Mark Stinson, host: [00:00:00] Welcome back friends to our podcast, unlocking Your World of Creativity. And as we've gone around the world talking to creative practitioners everywhere, we've also explored a number of creative media and platforms. Obviously we talked to authors and singer songwriters, but we've also talked to restauranteurs and game show developers.

And today we're gonna explore the medium of digital puzzle games. And my guest is Jonathan Knight, the head of games at the New York Times.

Jonathan Knight, NYT Games: Hey, thanks for

Mark Stinson, host: having me

. It's great to be here.

In your background, WB games Zynga, electronic arts, Activision, connect the dots for us, cuz it, at first glance it says, wow, with all this game production background, where does the New York Times fit in?

Jonathan Knight, NYT Games: , yeah, , it's a great question. And when I took the job About two and a half years ago, a lot of my colleagues in my network were like, does New York Times make games? They were confused by it, and so I get that. But [00:01:00] but we do, and it's one of the reasons I was excited about the opportunity.

They're puzzle games, so you know, the New York Times crossword, as soon as you say that, people go, oh, okay. Of course, that's like a legendary puzzle. We've been publishing the crossword puzzle since 1942. And the crossword made a transition to digital and became playable on, your devices and on your web browser.

And then we started introducing about five years ago additional games. So spelling B is a really fun word, finding game. And it's become really popular. And then last year we acquired Wordle, which was An internet sensation and we added that to the portfolio and we have a few other games.

So yeah, we have a collection of digital puzzle games. They're human crafted people make these puzzles every day for you to solve. And they're a little bit different. It's a daily puzzle and that's our cadence and it's time well spent. You solve the puzzle, you put it down, you come back the next day for the next one.

So yeah, it's a little different, but it is, but they are digital games and it's a really fun and [00:02:00] awesome opportunity.

Mark Stinson, host: Absolutely. And I think of the other side of your network. Then what about the the hardcore reporters and publishing staff at the New York Times? Does anybody say, my goodness, we have a head of games.

Jonathan Knight, NYT Games: Yeah. I think We have definitely in recent years recognized the value that games brings to the overall organization and have made more investments there. Recently, like we have a very big internal games team working on our kind of games business, and we have a. A separate subscription tied to the games, or you can subscribe to the overall New York Times bundle and get name games plus, news cooking, wire cutter.

We have a lot of sort of sub-brands at the New York Times and we're in a process of educating everybody about all the things that come with the New York Times. I think. Look, games are a distraction from the news. They're not the news. We hope that people come for the news and stay for the games and [00:03:00] that it becomes like kind of part of their day that they engage with both these things and cooking maybe on the weekends or what have you.

So yeah, it's it can be surprising how important the role that games plays at the New York Times, but it absolutely is essential to our strategy.

Mark Stinson, host: Absolutely. And as you talk about the games business and you talk about the brands and the sub-brands, this is a business and there's a p and l and a publishing side of things that also occupies your attention.

What is it about games that fits in to that overall growth strategy of the paper business?

Jonathan Knight, NYT Games: Put simply in terms of like business terms it's really about retention, subscriber retention, and what we're finding is that when people subscribe to the New York Times and they engage with both news and games on any given week their sort of long-term subscriber retention.

Is the highest of [00:04:00] any of our like product combinations, and that includes news alone, games alone. It includes news plus other, aspects of our portfolio. It's that news plus games. On any given week, if you're engaged with both of those products you retain really well over a long period of time as a subscriber.

And so we just see it as a really great product for creating that engagement. And I think it's the daily, it's the daily habit, frankly, that, news stories. Come and go. There's big Newsweek. There's slow news weeks. Even with our cooking product, people engage with recipes sometimes on more of a weekly basis.

But with games, it's a real daily habit. You get up in the morning, you do your wordle first thing maybe you solve spelling bee. Last thing you do before you go to bed. Like a lot of people like to solve the crossword puzzle over coffee. It's a daily habit and that's like the value that I think it brings to the portfolio.

Mark Stinson, host: You've definitely given a glimpse into my daily routine. And this whole world sensation there, there's a [00:05:00] starter word strategy obviously behind this as well, but I was thinking about, again, on the creative development side. Talk, talk to us about the process. I think of the creative.

Brief almost for my marketing and advertising days, what is the brief and the mission that the world team is

Jonathan Knight, NYT Games: looking at. First of all, we acquired Wordle. It was created by a brilliant engineer based outta New York, called Josh Wardle. And he had done some really interesting work previously in his career and he wasn't really a game developer, but he was excited to try his hand.

It. Making a game. And he made it for his partner. It was like basically a classic friends and family project. And it just started to grow and catch on and, suddenly 70 people were playing it and then 300 people were playing it, and then 300,000 people were playing it. Like it just went viral.

