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Month: April 2009

The Ghost Paper

Posted on April 30, 2009

Right now I’m thinking about one of my client papers. The last time I visited this paper, just a few months ago, was the most depressing visit to a newspaper I’ve ever experienced. The editor asked me to come down to the newsroom to meet a high school kid who might want to be a cartoonist when he grew up. The editor was great. I loved meeting her. The ombudsman I met was great, and we all had a nice conversation.

But the newsroom at this major metropolitan paper – this icon – was a ghost town. Row after row of empty cubicles, with maybe four or five people drifting through the empty room while I was there. I tried to imagine everyone was off covering some huge breaking story. Maybe the mayor had just been caught with an underage undocumented immigrant planting bombs in the reservoir, and the paper needed to cover it from dozens of different angles. It made the echoes and the silence of the cavernous and dimly-lit newsroom a little easier to take.

While I was talking to the high school kid, I couldn’t help but think back to almost a decade earlier, when I’d been invited to that same newspaper to meet its editorial cartoonist. I was just a couple years older than this kid I was talking to. Back then I was worried about getting in everyone’s way because the newsroom was overflowing with intensely focused people rushing back and forth, people in ties and suspenders or in pearls and earrings holding animated conversations with each other or with their cell phones, phones ringing, doors opening and closing, and faxes coming through…

In the few short months since I met the high school kid, my friend at the paper (who’d also been my editor back when I freelanced editorial cartoons) was let go.

Something tells me the bar at the National Cartoonists Society convention is going to be packed this year. I’ll have to bring money, though, because I’m told this year they can’t afford an open bar.

Site was down, now it’s up

Posted on April 30, 2009

I’m glad you guys e-mail me whenever the site’s down (and it’s been down four times since March ’08). My host sometimes isn’t what you’d call responsive (last time it was down it took three days for them to fix it), but this time they fixed it just five minutes after I submitted the trouble ticket. Of course, before they let me submit the ticket in the first place, I had to ping my site, run a traceroute and reroute the warp drive through the flux capacitors using my Mac’s “terminal” application (a command-line app that always reminds me why I haven’t touched a Windows PC since high school), and paste the results into the ticket. And THAT took about 45 minutes to complete while my readers were greeted with a blank white screen with tiny black letters that wrote “The e-mail could not be sent.
 Possible reason: your host may have disabled the mail() function…”.

During which time, Fox News published a study showing the following:

• 5% of you didn’t think “disabled the mail() function…” was as funny as yesterday’s strip.

•27% of male visitors between the ages of 12 and 109 hit “back” on their browsers to repeat their Google search for “Bush.”

•10% of Candorville readers lost interest and switched allegiance to “Beetle Bailey.”

How to Save Newspapers

Posted on April 12, 2009

As Saxon Kenchu would say, “the irony is ironic.” My comics appear in newspapers. My livelihood is largely dependent on newspapers. But I haven’t subscribed to a newspaper in almost ten years, and I only buy a copy of my local paper when I want to see how a new brush or a new shading technique I’m using looks in print. I’m part of the reason why newspapers are on their deathbed. For the last decade, almost, I’ve been getting my news online.

It’s just so much easier. I can tell Google what I’m interested in, and every time I visit I’ll see a list of new articles that satisfy my interests. I can subscribe to RSS feeds, or to Twitter streams from CNN, Buzzflash, Fox, or whatever, and every time I tap the “Twittelator Pro” icon on my iPhone, they update me with breaking news and opinion.

All these conveniences have one thing in common: They all generally rely on newspaper articles for their content.

Some have suggested that newspapers should start charging bloggers who quote their articles, and force sites like Google and Huffington Post to pay a price for their practices: Google because they make money selling ads on pages comprised of headlines grabbed from newspapers, and Huffington because its writers often grab large chunks of copyrighted articles, and the site earns ad revenue from that.

But that’s a half-assed measure. The online versions of papers have to do more than charge aggregators a fee or run Google ads if they’re going to become lucrative enough to support 200-person investigative newsrooms once print finally dies. They’ve got to charge their readers.

Why would readers pay? I’ve asked myself, what would get ME to pay for news again, if I’ve been basically freeloading for the last decade? The knowledge that I’m doing my part to preserve the Fourth Estate and thereby save our democracy might not be enough; not when I have to choose between that and being able to afford to upgrade my iPhone every year. The papers have to offer me something I can’t get from the aggregators: even more convenience, and even more personalization.

I would pay $10/month to latimes.com if they could give me the following:

1. Custom news and opinion, Google-style.
When I sign up, give me a page of topics that I can check off. “International news.” “Local news.” “News about (fill in the blank)”. Etc… My choices would be supplemented by a rotating list of random stories outside my chosen interests, so I won’t be just a provincial reader. Each article should be accompanied by a bio of the author and buttons for buying books by those authors. The paper would get a percentage of any sale made through those buttons, Amazon Associates-style.

