Click here to view this email in your browser 

Welcome back to my weekly media newsletter On Background, which is coming to you tonight from a particularly frigid New York City.

This week, my feature story explores the latest Games release from The New York Times, called Crossplay. It differs from its predecessors in two key respects: The game is two-player, and it will live as a standalone app. The implications of the strategy, which I explore below, are fascinating, as they reflect many of the major themes reshaping digital media.

Below that, make sure to check out my interview with Danielle Coffey, the president and chief executive of the News/Media Alliance, a trade association representing thousands of premium publishers. Danielle helped demystify why so many publishers have filed identical lawsuits against Google in the last two weeks.

And of course, I would be remiss to ignore the fact that On Background will soon be included in Mediaite’s One Sheet, a “media newsletter that aggregates media news from other media newsletters,” per The New York Times. I like to think that ADWEEK’s position at the top of the call sheet is a reflection of quality, rather than alphabetical order.

But first, some news, notes, and tips that you should know. As always, replies to this newsletter go directly to my email, so please feel free to reach out with any thoughts.

MARK STENBERG, SENIOR MEDIA REPORTER, ADWEEK
mark.stenberg@adweek.com   |  @markstenberg

If you were forwarded this newsletter, you can sign up here.

TALKING HEDS

• Daily Front Row Sold (Exclusive): The fashion industry outlet The Daily Front Row was acquired by the talent representation firm The Only Agency earlier this week for a seven-figure sum, said Kent Belden, founder of The Only Agency. The Daily Front Row, founded in 2002, covers the fashion industry, and its portfolio includes industry events, seasonal print products, and editorial assets. In terms of pairing, the tie-up is eerily reminiscent of when Great Bowery acquired Coveteur in 2019, only to shut it down in May 2024. Still, the new, combined entity appears naturally complementary: The Only Agency can plug its talent into The Daily Front Row, while the latter brings sponsorship inventory to the former. “We’ve seen the continued growth of in-person events,” Belden said. “Even if text diminishes, translating that expertise into live experiences is what The Daily Front Row is about.”

• Pale Blue Dot: On Tuesday, former Wired and MIT Technology Review editor in chief Gideon Lichfield launched BlueDot Media, a so-called “brand journalism agency.” The firm aims to help technology and finance companies create brand publications and company newsrooms, casting them as definitive information sources within their industry. For many journalists, working in-house for a branded outlet is somewhat of a siren song: The budgets are richer, but the promise of editorial autonomy often runs aground against reality. Lichfield, who teamed up with former Reuters editor Stuart Grudgings on the venture, has split the baby by offering these services from the safe remove of an agency. 
• SI TV: Sports Illustrated launched a free, ad-supported television (FAST) channel on Tuesday. The channel, SI TV, is available on platforms including Amazon FireTV and DirecTV and will serve as another surface area to distribute its video content, which includes podcasts, docuseries, and live events coverage. The publisher, now owned by Minute Media, is among the many joining the CTV gold rush. In recent weeks, the ecosystem was jolted by the news that Instagram itself had plans to broach the living room. While FAST channels nominally attract viewers by offering exclusive IP, the moat of “free, ad-supported TV” feels increasingly vulnerable given the expanding dominance of YouTube. 
• Pitchfork Paywall: The Condé Nast publisher Pitchfork, whose staff was diminished and folded into GQ in January 2024, announced its plan to launch a paywall earlier this week. The news invariably sent a subset of the internet into a fit, decrying the privatization of its content, but the truth is that the move is long overdue. Publishers, especially of the lifestyle variety, cannot exist on ads alone, and giving super-fans a way to express their financial support is a new axiom of digital media. 

THE LEDE

With Crossplay, The New York Times Gets Serious About Games

Its newest launch will be the first to live as a standalone app, marking a key milestone for the news publisher

On Wednesday, The New York Times launched its eleventh game, a multiplayer wordplay contest called Crossplay.

The release is the latest in a steady drumbeat of new diversions to emerge from The Times’ Games division, which has become the largest ad surface by reach across The Times’ portfolio since its launch in 2020, according to chief revenue officer Joy Robins. 

“It’s a new way to play,” Robins said. “It’s faster, more social, and designed for head-to-head competition, and we think it will welcome more of the population into The New York Times’ Games.”

In 2025, users solved more than 11 billion puzzles, and tens of millions of people visited daily to try their hand at Wordle, the Crossword, and Connections, among others, per Robins. Games has also proven a commercial success, attracting more than 1,700 advertisers since its inception and enticing normally news-averse brands to work with the publisher.

Indeed, the runaway success of the platform has led industry insiders to quip that The Times is actually a games company with a side hustle in news. The publisher, of course, downplays the joke, but its latest launch further illustrates just how plausible the punchline has become. 

Crossplay’s gameplay combines the linguistic challenge of Scrabble with the interactive dynamic of Words with Friends.

With the game’s debut, The Times marks two notable firsts: Crossplay will be a standalone app rather than part of the standard Games product, and it will also be the first multiplayer game developed by The Times. 

Launching as a standalone app is primarily to support specific features offered in the game, according to Robins, but it is also interesting for a number of other reasons. For one, Crossplay does not require a New York Times subscription to play, just a login.

