a distraction from the sustainability mission. It is the sustainability mission.

Sources

The NYT Didn’t Intentionally Set Out To Become a Games Company. Local Publishers Should.

by Dave | Jun 10, 2026 | Research

Trust Is Still Journalism’s Superpower. A Daily Game Quietly Rebuilds It.

by Dave | Jun 9, 2026 | Research

If readers trust local journalism .. why are so few of them making it a daily habit?

Trust Is Still Journalism's Superpower. A Daily Game Quietly Rebuilds It.

Even as audiences drift to influencers and social video, research shows all generations still prize trusted brands with a track record for accuracy. The problem is not trust — it is the absence of a daily habit that keeps publishers present in readers' lives.

The trust paradox

Here is a fact that should be more encouraging than it seems: people still trust local journalism. They trust it more, in most surveys, than national media. They believe it is relevant to their lives. They think it is important that it exists.

And yet they are visiting less often. Engagement is falling. Subscriptions are stagnating. If readers trust local journalism and believe it matters, why are so few of them making it a daily habit?

The answer is that trust and habit are different things. Trust is an opinion people hold when they think about a news source. Habit is what they actually do every morning. A reader can trust their local paper completely and still spend their morning on TikTok, because TikTok has a better habit mechanism — infinite scroll, algorithmic personalisation, the social pull of seeing what their friends have seen.

The Reuters Institute 2025 Digital News Report captures this clearly: even as audiences drift to influencers and video platforms, all generations still prize trusted brands with a track record for accuracy. The trust is there. The daily touchpoint is not.

What daily contact does that a great article cannot

A single excellent piece of local investigative journalism builds trust in a burst. It demonstrates what the newsroom is capable of. It may go viral within the community, attract new readers, and generate a wave of subscriptions. All of that is good.

But it is episodic. The effect fades. The readers who arrived for the investigation may not have a reason to return tomorrow. Trust built on exceptional moments is fragile in a way that trust built on daily contact is not.

A daily game builds trust quietly, visit by visit, without asking the reader to care about the news that day. The reader who plays your crossword every morning for three months has built a relationship with your domain that has nothing to do with any individual piece of journalism. When you ask them to subscribe, they are not being asked to trust a brand they know abstractly. They are being asked to support something already part of their daily routine.

The platform dependency problem

The six social platforms that each now reach more than 10 percent of global audiences with news every week— up from just two platforms a decade ago — are not neutral infrastructure. They are businesses with their own editorial priorities, their own monetisation models, and their own relationship with publishers, which has historically been extractive.

Every reader you reach through a social platform is a reader whose relationship with you is mediated by that platform. The platform controls the algorithm that decides whether they see your content. The platform controls the data generated by their engagement. The platform can change either of those things at any time, without notice, in ways that have nothing to do with the quality of your journalism.

A game hosted on your own domain, visited directly by readers who have built a habit around it, sits entirely outside this system. Publishers who are rebuilding their audience around owned channels — apps, newsletters, and direct traffic — are finding that these audiences are more loyal, more willing to pay, and more resistant to platform disruption than audiences built on social referral.

The neutral format, the wider audience

One of the underappreciated benefits of a daily game as an entry point is that it does not require the reader to have an opinion about your editorial stance. A reader who disagrees with your coverage of a local political issue will still play your crossword about their town. A reader who is fatigued by hard news will still engage with a puzzle. The game is politically neutral, anxiety-free, and genuinely fun — which gives it access to audiences that journalism alone cannot reach.

This matters in polarised local markets, where news avoidance is often correlated with political identity. The Reuters Institute 2025 report documents a deep divide in how conservatives and progressives relate to news media, with growing numbers on both sides tuning out. A game that is about the town — its streets, its businesses, its community events, its local government — rather than about political conflict is a format that can reach across that divide.

Trust as a subscription driver

The subscription conversion that follows daily game engagement is different in character from the conversion that follows a viral article. The game player who subscribes is not responding to a moment of peak interest in a particular story. They are formalising a relationship that already exists in practice.

They visit your site every morning. They know your voice. They have encountered your journalism through the puzzle clues. They are, in all meaningful senses, already a committed reader. The subscription is the acknowledgement of that. It is the easiest sales conversation you will ever have.

