Little Comic Relief

First off, to correct an error in the last post, Durango isn’t on the Front Range – obviously I know nothing about Colorado geography. Got it confused with Pueblo. Reminder: Copy edit your own blog!

The question was, can newspapers reach 18-to-30-year-olds? Here on the East Coast we have the Metro chain in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, survivors of the brief free-sheet spurt around the world before getting news on the Internet really took off.  (It also publishes in nine cities in Canada.) It tries to answer that question in the affirmative.

Our Metro runs only a few stories each day – typically the most important city government story, brief national and foreign entries, entertainment news, and very little sports. Although it is distributed around town, it is mostly associated with rail commuters (they tried it on buses, but it just led to cluttered buses). While serious stories are written seriously, much of the paper, including its entertainment coverage, is far more conversational than even the most conversational traditional newspaper. It does not try to break news to any extent, though I'm sure here and there it has gotten something first. Much is written in first person or as a Q and A. It runs stories on careers, education, and the like aimed at people coming up in the world, not people already there or planning for their children’s education. It has lots of advertising -- some days it makes my own paper look comparatively adless, though I'm sure the ad rates would barely support a pigeon.

Do young people read it? Sure. It’s free. It’s on the train. Do masses of young people read it? I have no idea. In Europe, however, where Metro is under different ownership, it has become, at least in one survey, the most-read free newspaper among the wealthy. I guess watching every euro counts.

Metro used to have a couple of comics, but no more -- interesting in view of the comics cutbacks at the Denver Post, including “Doonesbury,” which is as close to a sacred totem among journalists as any comic except “Pogo” has ever been. It turns out that few readers of the Post were initially discomfited by these cuts, which took out some low-hanging fruit ("Scary Gary"? "F-Minus"?) and some very costly comics while leaving the “Beetle Bailey”s of the world. (Perhaps resentment has grown since then.) The thinking seems to have been, the only people who read comics are the seniors, and all they want is the strips they’ve had their whole lives. Many of them have had “Doonesbury” for much of their lives, of course. But we’re talking, for that generation, of repeats of “Peanuts,” plus things like “The Family Circus,” “Hi and Lois,” and “Beetle” – most of which could be called repeats even if they are new. (Two of the most venerable strips, “Blondie” and “Nancy,” have been reimagined over the years and while not cutting-edge fare at least are not in an endless “Groundhog Day” loop.)

(Locally, the Philadelphia Daily News this week went to one tabloid page of comic strips, after going down to two a couple of years back from three... with some panels on a facing page.)

Add to this that the three largest papers in the U.S. for the last three decades do not run comics, and one starts to wonder whether the role of comics has been overblown for years by people who will howl if you give them a choice about taking away their daily visit with Sgt. Snorkel but who, if the comic was simply retired by its authors, would just say, Oh, well, guess I'll read something else. "Steve Canyon" had a huge readership, and then it disappeared and there was no more to be learned about Stalky Schweisenberger and almost no one canceled. When I was a kid papers didn’t have massive numbers of comics; big papers would have a page, small papers might run four. An editor might get into a financial fight with a syndicate and all of a sudden "Li'l Abner" no longer ran, and people might have been discomfited but they found something else. It was only when competing papers started going out of business that newspapers ended up with multiple pages of comics, fearing that someone who read an afternoon paper would only adjust his or her biorhythms enough to take a morning paper if it let him or her keep up with “Hagar the Horrible.”

Many older readers still see the comics as the equivalent of Jay’s monologue, a humorous or heartwarming fillip to the depressing state of the world. But it seems to be becoming clearer that trying to fill the pages with 30 comics is spending a lot of money to chase few people.

Young readers do not come to the paper through the colorful Sunday comics in the way they did when nearly everything except comics was black and white. (How would young readers relate to “Funky Winkerbean,” “Rhymes With Orange” or “The Piranha Club” anyway? There's this to say for “Garfield” -- even though it seems mainly an exercise in filling contracted space, at least it’s new to a 7-year-old. ) Young readers are hardly going to wait for a once-a-week session with the Sunday funnies, and the dailies are scrunched into minuscule space so that we can keep running strips that debuted in papers dead for decades.

