In the old days there was a newspaper truism that the best way to hear from subscribers was to drop a comic strip. Ten minutes after papers hit doorsteps, the switchboard would be lighting up with calls from indignant fans whatever denizen of the funny pages got replaced.

At the Monitor we’ve recently found a similar effect: Tweak the daily crossword puzzle.

“My husband and I are finding it harder and don’t enjoy doing the puzzles as much. It gets frustrating and we have to Google answers too often!”  was a typical email comment from a woman who, also typical of the people I heard from, didn’t want her name printed in a story.

Actually, we aren’t the ones who tweaked it. We buy puzzles through the Tribune Content Agency and they did the dirty deed.

The tweak was involuntary because Jacqueline Mathews, the longtime editor of their daily puzzle that we run on our comics page, retired at the end of 2023. Involuntary or not, it made our switchboard light up as long-time readers called to say that something had gone very wrong.

“I had always enjoyed it, to see if I could get them right. But now it’s no fun,” said Sharon of Hopkinton, (that’s as much I.D. as she would give) when I called her after she responded to a query for readers.

I contacted Tribune and they said that they’ve made no changes to policy or to the sources used for material so I figured the conflict arose be cause the new editor, Stella Zawistowski, was younger and had started using more recent culture cues: Burning Man instead of Woodstock or Joe Rogan instead of Paul Harvey.

That’s certainly part of it. “Movie stars: The clue is Pascal something or other, from some movie I’ve never heard of,” sighed Sharon.

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But talking to a half-dozen frustrated crosswordians (crossworders? crosswordistas?) made it clear there’s more to it than age. Zawistowski also has a different style, sometimes with long, multiple-word answers and an overall looser approach to clues. This rubs some the wrong way.

“This one, the clue is ‘eek.’ It’s four letters; I got O-H for the first two letters,” said Sharon, who said she saved nine Monitors with examples of puzzles that bothered her. “You know what it was? ‘Oh no.’ It’s two words, in four letters!”

We’re not alone, by the way. You can search online and find similar reader complaints in a few other newspapers that subscribe to Tribune puzzles.

Fascinating as this may be, you may wonder why it’s a topic for the Granite Geek column and not a publisher’s Note To Our Readers. The thing is, there’s nothing much geekier than puzzles that have no practical use.

The pleasure of using your mind to figure out something, even if it’s completely irrelevant to the American traditions of life, liberty and the pursuit of wealth, is one of the defining aspects of geekdom. Rubik’s cubes, chess problems, speed Sudoku or quirky math questions that don’t depend on an order of operations – they’re part of the mix, but so are word puzzles.

And crosswords are the original word puzzle. It’s impressive that they still hold up in this era of a hundred online variations of Wordle (I like Warmle and Squardle). I think it says something about the inherent curiosity of the human mind that so many of us spend time trying to remember a three-letter word for a flightless bird, and I think we’re better for it.

So while I’m sorry that so many readers are irritated by the change in our daily puzzle, I’m happy that so many of them still care. Geek on!

One more note: Several readers hoped our query meant we would change the puzzle back, or at least dampen down the novelty. “Could there be a happy medium between Ms. Matthews (whose puzzles have probably become too easy for some) and Ms. Zawistowski?” queried one, who added, “I do not want to be interviewed.”

Alas, Tribune has no plans to change and so far as I know the Monitor has no plans to switch services. I’m sorry but I hope you stick with us!

As a sidenote, we hope our readers will check out our new collection of online puzzles that we’re planning to introduce in the weeks ahead. And, yes, one of those puzzles is a crossword.