Sources

Why Your Crossword Clue Should Live Inside the Article — Not Outside It

by Dave | Jun 8, 2026 | Research

Designed to drive reader engagement - not dilute it

Why your crossword clue should live inside the article — not outside it

Most news games are decorative. They sit alongside the journalism but are not connected to it. The ones that move the needle are built on the opposite principle: the clue is only solvable if you read the story.

By Dave LaFontaine

The decorative game vs the functional game

A generic Sudoku on your homepage passes the time. It might even bring people back daily. But it does nothing for your journalism, your pageviews, or your first-party audience, because it has no connection to what you actually do. The game and the content are separate products that happen to share a URL.

A crossword where clue 5-Across is buried in today's city-council recap does something entirely different. It makes reading the article the path to solving the puzzle. The player is not being offered content as a reward for playing. The content is the game.

This distinction sounds simple. It has large consequences. Publishers who have added editorially integrated games report significantly higher article reads per session and per week compared to those running generic puzzle syndications. The engagement difference is not marginal. It is structural.

Three clue types, three depths of engagement

The clue-writing framework matters as much as the editorial integration. Not every clue should require deep reading — that would lose casual players before they develop the habit. The right approach uses three difficulty levels, each keyed to a different depth of engagement with the source article.

Headline clues are easy. The answer is in the headline or the first paragraph. A new reader can get these without opening the article at all — but they have still been exposed to the story, which is worth something.

Article-body clues are medium. The answer requires reading into the piece — finding a name, a number, a place that is specific enough not to be guessable. These clues are the primary traffic driver. The player who cannot immediately answer one has a choice: guess or read. Many read.

Implied clues are hard. The answer is not stated anywhere in the article — it requires connecting the story to a piece of context or background knowledge. These reward the engaged reader and create the most memorable solves. They also create the strongest motivation to click through to the article to understand the connection.

Each difficulty level is a different kind of journalism engagement. Together, they create a puzzle that works for readers at every level of engagement with your coverage — and pulls all of them deeper.

The curiosity debt mechanic

There is a psychological dynamic at work in a well-constructed article-linked clue that is worth naming: curiosity debt. When a clue creates a question the player cannot answer without reading the source material, the player is in a state of motivated uncertainty. They want to know. The article is the only place to find out. The clue has created a debt of curiosity that the article pays off.

This is a fundamentally different mechanism from a standard editorial call-to-action — a "read more" button, a related-story widget, a newsletter prompt. Those ask the reader to make an active choice to go further. A curiosity-debt clue makes not going further feel incomplete. The motivation is internal, not external.

The key design principle is that the clue must be specific enough that it cannot be guessed. A clue that asks for the name of the city councillor who voted against the rezoning can only be answered by someone who read the article. A clue that asks for "the name of a city councillor" is guessable and creates no debt.

Post-solve as the ideal moment

The placement of the article link matters as much as its existence. A link embedded mid-puzzle — before the player has finished — asks them to abandon the game to read the article. Most players will not do that. The link competes with the puzzle for attention, and the puzzle usually wins.

The right moment is after the solve. A player who has just completed a puzzle is in a specific mental state: satisfied, slightly elevated, and — if the clues have done their job — curious. They have been exposed to your coverage through the puzzle. They have unresolved questions about stories they only half-understand. The article links appear now, when the game is done and there is no competing pull.

This is why the Times Live app at The Times saw article reads rise 6 percent and topic readership jump from 2 to 17 percent after integrating games more deeply into its app. The games do not compete with the journalism. They prime the reader for it.

What to measure

The right metrics for a game-to-journalism integration are not game metrics — they are editorial metrics. Daily active players matters, but it is a vanity number unless it is paired with article click-through rate from the game, session depth on those linked articles, and email capture rate.

The question you are trying to answer is: does the game send readers into the journalism, and do they stay when they get there? Those two numbers — click-through rate from the game to the article, and time on page for those sessions — are the signal. Everything else is context.

Sources

The Three Legs of Local News Revenue Broke. Here is What is Left Standing

by Dave | Jun 6, 2026 | Research

The revenue crisis that has been going on for years

The three legs of local news revenue broke. Here is what is left standing.

