Visible cost-cutting has mainly involved ad prices and page width.

Otherwise, the paper has gotten better, and without resorting to the McPaper look. No cartoons have been cut. A staff artist, undoubtedly part time or free lance, remains.

I cannot share their finances, which are private, but it seems likely they will be around for a while, despite being in one of the most competitive newspaper markets in the country.

A cartoonist effort to rank papers by stewardship would be a big undertaking, but would reveal who is being lost due to “cost cutting” as opposed to wise planning.

Mastering sound cost control techniques that are working at some papers would allow a more potent challenge to cost cuts that are possibly ill-advised and which have been conceived by accountants.

They also have to be part of the media. That mean they have to be “in people’s faces”. If you cover all those bases you will have success.

To cover these “bases” you will touch on style, content, and delivery. These are the core issues in cartooning.

Things that have contributed to lower newspaper readership in the U.S.:

No competition

No local ownership

No newspaper machines

Dependence on AP reports and syndicated material.

The American newspaper business is one of the most profitable, regardless of what they say. The newspaper industry sported profits in the range of 17-18% in 2006, compared to, say, Exxon-Mobil, which reported record profits of 10% that year.

Personal responsibility among corporate newspaper ownership is the only thing that’s really hurting the newspaper industry.

Last year Reuters reported a study that said newspapers that spend money on their newsrooms actually make more money. I don’t think the corporate board members read the newspaper, though.

I like convenience and one stop shopping. I could probably surf the web and find many of the news items about the comics business that appear on this site. I don’t want to. It’s a waste of my time. I come to this site because the news I want has been gathered for me. Not only that, I always know the site will work with my computer and my browser – something not always true of some of the other comics sites I have visited.

If a newspaper site existed where I could get all the content I was interested in one convenient location, I would visit it regularly. Also, with all the widget technology out there it is entirely possible for a newspaper website to know exactly how many views each part of the paper is getting rather than their rather sophisticated current philosophy of guessing.

Once it is clear how many eyeballs go to the comics section of the paper in ratio to other topics offered, the debate over whether comics are important or not becomes a non issue and ad rates can be easily determined. The idea of mixing ads with the comics has come up here before but always in the context of the print version of the paper where the case seems to come down to newsprint cost. Totally irrelevant on the web.

I know there are many people who read their comics through the various web services like gocomics and daily ink etc. But there also a huge number of folks that simply go read them at the Houston Chronicle every day instead. There really should be a simple way to turn a comic spot in the Houston Chronicle into more $ than is happening now.

But more than that, a typical metropolitan newspaper has built a “community brand” that most companies would kill for, and they don’t seem to realize it. Of course they’ll have to develop a tansmedia business model for the future, but they have an almost captive market to do it with.

Mike Peterson nails the reasons why they are mostly clueless. If you’re looking for proof, look no further than my market, with COX owned Palm Beach Post. They recently let go almost every popular reporter, editor, artist, cartoonist and columnist they had. In doing so, they completely decimating their brand affinity with the community. Instead of focusing on the community editorially they seem to be trying to emulate USA Today, US and People in their content and delivery. Coupled with other alterations due to budget cuts, the change in the Post has been so shocking to the community that it is now a local joke.

On the other hand, COX owned Palm Beach Daily News, the little community paper for the town of Palm Beach is profitable and thriving. Sure, it’s a wealthy community. They get a break because advertisers will spend to reach its readers, but its real success is that the editors are focused on producing a community organ with laser-like intensity … and always have been. As their weekly freelance editorial cartoonist, I do less than a half-dozen cartoons a year that fall out of the local purview.

“Working commercial artist who is stretching his wings,” describes me perfectly. I believe that the Web is currently a good environment for individual cartoonists to potentially increase their audience and exposure, but not profitable as Ted Rall says. Going forward, it appears that successful cartoonists on the Web will probably have to work in more of a studio situation, similar to JibJab.com, to best leverage multi-media creatively. They’ll need to work in teams of concept artists, animators and programmers … or somehow learn to do it all themselves.

This doesn’t bode well for comics because there simply won’t be enough publications to sustain a career built solely on newspaper strips. And, if you look at papers like USA today, they don’t even offer comics. I think that as papers scramble for profitability and try to fit into the future, comics will likely begin to disappear.

Someone brought up the idea that by getting edgier comics in the papers, it will attract young readers. I disagree, because people who want edgy comics are already reading that kind of material online for free.

Kids today are used to getting the content they want for free, so I don’t see them growing up, and suddenly getting interested in paying for a newspaper just to follow a particular comic. Maybe newspapers are something they’ll pick up in their later years, but I think the young demographic is gone.

Anyway, it’s a good discussion. Being a newspaper guy I’m definitely intrigued by where the industry is headed.

In the final analysis, newspapers will survive in print because:

1. Print provides a service other formats like the web cannot–portability and ease of use being paramount.

2. Web-based advertising rates will not rise much, certainly not high enough to make web-based news-gathering profitable. This is because web readers don’t pay enough attention to ads or buy the products advertised at high volume.

3. Businesses and individuals need raw news. Neither TV, nor radio, nor the web/bloggers are not set up to generate enough actual journalism to replace the work done by print newspaper journalists.

Without a doubt, print will look different–more national, more local, less regional. But it will not go away. I wish I had ten million dollars. If I did, I’d start a couple of newspapers now.