The New York Times wrote a story about it cause it was catching on kind of in that holiday period right around Christmas. 2021 and then really blew up in [00:06:00] January, 2022. Josh and I got on the phone together. He was eager for the game to land at the New York Times. He really hoped it would end up there.

He didn't wanna run it himself indefinitely. And and we got to a really happy agreement and brought it into the company. So it was. An unusual way for us to add a new game to our portfolio in the sense that's not what we had done before. Spelling Bee, which is very popular, was homegrown, and the team built a prototype.

And, to your question around the process when you're. Coming up with new games, we do a lot of internal prototyping and try things out. We have a green light process where we move things through stages and decide to keep going or to cut them off. And we've killed lots and lots of internal projects that, didn't really take off.

And that's just how it is in games in the whole industry. You're always trying lots and lots of ideas and it's rare that something breaks through and succeeds, but that's the goal. For, once the game [00:07:00] is live and people are playing it every day and you're trying to improve upon it, that's like a different, set of.

Processes and challenges. And we do have a team that works on Tel and you're, you're trying to keep the game fresh and you're trying to keep engagement going. And we're a little focused on Spelling Bee. We're about to launch a a feature called spelling B pass puzzles, which allows you to go back and play previous ones that you may not have been able to complete.

Which is a simple thing, but it, it's gonna unlock so much engagement for that audience. Yeah. People, they do, they write briefs. We have hypotheses about what we're trying to accomplish with changes and new features and new games. We have our business goals and our creative goals and we go after it.

Mark Stinson, host: And I think about this development process, the green lighting process you're describing it must be similar to, I dialed back in your resume, the Simpsons and Harry Potter and, Farmville, all these things that were some, somewhere, somehow just an idea and they had to be developed.[00:08:00]

Jonathan Knight, NYT Games: Yeah, look, I've had a really rewarding career in games. I've gotten to work on some incredible properties and across all different platforms, whether it's mobile or PC or console. I've worked on licensed properties. You just named a couple of very big licenses. When we worked on the Simpsons game at ea it was, that's the.

Most successful animated television show of all time. Arguably the most successful television show of all time at this point. Like it's really long running and and, coming up with a video game based in, a franchise like that or Harry Potter is another incredible example is a different set of challenges.

Versus working on like original ip. When I worked at Maxis, at ea I worked on the Sims, and The Sims was our own ip. It wasn't licensed and we were developing it. And that was really fun and rewarding. But you're like, it's scarier in a lot of ways. There's no, you're creating the rule book for your IP at the same time that you're making the games.

You work on The Simpsons and they give you a style guide. Yeah, different challenges for different properties and different projects and they've all been a [00:09:00] blast. That's terrific.

Mark Stinson, host: And balancing that business side with the creative leadership, keeping the, you mentioned keeping it fresh, how do you keep the creative sparks alive when it really is a daily deadline Challenge.

Jonathan Knight, NYT Games: You think about your audience and your users and that's what, I don't wanna speak for my whole team, but I think a lot of them would agree that, you wake up every day and you realize that millions of people are. Playing your game. Millions of people are solving the wordle this morning.

Millions of people are solving the crossword puzzle today. That's what keeps you going. It's important. These are important things in people's lives. It's meaningful. It brings them joy, and for a lot of people it creates connections between their family members. We get incredible letters from people and incredible stories of.

You know how, I solved the crossword, with my father when he was in the hospital up until the day that he died. And it's what kept us together. We get stories [00:10:00] about pregnant mothers and we just saw, got one great story about a woman who was breastfeeding her baby and waking up all night long and, engaging with our games as she was doing that and that it's created incredible memories for her.

We have. Parents and kids solving world together and that's bringing them together. So that's what keeps us going is we're doing important work and bringing joy to all of these people.

Mark Stinson, host: Wonderful. And what's the team working on these days? I know I'm not asking for the confidential but the kinds of things that you're thinking about the next big franchise, the next big

Jonathan Knight, NYT Games: game.

We have so much opportunity right now at the New York Times and it's really just like always a challenge of what do we prioritize? Our roadmap is years long of all the things we want to do. I think there's a couple things we're focused on. One is our New York Times games app, which traditionally we were a website, you could solve the crossword on the website, the New York Times.

Obviously has a news [00:11:00] app. And you can solve the games and play the games in the news app. But increasingly we're seeing a lot of strength from our dedicated New York Times games app, and we're driving more and more people to download that app and play our games there. And we're bringing all of the games we have to offer to that app.