Print advertising. Digital display. Social referral traffic. All three collapsed inside a decade. This is not a content quality crisis — it is a distribution and revenue-model crisis. And the data points to one structural fix: owning the daily habit.

By Dave LaFontaine

Leg one: print advertising

The collapse of print advertising is the one most publishers have already processed. It took the better part of two decades, which made it feel gradual — but by the early 2020s, print ad revenue for local publishers had fallen to a fraction of its 2000 peak.

What is less discussed is what went with it: the classified ads that funded community journalism for generations. Craigslist did not just kill a revenue line. It removed the financial relationship between local commerce and local journalism.

Most publishers adapted by moving online. But online turned out not to be the salvation it appeared.

Leg two: digital display advertising

Digital display advertising looked, for a moment, like the replacement. Page views were measurable. Advertisers could target by geography and interest. Local publishers could, in theory, compete for ad dollars that used to flow to print.

In practice, programmatic advertising collapsed CPMs — the price per thousand ad views — as the supply of ad inventory exploded across the web. Publishers with small, loyal local audiences found themselves competing in a market that rewarded scale above all else. Google and Facebook captured the majority of digital ad spend. Local publishers got the remainder, at rates that made the economics increasingly difficult to justify.

The digital display bet did not pay off. It created dependency on platforms that were indifferent to local journalism's survival.

the three legs of revenue

Leg three: social referral traffic

The third leg broke fastest.

Social media — particularly Facebook — had become the primary distribution channel for many local publishers. It was free, it reached large audiences, and it drove traffic that could be monetised through display ads. Publishers built editorial and distribution strategies around it.

Then Facebook changed its algorithm. And changed it again. And again. Each change reduced the organic reach of publisher content. Then, in a single year, referral traffic from Facebook to news publishers fell by a factor of three. Off-platform publisher revenue dropped 86 percent in the final quarter of 2023.

And then came AI. Search, which had held up reasonably well through the social collapse, began to erode as AI summaries started appearing at the top of results pages, answering questions without the user needing to click through to the source. Organic search traffic — the last reliable free distribution channel — began its own decline.

The platforms were never partners. They were distribution channels that publishers did not control, and they behaved accordingly.

What is still working

The publishers who are navigating this most successfully have one thing in common: they are investing in owned channels, such as apps, newsletters, and direct traffic - rather than platform-dependent distribution. Audiences who come to you by habit rather than by algorithm are the only durable base. You cannot be algorithm'd out of a relationship your reader has built directly with your site.

This is where a daily game becomes a structural argument, not a gimmick. A reader who visits your site every morning to play a crossword built from your own stories is a direct-traffic user. Their visit is not mediated by any platform. Their email address is yours. Their habit is built around your journalism.

The GFMD roundup from the International Journalism Festival 2025 in Perugia was direct on this point: collaboration accelerates innovation, but the foundation of sustainability is audience engagement — meeting readers where they are and giving them a reason to stay.

First-party data as the new oil

The collapse of third-party cookies (combined with Apple's App Tracking Transparency changes) made first-party data the most valuable asset in digital publishing. An email address collected from a willing subscriber is worth more, in terms of long-term monetizable value, than hundreds of pageviews from an anonymous social referral.

A daily game that captures an email at the moment of a successful solve, with a visible newsletter opt-in, not a mandatory gate ... that is a first-party data machine. Every player who finishes your crossword and signs up for your newsletter is a relationship you own outright. No platform can take it away.

The math is worth doing. Flat plans from $25 a month cover the game's hosting and puzzle generation. One local sponsor on the game can cover that subscription many times over.

A share of LocalCross' ad revenue comes back to the publisher monthly. The email list the game builds is a compounding asset.

None of these revenue lines depend on a grant cycle or an algorithm.

Sources

How Wordle Supercharged the New York Times – and What Local Publishers Can Learn From It

by Dave | Jun 6, 2026 | Research

The NYT spent low seven figures on a free word game and added nearly 3 million digital subscribers in two years.

Here is the actual mechanism, and why it translates directly to community newsrooms.

First: The Bet That Nobody Believed

By Dave LaFontaine

In January 2022, the New York Times paid somewhere in the low seven figures for a game to add to their growing "Puzzles" section.