It also represents just the fifth app in The New York Times family, alongside the flagship app, The Athletic, Cooking, and Games itself. The Times is loath to launch extraneous apps. When it introduced the Audio app in 2023, the launch marked the first new standalone release the publisher had debuted in nine years. (Two years later, it closed the product and folded audio more prominently into its flagship app.) 

Crossplay is also, obviously, a mobile game, which if nothing else marks an important symbolic shift from its predecessors. The company is no longer, as they might say on TikTok, beating the “games company” allegations. The division more broadly is integral to The Times’ increasing focus on its “bundled” subscription, which now accounts for more than half its total subscribers, per its latest quarterly earnings.

In addition to the design considerations, launching Crossplay as a standalone product enables The Times to market it more aggressively in the App Store, Robins said. This will help it reach new audiences by searching for customers in a different ecosystem, exposing The Times’ brand to new cohorts, according to media analyst Kerri Mason.

While The Times will promote Crossplay across a variety of channels, optimizing it for the App Store also enables the publisher to bypass the increasingly complex world of search advertising, which has been disrupted by artificial intelligence. Like cooking apps (coincidentally, another strength of The Times), gaming apps exist largely untethered from the open web, whose future has grown uncertain as a result of answer engines.

In short, as the open web and search become unreliable sources of acquisition, The Times has avoided the issue by creating a product designed for discovery in an entirely different ecosystem.

The other novel element of Crossplay is that it marks the first two-player game created by The Times. This enables all kinds of new features, such as an in-game chat, but it also makes distribution more seamless, according to Mason.

The social nature of the game encourages users to share it with their friends, whether or not they are Times habitués. This natural incentive will help it spread more quickly to new audiences, which could have a compounding effect given that the app is already being promoted in a new ecosystem to a new cohort of prospective users.

To keep the barrier to entry minimal, Crossplay will be free to play—at least at first. In a novel but related twist, the game will also be the first from The Times to feature ads within gameplay itself, rather than before or after the session begins. According to Robins, users will get their first ad after seven turns, then every three turns after that. J.P. Morgan Chase is the launch sponsor.

Ads will be of the interstitial video variety, which The Times launched 18 months ago and has found consistent demand for, as they mirror the kinds seen in Instagram Reels, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts. Soon, the publisher plans to introduce these same ads to its Watch tab, which debuted in October.

The new app might not transform The Times’ business model overnight, but it points to an increasing comfort with experimentation and rapid product development. If the 173-year-old news publisher can successfully launch standalone mobile games, it might soon set its sights on even more ambitious ventures.

PULLED QUOTES

“We are well aware of the circular nature of this endeavor.”

— Mediaite founder Dan Abrams, on launching its media newsletter compendium,

READ MORE

“All I know is I went to bed with this adorable opinion writer and woke up next to Les Moonves.”

— Journalist Nellie Bowles, on her wife, Bari Weiss,

READ MORE

“For Gen Z, Spotify just looks like NPR—it’s part of the establishment, the old guard.”

— Mark Mulligan, managing director at industry analyst Midia Research,

READ MORE

“Ryanair is launching a Great Idiots seat sale especially for Elon and any other idiots on ‘X’. 100,000 seats for just €16.99 one-way."

— he budget airline Ryanair, on X, trolling platform owner Elon Musk,

READ MORE

QUOTE/UNQUOTE

Danielle Coffey is the president and CEO of the News/Media Alliance, a trade association that represents more than 2,000 news and media outlets. Last week, when publishers including People Inc., Business Insider, McClatchey, Advance Local, and The Atlantic filed lawsuits against Google, I called Coffey to ask why the timing was so coordinated. It turns out that a potentially transformative payday, to the tune of billions of dollars, could soon be on hand for publishers.

Mark Stenberg: Why are so many publishers suing Google for the same thing at the same time? 

Danielle Coffey: This is related to the antitrust suits filed by the Department of Justice and the State of Texas alleging that Google has a monopoly in the ad-tech industry. Several years ago, when those cases were still being built, USA Today Inc. (then Gannett) and later The Daily Mail launched “opt out” cases. If there is a class-action suit, companies have to opt to file their own case against Google.

Since then, Google has been found guilty of anticompetitive practices, and within the next few weeks, the courts are expected to hand down their proposed remedies. These other publishers are now joining USA Today Inc. and The Daily Mail’s suit so they can negotiate with Google outside of the class.

Mark: Why did USA Today Inc. lead the effort?

Danielle: They saw that the cases pending had potential for a favorable ruling. They took the brave leap early on and invested significantly in a lawsuit that will benefit them and others. Others joined more recently when it became clear that they would likely be successful.

Mark: What are these publishers seeking? 

Danielle: They are asking for damages as a party harmed by the anticompetitive actions of Google. They are claiming that advertising CPMs were artificially suppressed by Google’s manipulation arbitrage in the adtech ecosystem.

Mark: How do publishers calculate these potential damages?

Danielle: Publishers will argue that they are owed whatever advertising revenue they lost as a result of Google’s monopoly overcharge. And because this is an antitrust case, if Google takes this to court and loses, it will be on the hook for “treble damages,” or three times the initially requested amount.