Perhaps young readers would be better satisfied by having one or two strips that were actually relevant and funny to their lives. But burying them amid the Beetles and Flagstons would not work.

And perhaps, as with stock listings, newspapers should think about just blowing the whistle on comics – I say this with trepidation, I love newspaper comics and have always read most of them that weren’t “The Girls in Apartment 3-G” – and, like college papers, finding one or two locally or regionally drawn features that would provide a break from the news that would be exclusive to them. If people were only taking the paper to find out what that hilarious Lt. Fuzz was up to today, perhaps those are customers who are no longer essential to us at that price of keeping them.
Still more to come.

It's Rectangular to Be Square

As its part of the 2008 newspaper meltdown the Philadelphia Inquirer decided to cut back on space for Sunday comics. A memo went out, which of course within seconds had found its way out of the building to Philadelphia Weekly, which posted it and noted with the usual alt-weekly snark: "Okay, get this: The Inquirer only has two comics pages. (I guess she could be writing about Sunday's comics section.) If I can't get my Dennis the Menace and Ziggy fix there, where the hell will I get it?"

All right, it's a blog, so let's ignore that a simple e-mail could have discovered that yes, the note was talking about Sunday comics pages. Never let a fact stand in the way of a good punch line. Of note is the attitude: "Ohmigod, can you believe anyone still READS those comics? Dennis the freaking Menace? He hasn't been funny since 1956."

One of our local dailies ran a Gannett News Service story about how a Nigerian named Siku has written? drawn? adapted? the Bible into "The Manga Bible," not the whole Bible -- one tries hard to imagine the genealogy lists being read by a talking penguin, perhaps -- but "an overview with stories selected that basically provide an understanding of what the whole bible includes." A good copy editor could help that sentence a lot, but you get the point. The story originated in Springfield, Mo., the home town of John Ashcroft, and so possibly the local Borders does not have shelves of manga books, as ours does; but our paper nevertheless conveniently provided the sidebar trying to explain what manga is. I can see the Philadelphia Weekly blogger falling off his chair, convulsed in laughter, while reading "Manga publications are generally done in black and white, but some are in color." Yet if you were to throw the word "manga" out in a room with a cross-section of your community, how many hands would be raised?

When I was in my early 20s I read "Heavy Metal" -- I loved "Tex Arcana" -- and I probably read a manga book for the first time 15 years ago. So I could have laughed too. When I was at my first paper, my mother asked me if it ran "The Family Circus" and how she loved that comic because it was "so true to life." Gawd, not true to my life, I said to myself -- ignoring that if she was my mother, and it was about a family, perhaps I was missing something. All I could think of was those oval heads and the occasional angel and the all-suffusing banal good will of the thing. I don't remember if my paper ran Bil Keane's circular panel, but if it did, I probably got out my resume that night.

I still find "The Family Circus" to be treacle but it no longer bothers me to be in the same room with it. At age 55, with my son grown, I think our lives didn't resemble Bill and Thel and Jeffy's. Or maybe they did and I'm in denial. At 23, I didn't know what my life would be. Without diligent effort I would be sucked into the maw of PJdom. I wanted to be hip, intellectual, knowing. I wanted to be able to say, with a look of forced agony, "God, how WILL I live without my Dennis the Menace fix." I had my own equivalent, which I used often: "For 3,812 consecutive days, Nancy has failed to be funny." Of course, Nancy wasn't aimed at me any more than Tic-Tac-Toe was. Nancy was Candy Land, a strip 8-year-olds would find funny and thus they would want to read the paper. We had Nancy, we had Doonesbury, we had Mary Worth. Something for everyone. Buy it!

A columnist or feature can occasionally be hip; but a newspaper can't be hip. It can't be the counterculture. It is the culture. It has been part of how new ideas are absorbed into the mainstream. Sometimes journalists guess wrong at the speed of that absorption. Part of the fun in the 1960s and 1970s was watching mainstream journalists try to fit the counterculture into their frame of reference. (The first two verses of "Ballad of a Thin Man" say it all.) But it was fun while being a counterculture youth who could sneer at the clueless. My father, who was a smart and worldly man, could not figure out what "Penny Lane" really MEANT, but he knew it MEANT something. The barber shaves another customer? Is that an LSD reference? Yes, I sneered at him, too.