Not a news product. Not a podcast. Not an investigative unit. A word game that reset every day and took about three minutes to play. The people who ran it had no staff. The game had no ads. It charged nothing. The Times bought it anyway.

At the time, plenty of smart people thought it was a strange use of money. The Times had a journalism operation to fund. It had reporters, editors, printing presses, a paywall to defend. Why spend millions on something you were going to keep giving away?

Sure, newspapers had long had crossword puzzles and other games in their print editions - people actually make it a point of pride when they "can do the Times crossword puzzle using an ink pen, not a pencil!"

Two years after they bought it, the Wordle page alone accounted for 82 percent of the Times's total organic search traffic. The games app was pulling in two million dollars a month on iOS. Digital subscribers had grown by nearly three million — a 43 percent jump since the acquisition. Games were, by time spent, the single biggest product the Times had. Bigger than the news. The bet had worked. And almost nobody had seen it coming — including, by most accounts, the Times itself. That is the part worth paying attention to if you run a local newsroom.

Why free was the whole strategy

When Wordle moved to the Times, the critical decision was to keep it free. No paywall. No login required. No subscription prompt before the first play. The game was a front door, not a revenue line — at least not directly.

This confused people.

The Times was spending real money on user acquisition through a product that charged nothing. But the logic was straightforward once you saw it: Wordle brought tens of millions of new users to the Times domain who had never been there before. Many of them stayed to explore. A meaningful share signed up for games subscriptions.

A further share converted to full news subscribers. The game was the top of a funnel that had never existed before. Free was not generosity. Free was the business model. For a local newsroom, the parallel is direct. A daily crossword built from your own stories and hosted on your own domain (one that is free to play, no subscription required) gives people a reason to visit your site who would never have opened a headline.

Once they are there, you have a relationship to build.

The habit loop, and why it works

Wordle is not complicated. You get six tries to guess a five-letter word. The game resets every day. Everyone in the world plays the same puzzle on the same day.

When you finish, you get a shareable grid of coloured squares.

Those four design choices:

daily reset
universal puzzle
limited attempts
shareable result

... are not accidents. They are the mechanics of habit formation. The daily reset gives you a reason to come back tomorrow.

The universal puzzle gives you something to talk about with other people. The limited attempts create stakes. The shareable result turns every player into a distribution channel. Research on puzzle game engagement confirms the pattern. Puzzle games with daily challenges show 40 percent better retention than those without.

Players average 13 minutes per session — significantly above the nine-minute average for other mobile gaming genres. The engagement is deep, and it comes back Every. Single. Day.

We built LocalCross so that it builds on your own content, and thus rewards readers who pay attention to the news you produce. The daily/weekly/monthly reset becomes part of their routine. The shared score becomes a conversation about your town.

The habit builds around your journalism.

The numbers that should matter to a local publisher

The Times's scale is obviously different from a community newsroom. But the underlying mechanics are not. Consider what actually happened at the Times at a structural level, stripped of the zeros:

A free product created a daily reason to visit the domain.
That visit generated a first-party relationship — an email address, a browser session, a known returning user.
A share of those users converted to paid subscribers over time.
The subscriber who arrived through a game proved stickier than one who arrived through a social referral, because the game built a habit before it asked for anything.

None of that depends on Times-scale resources. The Pugpig 2025 Media App Report studied publisher app engagement across newsrooms of very different sizes and found the same pattern consistently: publishers with games saw higher session frequency, longer time per visit, and more article reads per user than those without.

"... article-first apps have a wider range of digital mobile content, and audiences who use them often have shorter sessions, indicative of mobile snacking rather than edition browsing. Publishers are shifting to this mobile-first approach because the wider range of content from editions to puzzles, audio and video still delivers engagement but also attracts new audiences."

The Stylist — not the Times — showed the sharpest single data point: puzzle users read 31 percent more articles per session and 69 percent more per week than non-players. That is a mechanism, not a coincidence. A completed puzzle puts a reader in a state of satisfied curiosity. That is the ideal moment to surface an article.

What to take from this

The Times did not set out to become a games company. The strategy revealed itself through a series of individual bets, each of which happened to work. A community publisher does not have the runway for that kind of discovery process. But the lesson is clear enough to act on deliberately.

