— by Rob Gurwitt

As radio listening habits change in New England and around the country, web traffic has become increasingly important to public radio stations, and at WBUR in Boston, that traffic has been growing. Tops for visitors is its homepage, which is no surprise. But coming in second on the site? Not the news, but a crossword puzzle.

“Oh my god, it gets people coming!” says Joan Dimicco, the nationally known station’s Executive Director of Product. The crossword has the highest rate of people who’ve visited before returning to it. It has the highest percentage of traffic from local visitors on the site. And the email alert the station sends out when a new crossword appears has the highest open rate of any WBUR email.

All of which is just a way of saying the crossword’s popular.

Based on each week’s news, it’s part of a suite of games—which also includes a news quiz and a localized version of Wordle—created by Kevin McCurdy and Bill Miles, the Hanover-based brothers-in-law who run NewsGames.org, a company dedicated to finding ways of strengthening Americans’ engagement with news and civic life in the communities where they live. If you’re a Daybreak reader and all this sounds familiar, it should: Daybreak’s daily Vordle and its weekly news quiz are built on their platform.

So, to a rather remarkable extent, are the games used by a growing number of news organizations far beyond the Upper Valley. In Vermont, Burlington-based Seven Days relies on them. So does NHPR in Concord. So does the Hartford, CT-based Connecticut Mirror. And KQED in San Francisco. And NPR affiliates in Arkansas, Michigan, Florida, Maine, and Tennessee. Public radio in New York City just joined the throng. So, not too long ago, did The Conversation, whose Boston-based US version has been growing rapidly, thanks to the popularity of its blend of academia and journalism.

“Building digital audiences is about our number-one strategic priority,” explains Jim Schachter, NHPR’s president. “Publishers understand at this point that it’s through digital means that people find and consume the work that we do. This presented itself as a pretty easy-to-implement and potentially effective means of building reader loyalty and engagement.”

And that, says McCurdy, is the idea behind NewsGames. He and Miles are serial entrepreneurs—they joined forces on the Hanover web-based digital self-publishing startup Picaboo—but with a focus on the civics of local life. When NewsGames began in 2021, they thought the real business opportunity lay in polling local readers—which initially they tried out in Hanover. They combined a mini news quiz with a question: Should dogs be leashed in town? Should the old Canoe Club become a restaurant, bookstore, or clothing store?

Their thinking, Miles said at the time, was that both nationally and locally, division was being stoked in part by a lack of common information. “I go back to growing up in the '70s, with the nightly news,” he said. “Everyone shared a common understanding of the happenings of the day. And I really believe that digesting it down to the salient items and having a shared understanding in our communities of what happened the week before will help us come together. It’s hard to have a common understanding and community and culture. If we can make it bite-sized and ‘gamify’ it, make it easy to digest, maybe there’s a larger group that will get involved. It's not partisan, it's just a common understanding.”

They eventually discovered that polling had its challenges, and that what the audience was most interested in was the quiz: “It’s almost impossible to keep up with all the news during the week,” McCurdy says now. “So once a week, with the quiz, you can keep up with the news in a fun, interactive, bite-sized way. And people also like to test their knowledge and be a little competitive—news games are intellectual breaks from the seriousness of all the news.”

Just as important, they realized there was a huge, untapped market in making it local. The New York Times has been a national pioneer in hooking readers on games, from its crosswords and Spelling Bee and Wordle and Connections to its logic games, weekly news quiz, and history quiz. It provided both a proof of concept and a challenge.

“We wanted to take the caliber of news quiz being offered by the New York Times and other national providers and enable that to be delivered locally,” says McCurdy. “Local news organizations have been struggling, and it’s not right that they shouldn’t be able to offer awesome products like the national players do.” Their experiments in the Upper Valley helped the pair understand the nuances of writing local news quizzes—and made them, McCurdy thinks, “maybe the world’s leading experts on local news quizzes.”

These days, thanks to its growth, NewGames has a staff of 10, including writers, a software engineer, and several interns. And though its priority is expanding the playing field for the crossword, Wordle, and news quiz, McCurdy and Miles are thinking down the road as well. One possibility: something like the New Yorker’s cartoon contest. “We did some prototyping around it and it was fantastic,” says McCurdy. “We had a great reaction, but we haven’t turned it into a product yet.” Another possibility: a geography guessing game.

The point, McCurdy and Miles say, is that for small and medium-sized news organizations struggling to contend with an ever-changing business environment and set of technological tools, NewsGames can take on some of that burden. “I don’t think the need for local news is going away, and you can’t get it unless there are people on the ground writing about our communities,” McCurdy says. “It’s just that the models people are using are antiquated and they need to change.” If games can help bring in an audience—just as comics and crossword puzzles did for newspapers’ print editions—then they have a role to play, however modest, in helping local news organizations evolve.

Which, in fact, is how some news organizations see things as they strive to build and maintain digital audiences. The crossword, WBUR’s Joan Dimicco says, has “shown us the capacity people have to be loyal. They can come to our website every day. It’s gotten us thinking more expansively about what our website could be.” In Burlington, VT, the crew at Seven Days—which makes use of NewsGames’ entire suite of games—sees them as reinforcing the weekly’s mission of tying locals and Vermonters statewide together.

“A news habit is helpful to all of us, because reading and keeping up with the news is an important part of the infrastructure of communities,” says associate publisher Cathy Resmer. “It helps people be informed and make better decisions about local issues. It’s not just that we want people to keep coming back to our site because we’re selling ads; the games also emphasize our mission in a different way: They’re high-quality local content that helps people feel connected.”

NHPR’s Jim Schachter also takes a broad—but measured—view of the role that news games can play in helping local and regional news outlets survive. “Our future is to connect and build loyalty among people who use and consume us when they want to and how they want to,” he says. “We can’t just keep talking to the same people. We’ll continue talking to them, of course, but they want us and we want to expand that circle. [Games are] one tool in what has to be a big fat Swiss army knife of tools if this is going to succeed.”