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.

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.