“Newspapers and other print media are “irrelevant,” while movies and music concerts remain popular and are one of the “few beneficiaries of payment,” the report said.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aG2UIb23pNQ0

Just passing on what I see being reported…

Interesting technology, but too steep a price. Like anything, though, it could catch on and the price drop to a more reasonable level as its popularity increases. And as a Mac fan, I’d love a gizmo like this.

That said, myself, I just can’t read comics onscreen for any length of time. And anything that’s the size of those glorious DC Wednesday Comics pages, unless you plug them into a large screen TV, what’s the point? You have to scroll and scroll and scroll, losing the effect of just following the flow of the story w/ your eyes.

I’m not saying that digital WON’T someday totally overtake paper as far as comics are concerned, but I think the art of comics will be the lesser for it.

Teen Titans and Wonder Woman were the worst of the bunch. Still, I’m all on-board for this week’s batch of comics!

http://gizmodo.com/5313266/re+rumor-apple-tablet-coming-in-october-priced-at-800

There have been attempts to ‘paint’ an interactive screen on a flexible fabric, but that’s a version that is still in development.

Very true. We always had a paper in my house when I was growing up and I didn’t read it often — except the Sunday funnies — but it was there and I saw my parents spend time with it. When I went to college, I began reading the paper in the morning for sports coverage, but also because there was this little shindig in Southeast Asia that my high school friends were attending. We all read the paper throughout college, largely to follow national and international politics. (Comics were pretty lame in the late 60s. That’s when Zap! and others emerged to fill THAT gap.)

But the generation behind us did not. My kids are newspaper readers, but many of their contemporaries aren’t. When I was in Newspapers-in-Education, we could readily get kids interested in the paper, but their teachers didn’t understand how the paper worked — they weren’t familiar with its structure and did not “get it.” I thought the newspaper was extremely instinctual but apparently it is not. The industry missed an entire generation, which is why otherwise intelligent young adults talk about “dead trees” and the “MSM” with a confidence that can only come from ignorance.

Yes! When it’s at a decent size, anyway.

(Adam) “While I think comics have potential to sell papers, I don’t believe the current slate of syndicated features can.”

Absolutely correct. Newspapers should start running unique comics, experiment, and when one catches on, syndicate it themselves. That’s how it all started. There’s a formula there that worked.

You’ve hit on something very important there. I would bet your kids didn’t grow up on paper because you didn’t provide one for them. Papers lost this battle for younger readers – not in the last 10 years – but in the last 30. While John and I are avid print newspaper readers, a huge percentage of our friends in their 30′s and younger are not. Our kids DO read the paper. Avidly. Just this morning all 5 of us (kids 10, 15, 18) were in the living room swapping the various sections as we worked our way through. We’ve never forced our kids to read the newspaper – they just like it.

As far as breaking news goes – I have never gotten the newspaper for that – I watch News Hour and listen to NPR and other radio stations for that. I get the local newspaper so that I know what’s going on in my community and also because I like their selection of features. Including syndicated columnists and comics.

I agree with Wiley that, while comics may not bring readers to print who don’t wish to be there anyway, they are still valuable as a draw for one paper over another and papers need to realize this. As more and more papers add comics to their online versions, it will be interesting to see what effect this has on their CPM numbers. Once there are many choices of newspaper online that provide the same quality level of content as in the old days, including comics, people may very well go back to reading their local paper even if it’s online instead of in print.

Ah, yes… the caveat, “if editors were smart”…

Anyway, what you described there was the very thing that made comics so popular to begin with. Syndication came later because those comics were so popular in individual newspapers, so they could be seen in smaller papers across the country that couldn’t afford to hire their own cartoonists. It would be great if a major newspaper went back to that, getting rid of their syndication package (or maybe keeping a few) and focused instead of giving more room for one or two cartoonists who work exclusively for them. And those comics shouldn’t be online, or have them on a long delayed basis.

This is a pipe dream,though, as no editor or publisher today has the stones to do something so dramatically intelligent.

Folks aren’t stupid. They know papers only recap the news, which is fine and a good enough reason to exist.

If a person wanted a detailed recap of a huge significant event, what would most prefer to do?

Stare at a monitor for 30 minutes clicking on ‘enlarge’ to see the photos then click back to the text?

Or sit in a Starbucks or at home in your recliner or table and read through the event. Heck, you even get to save the paper if it strikes you as really important. How many people click ‘File>Save As’ on a website?

You’re right that newpapers can’t compete with the Internet for instant news. They have to make the case they can do for the reader what the Internet can’t and in ways it can’t. No one said comics alone are going to save papers, but as one element in a new format they could be very important.