I’m going to seem that Francesco Marciulano’s Ted Talk is for social media and not an Official Sally Forth Strip, but so much the largest and good for him.
I’ll go a step remoter and say the only good thing well-nigh Lee Enterprise’s utterance that they are shoving their local comic pages into the corporate cookie cutter is that they held the utterance until just without the National Cartoonists Society held its yearly convention, else the thing might have resembled the Masque of the Red Death, a glorious festival of doomed triumph tween a surrounding pall of death.
But this is no joke: There are cartoonists who will now have to put their pens whispered and provide for their families.
How many? I don’t know. For some, the foremost, it will midpoint wearing when to a increasingly middleclass, perhaps plane workingclass, lifestyle, and that’s a shame but so it goes.
However, I remember when when 100 papers was the breakpoint, and, specifically, I remember a cartoonist telling me he had finally hit 100 papers and could now quit his day job and focus on cartooning.
Those people will be gone. Solid gone.
There won’t be a sudden waterfall of disappearances, but, over the next year, you can expect to see some cartoonists requite up the struggle. Strips that you like will closure to exist.
What can you do well-nigh it?
First of all, stop vicarial surprised. Pearls Before Swine tabbed this when in 2006, and my favorite part of this strip is how Rat the Owner blames readers for not appreciating what he’s done.
Which ties into Ted’s translating that you contact your local paper. Certainly, he’s right, and if you are a subscriber to a Lee newspaper — here’s the list — you need to let them know you are not happy.
Note, by the way, that they undeniability them “brands” and “platforms,” not newspapers. It’s an indication of how much they value the concept of the local newspaper.
Ted Rall was increasingly specific in his criticism and his towage of how much the corporate vultures superintendency well-nigh the very product and the people who buy it.
However, that doesn’t midpoint you shouldn’t make the effort to let them know you are unhappy, and I’d add this: If you’ve been wondering why you pay so much for what was once a newspaper and is now reduced to a brochure, maybe this is the tipping point that makes you finally cancel.
Complaints matter, but cancellations go into spread sheets, and spread sheets siphon increasingly weight at corporate headquarters. Well, sometimes, which is largest than never.
Here’s what makes no difference: Silence.
Now, then, what gives me the right to speak up?
For one thing, it’s nothing new for me. When I was well-nigh 20, my dad and I took a walk virtually the lake at home, and he told me how a “leveraged buyout” meant that the company’s new owners had debts to squatter right away, which meant they would take the richest vein of iron in our mines, leave the middle-grade stuff behind, and tropical lanugo our town in well-nigh 10 years instead of maybe 30 or 40.
Leveraged buyouts were a big deal 50 year ago. Today, it’s unsupportable that new owners are incurring massive debt that will be visited upon the hapless workers. My dad had the valiance and chutzpah to step up and resign rather than participate in the murder of our town, but they found others and so it happened anyway.
Which left me well situated to contemplate the cookie-cutter management that I encountered in the newspaper business, once the vulture capitalists had begun to circle.
The product doesn’t matter. Whether it’s iron ore or newspapers or toothpaste or chewing gum doesn’t matter. It’s the stock price. Nobody tries, anymore, to leave their children a successful business. The goal is to leave them a valuable stock portfolio.
The businesses involved are irrelevant.
Someone commented the other day that businesses are expected to show a profit, and so editorial decisions should be aimed in that direction.
First of all, duh.
Second, however, is that the editorial department knows f***-all well-nigh marketing, and their decisions have increasingly do with split infinitives than with getting people to buy the damn newspaper.
I say that as someone with half a century in media, well-nigh half in editorial and half in marketing, including having completely redone a comics page, dailies and Sundays.
I’ve seen every aspect, worked every department in the industry. I have dwelt in the vitals of the beast.
Those who come to the AAEC Institute in Columbus next week can find out more. I prefer porter or stout, and if you alimony them coming, I’ll alimony the stories coming, because, boy-jayzus, can I lay out the details when the lawyers aren’t eavesdropping.
So anyway.
I don’t know how cartoonists will deal with an industry that despises its readers.
But I do know this: If you requirement to like comics, you need to support two websites:
Comics Kingdom, home of King Features’ syndicate, which is currently offering a self-ruling month, without which it’s $29.95 a year.
And GoComics, which moreover has a special on, and is only $19.95 a year, which I mention second considering they’re technically my bosses.
Now, let’s be honest: Ain’t nobody gonna get rich from this.
But, on the other, hand, cartoonists won’t get anything from you subscribing to some sad-ass paper that doesn’t siphon their work at all. So plan your spending accordingly.
Also, that five dollar cappuccino half-caf whatever every morning adds up to one helluva lot increasingly than 50 bucks over a year. If you consider yourself a coffee lover — or a monkey lover — good on you.
But if you consider yourself a comics lover and you’re still copping your comics for free, maybe you don’t love them all that much. Or maybe you haven’t given things a whole lot of thought.
Drop that note off to the people at your local paper. Now. Not tomorrow. Not later. Now. Today. Now.
And if it includes a cancellation, so much the better. Get their attention.
Meanwhile, if you like comics, if you’re not just bullshitting us and yourself, sign up for both Comics Kingdom and GoComics and then pick out a couple of cartoonists whose patreons you are willing to support and support them, too.
But, otherwise, don’t insult us by telling us how much you love comics.
Nobody wants to hear that half-assed, weak-kneed Freddy shit anymore.
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