2. Custom coupons.
Give me another page at sign-up where I can check off products I buy, and neighborhoods & stores in which I shop. Show me a running total as I check off the boxes of how much I’m likely to save on average each month by subscribing. If I’m likely to save $20/month, buying a $10/month subscription would be a no-brainer right there.

3. Custom comics.
Let me choose from lists of comics: “Adult comics,” “family comics,” “political satire,” etc., and then let me delete comics I don’t like from those lists. Let readers rate the strips each day, and then offer readers a “Today’s top ten” list which would compile based on the rating regardless of whether the comic was rated by ten or ten thousand people. That way readers would find new, high-rated comics they’ve never heard of before. The comic would have a “block this comic” link so it wouldn’t be included in future top tens if you don’t want it to be. Each comic offered should have buttons for buying books & related merchandise, and papers would get a percentage of the sale for anything the reader buys through those buttons.

4. Local Craigslist-like services.
The difference would be you’d get another check-box page at sign-up where you can specify what you’re looking for: apartments, jobs, relationships, whatever, and you’re presented with a daily list of listings that meet your requirements, without you having to re-enter the information all the time.

5. Features, features, features
Crosswords, horoscopes, advice columns, etc. that, again, you can customize, and again, allowing you to buy books with a percentage going to the paper.

6. Local communities.
If you live in Glendale, you’re signed up to the Glendale latimes.com reader community, and you see a summary of activity (the last five or ten actions) in the community updating in real-time. Includes a community calendar, so if there’s a local art gallery showing, or high school baseball game, or a local independent filmmaker’s work debuts, you’re invited, with a map and a link to buy tickets if applicable (and, you guessed it, a portion of that sale would go to the newspaper).

7. Localized YouTube-like channels
…where local readers can share videos they create. Live in Oakland and want to see clips by fellow Oaklanders? The latest and most popular are listed right there.

And you get all of this sent to you in an HTML e-mail every morning that’s styled to look like the front page of the newspaper. You can read it on your computer, your iPhone, your Blackberry, or whatever, and it’s customized on the fly for each device.

The difference between this and sites like My Google or Yahoo are minimal. But they’d be much more noticeable once an online paper like latimes.com refused to allow Google or Yahoo access to their local news, simply by putting the site behind a pay gate and by refusing to provide anything other than headlines to the wire services. You wouldn’t need some conspiracy or some cartel of papers deciding to do this en masse, each paper could decide for itself whether to do this. If, for instance, the LA Times chose to restrict its content this way, Los Angeles readers wanting local news would have to pay for it because the aggregators would no longer have a source for local Los Angeles news.

The convenience this service would offer, combining wire reports with exclusive local reporting, local communities and local coupons tailored to each reader, would be worth the money. In fact, the ability to personalize local services might lead to more than one subscription per household. Adults who enjoy their local news might want to set up local news, comics & services customized for their eight year-olds.

I would subscribe if I could find all that in my inbox AND on my iPhone every morning, and couldn’t get the same information for free elsewhere.

DETROIT drops Candorville – Write to the Free Press

Posted on April 2, 2009

This is not a good time to be working for the newspaper industry. The Detroit Free Press has cut several comics, including Candorville, because of the economy. If you want to see Candorville returned to Detroit, you’ve got to let them know right now by writing to [email protected] and/or calling 313-222-6400!

The Free Press is essentially merging with Detroit’s other paper, “The News,” and scaling home delivery back to only three days per week. The rest of the week, they’ll have skeleton versions of the papers available in racks in the metro area only. They’re cutting expenses every way they can, but because the comics page is generally cited as the main reason people pick up the paper, cutting back on comics is the best way to lose even more readers. If you’re in Michigan or you read the Free Press via mail or online, write to the Free Press and tell them you want Candorville back, and there’s a good chance they’ll listen to you.

Times aren’t good for cartoonists, yours truly included. The Seattle Times cut comics a few months ago, including Candorville. Reader response changed their minds and they brought it back. St. Louis cut back on comics (including Candorville) just a couple weeks ago, and now Detroit. In the alternative comics world, the best alternatives out there (e.g. “This Modern World”) just lost dozens of clients as a major alt chain decided it couldn’t afford to carry comics anymore. Publishers and editors don’t know how to stem their losses, so they’re slashing costs wildly. Blindly. You’ve probably noticed your favorite newspaper isn’t the paper it used to be. It’s smaller, lighter, less significant, and increasingly less relevant to your life. I worked for the Daily Californian (UC Berkeley’s student run paper) back in college. College papers have always been a pale shadow of major metropolitan papers. Yesterday, while I walked a few blocks to pick up some Thai food for lunch, I looked in the LA Times and LA Daily News newsracks. They were about the same size as the Daily Cal was ten years ago.

If you want to keep “Candorville” and other features in your local paper (or return it if it’s been cut), you have to write to them and tell them now, or you’re going to lose it. It’s only a matter of time, and time’s running short in this industry.

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