Wordle and the return of the newspaper bundle

The idea that The New York Times has become a gaming company instead of a newspaper has reached meme status. It’s not exactly untrue, but it’s not really true either.

Jim Barksdale, the former CEO of Netscape, said that there were only two ways to make money: “One is to bundle; the other is to unbundle.” Ezra Klein described the death of the old financial model of newspapers as a great unbundling. Newspapers used to survive on cross-subsidy: that which was cheap (sports and opinion) and profitable (classified ads, movie times) funded what journalists actually wanted to do: deeply reported news.

Craigslist started pulling that bundle apart by unbundling the hugely lucrative classified ads from the newspaper. Ezra Klein actually saw this coming all the way back in 2005. Then blogs ate the cheap stuff that newspapers produced, particularly opinion (as the old saying goes, everyone’s got ’em). This left newspapers holding the bag on the expensive stuff: actual journalism.

Which brings us back to The New York Times, the Wordle company**™**. Games have been key to its transformation. The newspaper’s CEO, Meredith Kopit Levien, described in an interview earlier this year with Ben Thompson how the company is putting together a new kind of bundle: games, recipes, product recommendations, audio, sports, and yes, news.

According to SEC filings, among the publication’s 12.2 million digital-only subscribers in Q4 2025, only 12% were news-only, compared to 35% who had a single subscription to a non-news product (like The New York Times Games or The Athletic). The other 53% were bundle or multiproduct subscribers.

In essence, the strategy at The New York Times has been to make itself relevant to more and more parts of its readers’ lives: a game with their morning coffee, recipes for dinner, sports during the playoffs, and news during elections.

The internet broke apart the newspaper bundle, but The New York Times figured out how to build another one.