Then, somehow, I and most of us became part of the culture. But it can be hard to find one's place in the culture, which grows more complicated by the day; the Internet, with its social networking and postings and chat, provides a new counterculture, or multiple ones, ones that make the mainstream look even lamer than "The Family Circus" did to me in the 1970s. The argument about the future of news is partly about whether the mainstream ends with the baby boomers, like the parents left behind in "Childhood's End" as the children join the ubermind. Of course, the mainstream didn't end with "The Ed Sullivan Show," either.

Journalists are often too cool for the room, which is why alt-weekly journalists can have such fun with those on the dailies; freed of the responsibility to serve an audience that found "The Facts of Life" funny, for years they could take shots while floating on a bubble of concert ads and "SWF seeks MBM with versatile poodle" listings. (In which they're being killed just as we are by online classifieds.) This is part of why many newspaper people spend a good bit of time trying to deny or avoid what it is their readers want from them, which is, in ways large and small, journalistic and non, "The Family Circus." Along this road we will make further stops.

There's No Ties Like Monetized

In a comment on a previous post (I know there must be an easier way to do this than cut and paste), my old pal Clay McCuistion writes:

"If we have traditionally counted on advertisers to pay our way in the print media, it means we're not prepared to make much of a case to consumers that they need to pay up. Instead, we're prepared to offer them three months for $3, or whatever the latest circulation discount is. The result: I think consumers have come to expect free information. The question -- how is that monetized? Can it be?"

The point often is made that people are prepared to pay $3 and change per day for coffee at Starbucks, yet they are not willing to pay 50 cents (whoops, we just raised the price to 75!) for page after page of information that vitally affects their lives. This usually is accompanied by a jeremiad concerning the vapid priorities of the reading public.

Part of my job is to handle calls from readers who have "a question or comment" about our news coverage. Recently my paper largely eliminated daily stock agate, with predictable results. One questioner-and-commenter noted that the only things he bought the paper for were the stock agate, the Cryptoquote and the sports results.

Well, you must read other things in the paper, said I. Yes, I do, he said; but I don't buy the paper to read them. I buy the paper for the stock agate, the Cryptoquote and the sports results. And this was a gentleman of the old school, the "I don't have a computer at home" class. Were he of the new school, he would have left us years ago, I suspect, except for our secret weapon, the Cryptoquote.

Leaving aside the sort of overstatement-for-effect that often occurs when readers call ... he is willing to pay the newspaper for something. He's willing to pay it for information he knows in advance that he wants and for a pleasurable activity. He's not willing to pay it to find out that Mitt Romney folded his tent; he doesn't have a computer, but he can turn on the TV or listen to KYW Newsradio. He's not willing to pay it to find out that there's a wonderfully written article on B1 that he's interested in; maybe there'll be one today, maybe there won't. But there will be sports scores every day.

So if the answer is just "journalism," he'll read it, but he's not willing to pay for it; and as we're learning, it's going to take a heck of a lot of online advertisers to support a news operation. A heck of a lot more than we have or are likely to.

The recent biography of Charles M. Schulz, in noting the success of Peanuts, makes clear that in its heyday Peanuts was such a draw that people would buy the newspaper just to read Peanuts. OK, it was three cents a day then, but a cup of coffee was, 15?

Yes, journalism has always been, if not free, at least heavily subsidized; and newspapers always used other things to assemble an audience that was willing to buy a ticket at the door to see the show, during which you got the edifying lecture that we call journalism. Some people even bought the ticket mainly for the edifying lecture. We really like those people.

But you still had to buy a ticket. And the purchase price of the ticket isn't the point; it's how to make the whole show economically feasible. By itself, the edifying lecture, topic largely to be revealed once you're inside, never really was.

"How can it be monetized? Can it be?"

As "journalism," probably not. As a "product," probably.