While other publications might allow for wild-looking grids and play fast and loose in terms of clues, Farrar instituted regulations that have now become industry standards. Farrar, who started her career as crossword editor at the New York World, insisted on the highest-quality puzzles possible. Sulzberger hired Margaret Petherbridge Farrar, who edited Simon and Schuster’s wildly successful series of crossword collections, as its puzzle editor. Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter But, he reasoned, if the Times was going to have a crossword, it was going to be the best crossword in the nation. So Sulzberger decided to institute a puzzle. And, as an editor pointed out in a note to publisher Arthur Hay Sulzberger, the crossword would provide readers something to occupy time during coming blackout days. Suddenly, the puzzle was not a frivolous distraction but a necessary diversion, something to keep readers sane with the rest of the news so bleak. Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, the Times caved. 15, 1942, just two months after the Japanese Navy Air Service had launched its air strike against the U.S. Its editors also believed that the paper should captivate readers’ attention without needing to rely on a puzzle.įor decades, the Times remained the only major metropolitan newspaper in America without a puzzle. This moral high ground stemmed from the Times’ historical abstinence from any kind of yellow journalism: the paper wanted to maintain the highest standards possible. Throughout the ’20s and ’30s, the Times ran several editorials pooh-poohing crosswords as a passing fad though solvers wrote pleading the paper to print a puzzle, the publishers refused. Readers clearly craved puzzles, but one American newspaper refused to yield its staunch stance against games: the New York Times.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |