Ricardo Caté Cartooning Without Reservations
Without Reservations is a daily comic in the Santa Fe New Mexican. Creator Ricardo Caté’s subject material comes from his experience but also deals with political themes.
Caté said his overall goal is to keep expanding his comic and be in more newspapers.
“I want to make this nationwide,” he said. “I want to see if it will be accepted or not.”
Mvskoke Media and Ricardo discuss Native American cartooning.
Steve Kelley, late of San Diego, now in Pittsburgh
Former Union-Tribune political cartoonist Steve Kelley, who departed the paper in the aftermath of a 2001 dispute over “butt cracks” he allegedly snuck into print, is back behind the inkwell, this time at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
The San Diego Reader reports on Steve Kelley’s trip from San Diego to New Orleans to Pittsburgh.
Dan Saad Remembers the Good Times
Ten percent.
That’s how much of 100-year history of The Press & Guide that I was a contributor as its editorial cartoonist. But it was 10 exciting years and a highlight of my 37-year career in metro Detroit.
The Dearborn Press and Guide asked their former editorial cartoonist Dan Saad to celebrate the paper’s centennial with a few words and a few lines.
Exhibit Honors Non-Voting Political Cartoonist
His 1902 drawing of President Theodore Roosevelt refusing to shoot a bear cub led to the creation of the teddy bear toy. He’s also responsible for the phrase “Remember the Maine!” a Spanish-American War rallying cry that’s still still taught in history classes today. The line accompanied a political cartoon he published in the Washington Post in 1898.
Clifford Berryman spent 60 years in Washington D. C. drawing excellent political cartoons, and like all citizens of our nation’s capital was never allowed to vote for federal officers. There is an exhibit of Berryman’s art.
Digressing to Newspapers’ Continuing Death by Suicide
Retiree Rob Black lives in an upscale but not wildly affluent suburb of Kansas City and has subscribed to The Kansas City Star since he moved to town in 1970. So it was a rude shock in July when he received a bill raising his renewal rate by 27 percent to $846.66 a year.
Surely that was a mistake, Black recalls telling the sales rep he reached by phone. Could he negotiate a lower rate? At least to the $600-something his neighbor was paying? No and no, the rep replied, and home delivery stopped within days.
It took some checking over a period of a month, but three sources confirmed to me that Black was on the receiving end of a peculiar new circulation strategy, which one called “reverse redlining.”
At the Star and 29 other McClatchy papers, longtime core subscribers, especially in higher income ZIP codes, are being hit with big renewal rate increases.
Some will cancel, the theory goes, but many will shrug and send in a check. So the practice works out to a net revenue gain for the company.
Rewarding your best customers with a higher rate than everyone else’s seems a dubious consumer relations strategy, especially for an industry now focused on wooing audience revenue support as print advertising quickly erodes.
Poynter reports on “The Strange Case of the $846 Subscription Offer to the Kansas City Star”.
The Miami Herald did that to me regarding the subscriptions. Went from $44 quarterly to $65 quarterly to $88 quarterly to $154 quarterly. And they don’t warn you, it just appears on your credit card.
I cancelled the subscription, resubscribed and got 6 months (not quarterly, but 6 months) for $44. When the renewal comes up again, I’ll do the same – cancel and resubscribe.
BTW, the Miami Herald is a McClatchy paper.