BigStar303
2004-08-25 13:35:06 UTC
Note the "veiled swipe" at Peanuts halfway through this article.
Personally, when I see a strip from one of these newer "cutting-edge" comic
strip artists such as Alcaraz that I believe I'll give a rat's ass about seeing
10 years from now, then I'll take them seriously. Until then...
************************************
Good Grief! My Favorite
Comic Strip Is Missing
THE NEW YORK TIMES
By JACQUES STEINBERG
August 22, 2004
When The Dallas Morning News pruned its stock tables, sports results and
television listings this year, a consequence of sluggish advertising revenue
and sharply rising paper costs, few readers felt aggrieved enough to complain.
But when the paper later staged a "Survivor"-style contest to cut a dozen of
its 53 comic-strip offerings to save a precious half-page of space in the
weekday paper, more than 40,000 readers voted their passions.
They lobbied successfully for comic comfort food like "Peanuts" and "For Better
or For Worse," though other chestnuts like "Mary Worth" and "Steve Roper and
Mike Nomad" faced a grimmer fate. They also railed against a newer strip aimed
at a younger audience, "La Cucaracha," about a group of 20-somethings living in
East Los Angeles, while exhibiting indifference toward another, "Jump Start,"
about a black family. Both comic strips were ultimately cut.
While the excisions in Dallas are among the most severe involving the funnies
in recent memory, newspapers across the country have been engaging in similarly
agonizing discussions about whether their current rosters of comics (sometimes
four pages a day) are a luxury, given the current dreary economics of the
newspaper business.
A handful of big daily newspapers -- including The Salt Lake Tribune -- have,
like The Morning News, recently cut the number of comics they run, or shrunk
the size of some strips so that they fit into a smaller space. Others,
including The Houston Chronicle, have in recent months mounted or at least
contemplated surveys like The Morning News's to gauge reader preferences -- a
precursor, they acknowledge, to possible future cuts.
In grudgingly taking up such questions, editors and publishers face a choice
that has long been agonizing for papers that dared to replace longtime
favorites. By cutting strips like "Brenda Starr" and "Judge Parker," as The
Atlanta Journal-Constitution did this year as part of a comics shuffling,
editors run the risk of alienating older readers, who are their core
constituency. (Indeed, after a write-in campaign, The Journal-Constitution
decided to give "Judge Parker" a reprieve.)
But if editors instead choose to cut newer strips like "La Cucaracha," or fail
to make room for more cuttingedge work, they realize they may be bobbling a
prime opportunity to lure the younger people who are critical to newspapers’
future — and whose love for animated entertainment has been demonstrated by
the television programs (including “The Simpsons” and “King of the
Hill”) and movies (“Finding Nemo”) that they watch and the books (graphic
novels) that they read.
“I think newspapers need some percentage of attraction to young readers to
get them interested, get them hooked, get them off the Internet,” said Scott
Adams, the creator of “Dilbert,” the 15-year-old chronicle of cubicle
culture that appears in 2,000 papers worldwide. “The comics page is their
portal. And right now, they risk having no portal.”
Lalo Alcaraz, an editorial cartoonist for the alternative newspaper LA Weekly,
who has been drawing “La Cucaracha” for nearly two years, was more blunt
about the generational scrimmage for space on the comics page.
“If only science had not found a way to revive dead cartoonists and keep them
alive, that would be helpful to me and a lot of guys coming up,” he said in a
veiled swipe at, among others, “Peanuts,” which remains in syndicated
reruns more than four years after the death of its creator, Charles M. Schulz.
Deliberations within newspapers about whether to cut comics, and if so how many
and which, are set against a bleak economic backdrop. Not only have newspapers
in general not partaken of the advertising rebound some other media, like
television, have enjoyed, but publishers also are grappling with the unforeseen
costs of covering a war in a year that also has the Olympics and a national
election. Meanwhile, ominously, newsprint prices have risen steadily, jumping
10 percent in the last year, with another similar increase expected.
