Kos left a post today regarding newspapers dropping cartoonists as a cost-cutting measure.
Here’s a funny secret: newspaper editors and publishers hate comics. There was always a tremendous amount of ambivalence about the comics page, and no interest in adding new talent or culling strips that had gone stale. (The latter might even explain the occasional antipathy: comics attract rabid fans, who go batshit if the paper tries to replace them or if a strip gets bumped for a single issue. Ask me about the Lynda Barry Month sometime.)
But a huge amount of people pick up newspapers just for the comics. Those two pages of comics in your daily, maybe 1% of the total paper, are probably responsible for 10-15% of the pick-up (I’m making up those numbers, but it’s an educated guess).
What irritates me is that editors frequently operate in a vacuum from their readership. Their interaction with the public is often limited to the letters-to-the-editor section, which they take very seriously, but is also mostly representative of “statistical outliers.” I think newspapers would be wise to hold biannual surveys to get a better idea of why people are really picking up the fishwrap.