So literally just today we launched our game tiles, which is a visual puzzle. We launched that in the games app. We brought Sudoku into our games app just a few weeks ago. And we're gonna be bringing more games into that games app, and we're gonna be updating the design of that app, making it more modern, bringing more features.

And so that's a big focus and we're excited about that. I mentioned on spelling B, we're bringing the past puzzles, the ability to play the last two weeks worth of puzzles and catch up. And that's a little bit more like our crossword archive where you can play a series.

So that's a big focus for the team. We have a new beta game out right now called Digits, and it's gaining some traction and we're excited. It's a limited beta. We're, we may or may not. Support that game[00:12:00] on an ongoing basis, but we're excited about the feedback we're getting on it. It's a numbers puzzle, so it's a little bit different than, our typical word puzzles.

And we have another. New beta that we're gonna be launching, sometime in the next couple of months two or three months that I'm really excited about. More new stuff on the horizon. Yeah. And then lots of other projects that I could ramble on about, but those are the biggies right now.

Mark Stinson, host: You're touching on a kind of a creative trial and error, exploration. Gotta keep a pipeline that I think a lot of people would say. And I think about your past roles as well, but you've got the New York Times crossword puzzle, it's stay in your lane.

Let's just build what on what we have, it's our flagship offering. But you've just listed, geez, a dozen or more of these trial and, error and, let's just see where it goes. Let's beta test, let's go, see what we can do.

Jonathan Knight, NYT Games: Yeah, the reality is we have to do both and we do spend most of our resources making sure our [00:13:00] core service works and works well for people.

We have to get our crossword puzzle out every single day at, the quality that people have come to expect. With, by the way, the crossword puzzle, we're innovating all the time. We're making it more relevant, the process for. Taking in submissions and then editing and curating them, and ultimately deciding which ones to puzzle.

We have a l to, to publish. We have a large editorial team that works on the crossword every day and every week. It's led by Will Schwartz but there's many people on that team who. Who edit the crossword every day, every week. And that's a really big project. And then making sure that it works digitally for people who are paying for that.

So I would say, and I'm glad you mentioned it, that is, Where we spend most of our resources. And that's the bread and butter and it's essential that we get that just right. And then you're always looking for ways to grow and to innovate. And Wordle was the perfect version of that.

If you don't do that, someone's gonna come along and [00:14:00] take it from you. And we were so fortunate to be able to. To acquire that and bring it into our portfolio. Because what it does is it expands the audience. We're reaching more people, we're reaching younger people. It's a more international audience.

It's a simpler game. It's more approachable. Crossword puzzles are hard, people, they're more time consuming. And so it rounds out our opportunity and it creates a funnel into the crossword, frankly. So all these games can play different roles and we do need to always be, innovating and trying new ideas.

Mark Stinson, host: And you mentioned the team aspect of this and I think about the, what the topic, sometimes I would call it a controversy of how to build out teams, creative teams, especially on a remote, on a multi-location kind of basis to, to make sure you have all the best talent and to retain that talent.

But how are you managing through those issues?

Jonathan Knight, NYT Games: Yeah, so we, we have a good size team dedicated to games and across a lot of different [00:15:00] functions. I'd mentioned the editorial team that's working on our content. We have a engineering, a large engineering team, obviously that's delivering the digital product and, they work alongside product managers and product designers.

We have researchers. We have a big data. Team, that's helping us understand what's happening giving us those user insights that are so important. We have an awesome marketing team that's helping, us share everything we're doing with the world and and optimize, for discovery and acquisition of new users and new subscribers.

So it's, it's a gooder, good size operation. You're right. Look, the pandemic hit and, Challenged us to find all new ways of working, and we do spend a lot of time on remote hybrid working norms. I would say close to half of my team is remote. Apart from the pandemic we just have been a remote friendly Team inside the company.

We've been hiring a lot of engineers who are working across the country and we've been very adaptable to people's lifestyles and what works for them. And I think it's [00:16:00] important to give people that, that flexibility and meet them where they are. A lot of, and what we find is that a lot of people do want to come into the office in New York and they do want to be together.

And that sort of like in-person stuff still really matters for building. Relationships and, we bring people together from all over the country a couple times a year, to make sure that we have that FaceTime and build those relationships and have that social aspect to what we do that's really important.

But yeah, a lot of the work gets done in a remote environment and we've found a way, to make that really effective. I'll say one more beat on that Games is a team sport. Like making games is a team sport for sure. Like it, I mentioned all the different, it makes total sense. Yeah.