“We’re struggling with both the cost of the comics we buy and the cost of
the newsprint we use to run them,’’ said Amanda Bennett, editor of The
Philadelphia Inquirer, which is considering trimming the paper’s two pages of
comics each weekday. “We think readers still care a lot about the comics.
Although in the long term, we’re thinking of them in ways like stock agate,
which had usefulness, but the usefulness is dropping off.’’
The Inquirer cut one comic earlier this year, although that move had more to do
with extracting concessions from the syndicates that license such strips —
sometimes for as much as several hundred dollars a week per strip — rather
than as a paper- saving measure. The Inquirer asked The Washington Post Writers
Group, whose offerings include Berkeley Breathed’s “Opus,’’ to make one
of its strips available free to the paper for at least six months, a request
first reported by Editor & Publisher. When The Post Writers Group balked, The
Inquirer made good on its promise to drop one comic strip, eliminating a
relative newcomer called “That’s Life,’’ said Karisue Wyson, a sales
manager for the group.
For The Salt Lake Tribune, which cut its weekday comics section from three
pages to two late last year, the issue was not about cutting the number of
pages in the paper but about competing priorities in a zero-sum world.
“It was simply consuming, we felt, too much of our news hole,” said Terry
Orme, managing editor for news and business. “We needed some more space for
our features section. And we couldn’t go up in space.” Seizing an
opportunity to weed out some of its oldest strips, the paper announced late
last year that it had retired “Judge Parker” and “Mary Worth,” among
others. Readers then loosed a fusillade of e-mail messages, phone calls and
faxes in response, some of them invoking breakfast-table chatter with their
grandparents.
“Some callers said they liked the little stories that continued from day to
day, because ‘they are like little soap operas that don’t take long to
read,’ ” Connie Coyne, the paper’s reader advocate, wrote on Nov. 22.
“And many readers said they liked the strips because they emphasized American
values of hard work, truthfulness, sincerity, loyalty and love of family.”
A few weeks later, the two strips were restored. A relatively new strip, “Out
of the Gene Pool,” was pulled instead.
“You’re trying to get the best of both worlds here — maintain your base,
and grow,” said Mr. Orme. “It’s a difficult balancing act.”
While acknowledging that comics have long served as a gateway to newspapers for
young people, Mr. Orme expressed confidence that his paper could continue to
find other attractions for them, including using that space for articles about
movies and music.
But at The Morning News, Mike Peters, an editor who writes a regular column on
comics, said he worried that his paper was squandering a crucial opportunity by
letting a survey of current readers — more than half of them over 55 —
wield the axe so disproportionately against newer strips. “It’s a fatal
flaw of a survey like this,” he said. “One of the goals of reaching out to
your market and soliciting that kind of input is that you want to have strips
in there that appeal to the readers you don’t have.”
(As part of the process, the paper did add one new comic strip, “In the
Bleachers.”)
James M. Moroney III, the publisher and chief executive of The Morning News,
said he saw no downside for young readers, and instead cited the potential
benefits, for readers both old and young, of a thinner paper.
“All the research we do says that to the reader, to the consumer, ‘more’
isn’t necessarily better,” Mr. Moroney said. “They want us to edit the
paper down fairly tightly.” Though, as Mr. Moroney learned, not too tightly.
So passionate was the response to the comics poll in Dallas, particularly among
longtime readers, that late last month the paper staged a runoff to restore one
of the fallen dozen. The contest was won — by a margin of just 55 of the
15,000 votes cast — by “Love Is . . . ”, a treacly one-panel strip of
aphorisms that has been pasted to refrigerators for decades.
Among those who cast one of the votes for “Love” was Christopher Kratovil,
30, a lawyer who told the paper he had not paid much attention to that comic,
or any other, until falling in love himself two years ago.
“My wife will clip out ‘Love Is . . . ’ and put it in my wallet, my
briefcase, the front seat of my car,” Mr. Kratovil said last week in a
telephone interview. Asked how he had felt during the two weeks last month that
the strip was out of the paper, Mr. Kratovil said: “It was the moral
equivalent of not having a morning coffee. I could live without it, but my life
is much more pleasant with it.”
