Well, speaking of prostitution, I’ve got ads to build. Ta

Newspapers today are less honorable than prostitutes.

Yep, I’m talking about strips. The WSJ prints individual cartoons, obviously, which is not syndicated content, and that squares with my argument that syndicated content, by virtue of its non-uniqueness, is part of what newspapers have to combat if they are to survive.

The fact that many large newspapers operate in a one-paper town yet still can’t establish a unique persona is testament to the malaise of “McDonaldism” sweeping the world generally.
Strips can be equated to Big Macs, you’ll get the same bland, uninspiring item wherever you are in the U.S.

What they SHOULD be like is the Soup Nazi in Seinfeld, offering a unique and superior product only available at one location, creating huge demand and getting paid well for it.
A columnist is unlikely to be able to achieve this, but a talented writer who also draws could do it. A Larson for the New Millennium, in other words. Working for one paper exclusively and selling compilation books and swag on the internet would bring in more than enough money for the right candidate. Fame (if it’s what you seek) will follow, no matter if your strip is only published in the L.A. Times.

I never saw Dilbert or C&H in a newspaper until years after I bought a Dilbert or C&H book in a store. Syndication brings success to a very few.

Cartoon strips have to become unique. Newpapers AND cartooning will benefit from it.

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All newspapers do is deliver customers to advertisers. The content they carry is designed to appeal to their ideal reader, and they promise to deliver x-amount of those ideal readers (the old demographic)to that advertiser in return for that advertiser’s money.

Those advertisers have looked at falling readerships and they will not, under any circumstances, go back to the newspapers in the hope that the readers will return.
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There’s that word again – “unique”. I understand that the WSJ doesn’t carry cartoons and is one of the few papers whose circulation is strong (and even rising).

“Unique” is the word, folks and it doesn’t seem to have sunk in, so I’ll say it again:
What does your paper have that people can’t get at another paper?

We’re cartoonists here, so I’ll keep it cartoon-centred. Why should people buy the New York Times when the strips they feature can be seen in umpteen other papers, whether online, offline, for free or not?

Continuing to keep it cartoon-centred: Where is the next UNIQUE comic strip talent coming from in this syndication-controlled business?

It’s not just editors who can be accused of not listening – there are plenty of cloth-eared cartoonists too. Start thinking outside the box whilst you have the shreds of an actual newspaper industry left.

Not only is it unlikely, but it is too late. With a rise in serious online competition (like the Huffington Post), if the larger papers don’t have a web presence they will lose that revenue stream to their online competition.

Why haven’t Universal Press and United stopped posting their comics on their website? Thus Forcing people to subscribe. Couldn’t they start the change ? They already have subscription plans. Are they in the same vein as wire services in regards to selling their comics and columns on the web?

Which leads to another problem: the number of people who read news (printed and/or online) is shrinking. Older people seem to still be reading news in similar numbers to years past but younger people are not. And I think that trend is a major problem for news operations.

So, would Ted’s ideas lead to a market where a large number of readers would pay for local news they could only obtain from the local paper (print or online)? I suspect not because the pool of people who value and pay for news has been in decline for a long time. How to turn that around is, I believe, the major challenge for news operations.

Which is, I think, another big problem because newspaper operations are just not set up for the current climate. In general, newspapers are very deliberate and cautious.