Like it, it is, it is a collaborative effort and it's a lot of different disciplines coming together from different points of view to deliver, a product for users. And it's hard. It's hard work and it requires a lot of, Communication, collaboration. And I think, for me, and this has been true my whole career, the most important thing is around the [00:17:00] vision and the strategy of what we're all trying to do together and getting everyone on the same page about that and excited about that and believing in, not just the vision of what we are, but also what we aspire to be and where we're headed and all the opportunities and, I think that makes the remote work, that makes the all the challenges that we have all over the world right now in, in terms of staying engaged and, burnout and all the rest of it.

If you are part of a team that has a shared collective vision and some shared values about your product and you believe in it and you believe in where we're going and it's exciting to you That's more than half the battle and all that stuff is just essential to, a high functioning team.

Mark Stinson, host: Yeah. Very good insight. Thanks for sharing that. My guest is Jonathan Knight. Jonathan, I think we've covered the sort of business and highlights and career highlights, but I've noticed a little something on the side of your resume, and that's [00:18:00] consulting and advising public schools. And I wondered if you could maybe give us an insight into what that kind of public school involvement and what about the learning aspects of digital games that you're,

Jonathan Knight, NYT Games: espousing?

Yeah. Thanks for asking and for bringing that up. And I would like to do more of it. My, my job occupies most of my time. But no I've been involved with the Gweneth County school system in Georgia for a number of years. I don't do a ton for them. I attend meetings and try to give advice.

The main thing I do for them is I judge their student video game contests. They do them every year and I volunteer my time to go through all of their Just awesome and creative projects that they do. And we have a rubric and we judge them and there's a couple of other judges and that's one way that I can give back and.

I'd love to be able to do more, it's been really fun for me. It's incredible the tools that kids have today to create things, whether it's unity or some other tool, or [00:19:00] Roblox anybody can make a video game and that was not true when I was growing up. And so it's just, yeah, it's really rewarding to see all that creative energy coming out of the kids.

Ah, fantastic.

Mark Stinson, host: Jonathan, I can't thank you enough for a great conversation. It's been engaging, creative, and le leave us with some maybe encouragement at least inspiration for creative people coming up, going through that gating process you've been describing, and whether it's on their own to develop new ideas or with their companies and teams.

What did we need to do to keep the fire burning?

Jonathan Knight, NYT Games: You just, make stuff and learn from it and then make more stuff. It's just that simple. And I think, the most successful film directors in Hollywood all the way down to just the average person making TikTok content or video game makers, they'll all tell you the same thing you get good at doing by doing, and you have to have sort of a growth mindset and a learning [00:20:00] mindset and not be afraid of failure.

Recognize failure. Oh, that was bad. Here's what I learned from it, and then do it again and keep trying. And, that's it's a, it's advice as old as time. It's not it's not revolutionary, but it really is true and it really does work. I think, the one piece I might add is it's important to, to be in an environment with other people that that is supportive and encouraging and allows you to fail.

Talk about the failure in a way that, you don't take it personally, that people aren't using it against each other. That, failure is a gift and it can be hard, but if you're surrounded by people that feel the same way and. Point out the positives of failure, and then you get back on that horse.

Almost nobody comes out of the womb, just like nailing it creatively. It's just really rare. If ever it's all about doing and learning. The Beatles blew up and this has been like, Documented in the Malcolm Gladwell book, why did they suddenly get off that airplane in America, and take the world by [00:21:00] storm.

It didn't come outta nowhere. They were playing in a, in a basement, in a ca, in a bar in Berlin or not Berlin. What was the, I'm getting it all wrong, but in Germany. Yes, forget the city and they were just rocking out, two shows a day for eight days a week, as the song goes.

And for months, after, months after months. And they got really good at what they were doing. That's what it's all about. It's about practice and learning, iterating and then you get there and you have your breakout and Yeah, so that's what I would say. Hamburg, not as Hamburg Hamburg.

Mark Stinson, host: Yes. I'll get the phone calls, you'll get the emails. It's come on, Beatles people. Yeah, I love that. I've been talking with Jonathan Knight. He's the head of games at the New York Times, but also as we've been talking, there's a business side of that, and he's a senior vice president of a major media corporation.

So not only having the fun and creative side, but also running a. Business operation, a p and l, publishing pipeline for a major media [00:22:00] organization. His background that we've touched on is creative leadership roles at some of the name brand video game and gaming companies that we all know and love.

And I think we've really taken away today both of those, that we've gotta have our creative smarts, but we've also gotta practice our craft and gain the confidence to put our work out into the world. And that's what this podcast is all about. So we'll continue our worldwide travels. We've stamped our creative passport in San Francisco Bay Area today and of course, the New York Times globally.

But we'll continue our global travels and talk to creative practitioners about how they get inspired. organized ideas and most of all, how they gained the confidence and connections to launch their workout into the world. Until next time, I'm Mark Stinson, and we're unlocking your world of creativity.

See you, soon .