Eric Dash contributed reporting for this article.
Personally, when I see a strip from one of these newer "cutting-edge" comic
strip artists such as Alcaraz that I believe I'll give a rat's ass about seeing
10 years from now, then I'll take them seriously. Until then...
************************************
Good Grief! My Favorite
Comic Strip Is Missing
THE NEW YORK TIMES
By JACQUES STEINBERG
August 22, 2004
When The Dallas Morning News pruned its stock tables, sports results and
television listings this year, a consequence of sluggish advertising revenue
and sharply rising paper costs, few readers felt aggrieved enough to complain.
But when the paper later staged a "Survivor"-style contest to cut a dozen of
its 53 comic-strip offerings to save a precious half-page of space in the
weekday paper, more than 40,000 readers voted their passions.
They lobbied successfully for comic comfort food like "Peanuts" and "For Better
or For Worse," though other chestnuts like "Mary Worth" and "Steve Roper and
Mike Nomad" faced a grimmer fate. They also railed against a newer strip aimed
at a younger audience, "La Cucaracha," about a group of 20-somethings living in
East Los Angeles, while exhibiting indifference toward another, "Jump Start,"
about a black family. Both comic strips were ultimately cut.
While the excisions in Dallas are among the most severe involving the funnies
in recent memory, newspapers across the country have been engaging in similarly
agonizing discussions about whether their current rosters of comics (sometimes
four pages a day) are a luxury, given the current dreary economics of the
newspaper business.
A handful of big daily newspapers -- including The Salt Lake Tribune -- have,
like The Morning News, recently cut the number of comics they run, or shrunk
the size of some strips so that they fit into a smaller space. Others,
including The Houston Chronicle, have in recent months mounted or at least
contemplated surveys like The Morning News's to gauge reader preferences -- a
precursor, they acknowledge, to possible future cuts.
In grudgingly taking up such questions, editors and publishers face a choice
that has long been agonizing for papers that dared to replace longtime
favorites. By cutting strips like "Brenda Starr" and "Judge Parker," as The
Atlanta Journal-Constitution did this year as part of a comics shuffling,
editors run the risk of alienating older readers, who are their core
constituency. (Indeed, after a write-in campaign, The Journal-Constitution
decided to give "Judge Parker" a reprieve.)
But if editors instead choose to cut newer strips like "La Cucaracha," or fail
to make room for more cuttingedge work, they realize they may be bobbling a
prime opportunity to lure the younger people who are critical to newspapers’
future — and whose love for animated entertainment has been demonstrated by
the television programs (including “The Simpsons” and “King of the
Hill”) and movies (“Finding Nemo”) that they watch and the books (graphic
novels) that they read.
“I think newspapers need some percentage of attraction to young readers to
get them interested, get them hooked, get them off the Internet,” said Scott
Adams, the creator of “Dilbert,” the 15-year-old chronicle of cubicle
culture that appears in 2,000 papers worldwide. “The comics page is their
portal. And right now, they risk having no portal.”
Lalo Alcaraz, an editorial cartoonist for the alternative newspaper LA Weekly,
who has been drawing “La Cucaracha” for nearly two years, was more blunt
about the generational scrimmage for space on the comics page.
“If only science had not found a way to revive dead cartoonists and keep them
alive, that would be helpful to me and a lot of guys coming up,” he said in a
veiled swipe at, among others, “Peanuts,” which remains in syndicated
reruns more than four years after the death of its creator, Charles M. Schulz.
Deliberations within newspapers about whether to cut comics, and if so how many
and which, are set against a bleak economic backdrop. Not only have newspapers
in general not partaken of the advertising rebound some other media, like
television, have enjoyed, but publishers also are grappling with the unforeseen
costs of covering a war in a year that also has the Olympics and a national
election. Meanwhile, ominously, newsprint prices have risen steadily, jumping
10 percent in the last year, with another similar increase expected.
“We’re struggling with both the cost of the comics we buy and the cost of
the newsprint we use to run them,’’ said Amanda Bennett, editor of The
Philadelphia Inquirer, which is considering trimming the paper’s two pages of
comics each weekday. “We think readers still care a lot about the comics.
