Argh… yes … I was being lazy, and definitely didnt want to spend the calories figuring out or coining the right classification for what the NYT is doing.

Yes, the crossword has existed for longer, but it was never the core source of funding.

It’s interesting, and I doubt it can scale - every newspaper has its own puzzle section?

Right I guess in the old model they were often syndicated. But as a kid I remember seeing things like the jumble, word search, cryptic something or other etc. in my local small-ish city newspaper