XWordInfo stopped its main updates on September 4, and it’s going to be harder to talk about crosswords without it.
For those unaware, XWordInfo is a crossword resource. A feat of modern coding, it has presented data about every New York Times crossword ever published, including every clue and answer, completed grids, special visual effects, and more statistics than anyone could expect. Introduced in 2008, it was an essential resource by the time I started studying the field. For some years, its data was limited to the “Shortz Era,” the period after Will Shortz became crossword editor; but thanks to the efforts of David Steinberg and a volunteer movement he led, its database now stretches back to the first NYT crossword of 1942.
And from there, it stretches forward to—last Sunday.
There was little to signal that this era was ending. Jeff Chen, the newer of the site’s two contributors, had announced a week or so ago that he would no longer be blogging about each new crossword. But a few days after that, with barely 48 hours’ notice, site creator Jim Horne announced the site wouldn’t have any new crosswords for Chen to blog about.
Horne clarifies the situation on the crossword podcast Fill Me In. Link is at https://bemoresmarter.libsyn.com/fill-me-in-407-the-internet-is-an-umbrage-machine.
It seems that Horne and Chen were pinning their hopes on someone else buying the site, possibly the NYT itself. That always seemed like a long shot to me.
Since the restructuring of the New York Times crossword under its “Games” umbrella, the management of its puzzles has been more and more about the bottom line. The NYT has abandoned support for downloadable .puz files. It’s stopped putting its acrostics online. And despite a raft of content about its own crosswords, it has eschewed any acknowledgement that crosswords other than its own exist.
To its credit, it did share information with XWordInfo about NYT puzzles several weeks ahead of the rest of us, so that Chen or Horne could enter new grids into its system without having to type in hundreds of words at 12:30 AM every day.
But it's hard out there for an indie. Other pressures have been weighing on XWordInfo for a bit; the occasional controversy around Chen’s blog posts or the pangrams feature, as well as the limited support of its subscriber base, meaning a growth in labor without a corresponding growth in reward. The failure to sell to the NYT (or anyone else) was, in that sense, the final nail in the coffin.
This is the second major resource the crossword community has lost this year. The first, Matt Ginsberg’s crossword clue database, stopped its updates dead a few months back. I can’t begrudge Ginsberg his decision to move on, but it’s increasingly clear that no one is likely to replace his work.
Ginsberg’s database was entirely for free; XWordInfo was not. But both of them were rooted in the ethos of the early internet, the belief that information should be complete and freely shared. That the encyclopedic should be accessible.
These days, streaming companies create artificial scarcity by removing programs they could easily afford to keep, just to make their financial reports look like they’re getting more bang for their buck. And big puzzle publishers, the NYT especially, are likewise busy making their universe of offerings smaller than it needs to be.
That’s a bit of crossword info I wish I didn’t know.
Apparently subscriptions have not been enough to sustain the enterprise, and that might seem to carry over to a new owner. But it still might be worth considering some sort of crowdfunding to indicate the strength of demand.