Although in the long term, we’re thinking of them in ways like stock agate,
which had usefulness, but the usefulness is dropping off.’’
The Inquirer cut one comic earlier this year, although that move had more to do
with extracting concessions from the syndicates that license such strips —
sometimes for as much as several hundred dollars a week per strip — rather
than as a paper- saving measure. The Inquirer asked The Washington Post Writers
Group, whose offerings include Berkeley Breathed’s “Opus,’’ to make one
of its strips available free to the paper for at least six months, a request
first reported by Editor & Publisher. When The Post Writers Group balked, The
Inquirer made good on its promise to drop one comic strip, eliminating a
relative newcomer called “That’s Life,’’ said Karisue Wyson, a sales
manager for the group.
For The Salt Lake Tribune, which cut its weekday comics section from three
pages to two late last year, the issue was not about cutting the number of
pages in the paper but about competing priorities in a zero-sum world.
“It was simply consuming, we felt, too much of our news hole,” said Terry
Orme, managing editor for news and business. “We needed some more space for
our features section. And we couldn’t go up in space.” Seizing an
opportunity to weed out some of its oldest strips, the paper announced late
last year that it had retired “Judge Parker” and “Mary Worth,” among
others. Readers then loosed a fusillade of e-mail messages, phone calls and
faxes in response, some of them invoking breakfast-table chatter with their
grandparents.
“Some callers said they liked the little stories that continued from day to
day, because ‘they are like little soap operas that don’t take long to
read,’ ” Connie Coyne, the paper’s reader advocate, wrote on Nov. 22.
“And many readers said they liked the strips because they emphasized American
values of hard work, truthfulness, sincerity, loyalty and love of family.”
A few weeks later, the two strips were restored. A relatively new strip, “Out
of the Gene Pool,” was pulled instead.
“You’re trying to get the best of both worlds here — maintain your base,
and grow,” said Mr. Orme. “It’s a difficult balancing act.”
While acknowledging that comics have long served as a gateway to newspapers for
young people, Mr. Orme expressed confidence that his paper could continue to
find other attractions for them, including using that space for articles about
movies and music.
But at The Morning News, Mike Peters, an editor who writes a regular column on
comics, said he worried that his paper was squandering a crucial opportunity by
letting a survey of current readers — more than half of them over 55 —
wield the axe so disproportionately against newer strips. “It’s a fatal
flaw of a survey like this,” he said. “One of the goals of reaching out to
your market and soliciting that kind of input is that you want to have strips
in there that appeal to the readers you don’t have.”
(As part of the process, the paper did add one new comic strip, “In the
Bleachers.”)
James M. Moroney III, the publisher and chief executive of The Morning News,
said he saw no downside for young readers, and instead cited the potential
benefits, for readers both old and young, of a thinner paper.
“All the research we do says that to the reader, to the consumer, ‘more’
isn’t necessarily better,” Mr. Moroney said. “They want us to edit the
paper down fairly tightly.” Though, as Mr. Moroney learned, not too tightly.
So passionate was the response to the comics poll in Dallas, particularly among
longtime readers, that late last month the paper staged a runoff to restore one
of the fallen dozen. The contest was won — by a margin of just 55 of the
15,000 votes cast — by “Love Is . . . ”, a treacly one-panel strip of
aphorisms that has been pasted to refrigerators for decades.
Among those who cast one of the votes for “Love” was Christopher Kratovil,
30, a lawyer who told the paper he had not paid much attention to that comic,
or any other, until falling in love himself two years ago.
“My wife will clip out ‘Love Is . . . ’ and put it in my wallet, my
briefcase, the front seat of my car,” Mr. Kratovil said last week in a
telephone interview. Asked how he had felt during the two weeks last month that
the strip was out of the paper, Mr. Kratovil said: “It was the moral
equivalent of not having a morning coffee. I could live without it, but my life
is much more pleasant with it.”
Eric Dash contributed reporting for this article.