By Maraithe Thomas, News correspondent

What’s a 10-letter word for something black, white and read all over less and less?
In the past 12 months, 11 metropolitan daily newspapers have gone out of print in the United States, according to a site that tracks their demise called newspaperdeathwatch.com. As a result, so have print versions of one of America’s favorite pastimes:’ crossword puzzles.
With the trend of newspapers going exclusively online or going out of print entirely, one might conclude that the future of crosswords and comics is up in the air.
Newspapers that go online may be able to put their crossword puzzles online too, but that is surely not as satisfying as holding a folded up paper in your hands, smudging out mistakes, and scribbling down notes in the margins.
Senior Kevin Money said he is an avid crossword puzzle fan who does newspaper crosswords from several Boston papers. He said as interested as he is in the puzzles, doing them online just wouldn’t be the same.
‘I wouldn’t go online and print them out. I might just stop doing them completely,’ the computer engineering major said. ‘It’s part of my daily commute; I’m used to picking up the Metro or the Globe.’
Although crossword puzzles and comics are available in other mediums, like crossword puzzle books and some magazines, they were birthed in newspapers in 1913 in the New York World. They became a fad in the 1920s, and a decade later, they appeared in almost every American newspaper.
Today, crossword puzzles are an American icon of popular culture, and the most popular puzzle in the world ‘- but perhaps none so much as the New York Times Sunday crossword. Notorious for its intense ‘- some would say insane ‘- level of difficulty and its fervent fan base, the puzzle attracts thousands of solvers every week.
This is perhaps why it is the one newspaper in the country that has been able to put their crossword online and charge money for it ‘- successfully, said the crossword puzzle editor, Will Shortz.
The newspaper has more than 50,000 subscribers to its online-only crossword puzzle, Shortz said. For about $40 a year, subscribers have access to archives of past puzzles and can print them out and get access to exclusive crossword content.
Shortz, the editor of The New York Times crossword puzzle since 1993, said many people subscribe to newspapers simply for the crossword, which can become expensive. Right now, including special offers, an annual subscription to the Sunday Times would come out to $312.80.
The online alternative is an inexpensive substitute that brings in a good amount of money for the paper, he said.
‘My feeling is that between 2 and 5 percent of circulation would fall away if the paper were to take out the crossword,’ he said. ‘Puzzles help newspapers a great deal.’
The New York Times, in fact, recently added a new puzzle to its pages called KenKen, a logic and arithmetic puzzle similar to Sudoku ‘- a sign that puzzles are becoming increasingly important to afflicted newspapers.
Despite the success of The New York Times’ online crossword, Shortz said it’s just not the same as having it on a piece of newsprinted paper.
‘It’s much more satisfying to solve a puzzle on a piece of newspaper,’ he said. ‘It’s a much more tactile experience and it’s not the same on a computer or even on a printed out piece of paper.’
The fact that so many people pay for the online version of the New York Times crossword is particularly telling of the importance of the puzzle because when papers have tried in the past to charge money for online news content, they have been unsuccessful.
Associate professor of journalism Dan Kennedy said the reason newspapers have been so unsuccessful in charging for online content is because of a failure to harness the advertising market.
‘We’ve never had to pay for news content. In print, we pay for the paper and the distribution. Online, we pay for the computer and the Internet access,’ he said. ‘Ads should pay for the content, but that model has failed.’
Kennedy said that in the past, the classifieds section was the most lucrative for newspapers, but now people turn to websites like Craigslist.org or Monster.com in place of paying for an ad in the paper.
‘[Newspapers] need to have something that people can’t get anywhere else,’ Kennedy said of charging for online content.
The New York Times may have found that something.
But what about those papers without an obsessively popular puzzle? Boston College’s student newspaper, The BC Heights, is facing the same budget obstacles as papers across the country and is seriously considering cutting out the comics and Sudoku from its paper to save nearly $200 a week in printing costs. But they would never touch the crossword puzzle.
‘Last year we took it out for one issue to make room for more ads,’ said BC Heights Editor-in-Chief Alexi Chi. ‘We got so many letters that now we would never consider cutting it out.’
Chi added they wouldn’t expect a negative reaction if they chose to remove the comics and Sudoku puzzle. Both were added simply to fill space, he said.
So while newspapers around the country stumble and fall, it is now the puzzles that must aid their struggling counterpart in staying alive.
‘People will continue to buy [crosswords] in many forms ‘- in magazines and books and online,’ Shortz said. ‘But I think in the meantime, puzzles are doing a big service to newspapers.’