A daily game built from your own stories and embedded on your own site is not a distraction from journalism — it is a distribution mechanism for it. It gives readers a daily reason to visit. It builds the habit before you ask for a subscription. It captures the email address that social media never will.

The Times stumbled into this. You do not have to.

Sources

The “News Avoider” is Not Who You Think — and a Daily Game Might Be the Bridge Back

by Dave | May 29, 2026 | Research

The news avoider is not who you think — and a daily game might be the bridge back

Millions of people have stopped opening news apps. But research shows they haven't stopped caring about their communities — they're just consuming news indirectly, and a low-stakes daily game is a different kind of entry point.

Who news avoiders actually are

The phrase "news avoider" conjures a particular image: someone checked out, disengaged, wilfully uninformed. The data tells a more complicated story.

Research published by the Columbia Journalism Review found that so-called news avoiders are not really skipping out on the news at all. They have alternative, often indirect sources of information — friends, social conversations, podcasters, ambient awareness.

The attitude is less "I don't care" and more "I'll hear about it eventually." They are still connected to their communities. They are just not coming to publishers for that connection. The reasons vary. For some it is anxiety — the relentless cadence of hard news creates a feeling of dread that makes opening an app feel like a punishment.

For others it is time. For others still, it is a creeping sense that the news they receive is not really about them or their community. The Reuters Institute 2025 Digital News Report found that growing numbers of people are selectively — and in some cases consistently — avoiding the news.

This is not a niche behavior. It is accelerating across age groups and markets.

Photo by Tony Tran on Unsplash

Why hard news pushes people away

There is a design problem at the heart of how most news is delivered. Headlines are optimised for urgency and consequence. The implicit message of most news apps is: something bad is happening, you should know about it, here is more bad news below.

For readers who are already stressed, that experience is actively unpleasant. The news-avoidance response is rational. If consuming news makes you feel worse, you consume less of it. This is not a failure of journalism — it is a failure of the delivery mechanism. The journalism may be important, accurate, and locally relevant.

The experience of receiving it is still aversive. What is needed is a format that creates a different first feeling. Something that does not lead with consequence and urgency. Something that gives the reader a sense of agency and completion rather than dread and overwhelm.

The neutral format advantage

A puzzle makes no political demands. It does not ask you to feel anything about a headline. It presents a small, solvable challenge with a tidy answer at the end. The emotional experience is almost the exact inverse of a hard news digest.

This matters because it widens the aperture of who you can reach. A reader who would never click a headline about the city council vote will still play a daily crossword about their town — especially if the clues are genuinely local. The puzzle is the packaging. The journalism is the substance inside it. The indirect news consumer — the person who says "I'll hear about it eventually" — is not hostile to local coverage.

They are just looking for a different kind of on-ramp. A daily game that is built from your own stories and resets every morning is exactly that on-ramp. It meets people where they are, in a format they already use, without leading with anxiety.

The game-to-story bridge

The critical design question is what happens after the solve. A game that entertains and disappears does nothing for a publisher. A game where the clues are built from real articles, and where those articles are linked from inside the game, does something structurally different. When a player encounters a clue about the new bridge on Main Street, or the school board meeting, or the flooding on Elm Street, and cannot immediately answer it, the natural response is curiosity.

That curiosity is a kind of debt — the player owes the article a visit to get the answer. The game creates the interest; the journalism pays it off.

And critically, the link appears after the solve — at the moment of maximum satisfaction, when the player is not anxious or overwhelmed, but pleased with themselves and curious about the world. That is a fundamentally different mental state from clicking a headline in a news feed, and it produces meaningfully different engagement.

Research from the Pugpig 2025 Media App Report bears this out. Publishers who added games found that puzzle users read significantly more articles per session and per week than non-players. The game does not distract from the journalism. It primes the reader for it.

A crossword clue is still journalism

There is sometimes an anxiety among publishers that games are somehow beneath their mission. That editorial credibility requires staying in the lane of hard news delivery, and that anything lighter is a compromise.

A better way to think about it: a clue that tells a reader to find the name of the engineer behind the new flood barrier in this morning's infrastructure story is journalism. It is a different format, but it is doing the same work — making local news discoverable and relevant to people who live in the community it covers.

The news avoider is not lost. They are just waiting for a reason to come back that does not feel like homework. A daily game built from your own stories is that reason.