"But the company is also vying for people’s attention against every app on their home screen. So it’s developed products in recent years to satisfy the lifestyle needs of its audience: cooking, shopping... sports... and audio, building on the success of The Daily with a slew of podcasts. The products and the journalism coexist under what the Times calls 'the bundle'.... 'A lot of people are actually buying the bundle through our Games product... And that is what is so powerful about games as a funnel.' People who engage with both news and games on any given week have the best long-term subscriber retention of any product combination in the bundle, and it isn’t lost within the Times newsroom just how integral Wordle, Connections, and the rest have become to the bottom line. As one Times staffer puts it: 'The half joke that is repeated internally is that The New York Times is now a gaming company that also happens to offer news.'"
Lots more at the link, including detail about the producing Wordle and Connections.
Wordle... was set up with a list of randomly selected words that would last through 2027. An unfortunate coincidence revealed the limits to the algorithm in May 2022 when, a week after news leaked that the Supreme Court was poised to strike down
Roe v. Wade, the game inadvertently chimed into the national abortion discourse with the randomly selected word FETUS....
[Tracy] Bennett chooses her words about six weeks in advance, using a random-number generator associated with each word in the database to generate a week’s worth of Wordles. “Sometimes I see problems, and that’s when the editing comes in,” says Bennett. “I’ll say, ‘I’m not gonna have this next to that,’ ” or “ask my superiors if it’s better to wait on that word and run it another time, based on the news cycle”—something she hasn’t yet had to do....
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18 comments:
I don't look forward to "Wordle the Movie".
The headline is interesting considering the reporting of hiring freelance correspondents that participated in the Oct. 7th activities. Play silly games, win silly prizes.
I read today that the LATimes has laid off 100+ of employees. A headline I see from NBC (I am not making this up) last night: Journalists of color hit hard in seismic L.A. Times layoffs. That's the Union/Guild spin on this event. I'm assuming the Union agreement with the Times has a Last-in-First-out clause that prevents firing the people who have been around the longest -- who are more likely not Journalists of Color.
Best of luck to them on their online business venture. Any idea when they might try to do news reporting?
Fetus is a technical term-of-art appropriated by human rites practitioners to socially distance themselves from the wicked solution. Unfortunate, indeed, is the beating heart that beats ever louder.
I think the NYT needs to double or triple or quadruple down on that "dispatching correspondents to war zones" thing. I could see Gail Collins and Maureen Dowd in Yemen, Michelle Goldberg and Nicholas Kristof in the Sudan, that restaurant clown in Ukraine. I can never remember his name. Frank Bruni, that's it. David Brooks and Paul Krugman could go to Gaza, Charles Blow could maybe climb up his own asshole and keep us up to date on the tensions in that troubled region. Ross Douthat seems like a good choice for the Antarctic front. Thomas Friedman could act as a sort of strategic reserve, ready to parachute in and bloviate from the back seat of a taxi wherever things start popping off.
PENIS is always good.
Give the NYT props for good business decisions.
MONEY is always the Wordle
Two things:
1. I am shocked at how little $ the Wordle guy got paid.
2. In the spirit of 5-letter words, the name should have been WORDL
That is all...
I just cancelled my Times subscription because I pay $5.00 a week for the basic plan and that's too much money to then have them push all these other products on me that I can't use because $5.00 a week only gets me the basic subscription.
So they get nothing.
IRONY
$5.00 a week for the basic plan
You can subscribe to a number of quality news sources on Substack for that amount of money.
Douthat lives in Budapest, so he can cover all of Europe.
I do the Connections and Spelling Bee free options every day. But not one penny of my money will ever go to that corporation if I can help it.
Unlike our hostess, I choose to not contribute financially to institutions dedicated to the destruction of American freedoms.
Am still, after three or four or five renewals of this arrangement (but I was assured that this is the last time, really the very last time), paying $4 a month for the NYT online. They send emails quite often begging me to give them an additional 50 cents a week for 'full access'. These make me smile.
I have much more fun with Worldle, and it's free.
And if they'd managed to keep politics at a comfortable distance from their puzzles, I'd still be sending them $5/month. But no, they couldn't help themselves.
So being the uni-party's official propaganda outlet isn't working out as well for the NYT corp's bottom line as before? That says a lot about the the NYT's readership demographics that their side lines are tricky word games perfectly suited for peeps that are overeducated with high verbality, disposable income, and some time to kill. (ie, SWPL stuff.)
Good time to brag about the granddaughter
She'll be 9 in May. She comes down stairs in the morning and asks her dad if he did the wordle yet. Then asks for his phone so she can do it. She needs help, but she does it everyday.
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