CSotD: Singing in the rain, whistling by the graveyard
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Comes word via a Facebook posting by Hilary Price that the New York Post is dropping its comic page as a cost-cutting move. I haven't got a second source on this and don't know her initial source, but I know and trust her personally, so while we can all hope someone got it wrong, I'm moving forward on the assumption that it's right.
Nothing I'll say here is dependent on that sad bit of news panning out anyway. This could turn into a book, but I'll try to keep it compact.
The above illustration is Page One of what, on March 13, 1993, was expected to be the last issue of the NY Post, just before it was rescued by Rupert Murdoch. It's worth a click to scroll through the (PDF) pages of outrage, in part for the amusing lack of restraint, but also because of the futility of it all.
What's sad is that, whether anyone else would say it, much of the mismanagement they outline is kind of typical today, though a little more Labor Department compliant.
FIRST POINT: In a properly functioning world, other newspaper owners would notice the Post's latest move, but would realize that it operates on a business model more aligned to supermarket tabloids than to mainstream dailies.
But we're not in a world where newspaper owners understand and follow a coherent business model, either on a macro or micro level.
I'm not being sarcastic, nor am I opining from high atop Cloud Cuckooland. I've watched this happen from the inside, and — having worked in three departments and with all of them — from a rare position from which I came to understand more than one piece of the elephant.
One issue newspapers face is that editorial attempts to make marketing decisions with no experience in sales and marketing while the business side makes decisions about content with only the vaguest sense of how that works. It's one helluva combination.
On the micro level: At most papers, a new employee will get a tour of the place conducted by someone from his or her department, who has no freaking idea how any of the rest of it works. I tried in vain, at two different papers, to get employees to take a tour that would give them an overall understanding of the operation. They wouldn't do it. They already knew: An elephant is like a rope, a wall, a tree, a firehose. And their department is the only one keeping it alive.
On the macro level: The local newspaper was once run by an entrepreneur who served as editor, publisher and ad director. Its success was dependent on the hard work, insight and charisma of that owner, who was deeply connected to the community the paper served.
Later, as chains developed, the publisher was the owner's eyes and ears and was expected to have deep roots in the community.
Once a year, the crusty old sonofabitch would force the news department to give breathless coverage to the Annual Flower Show of the Gardening Society, the president of which, by no coincidence, was named Mrs. Publisher. And the reporters and editors bitched and complained about it, but that day's paper was stuffed with ads from all sorts of businesses with no connection to flowers or gardens.
Why? Because at Rotary two months earlier, the publisher had announced that it was Flower Show time, and, without his having to actually say it, everybody in the room knew that, if they wanted free ads when their pet project came around that year, they'd damn well better pony up for a quarter page ad now.
And everyone had a place to live and food to eat and a job at the newspaper.
And then: Once chains went from being small and privately owned and became large and publicly traded, once the longterm goal went from building a business to building a portfolio, publishers became cogs in the profit wheel, shifted around so that today they have no roots in any community, nor time to develop any. A good publisher gets promoted to a larger paper. A bad publisher gets kicked to the curb. Either way, nobody is in town for more than five or six years.
Not enough time to become influential at Rotary or in the Gardening Society, much less long enough to know that the reason the mayor is pushing for a new parking lot is that his sister's brother-in-law owns a paving company.
Your local paper today is no more local than your local Wal-Mart, and you are no longer one of 20,000 local subscribers to the East Overshoe Gazette. You are one of 2,500,000 interchangeable subscribers to one of the 150 interchangeable papers of the MegaPulp Corporation.
(Ted Rall)
SECOND POINT: All that complaining about the NY Post's management, you will note, came before the Internet was a factor.
STOP BLAMING THE INTERNET
Of course it's a factor, but mostly because idiots at corporate HQ made stupid decisions about how to deal with it.
It's not the Internet nearly so much as it is the drive to build publicly-traded megachains in a business based on a model of local service. And when you cobble together something that can't work, it's not surprising that the people in charge do other stupid things as well.
Liking giving away their content while simultaneously demanding that the circulation department increase the number of people paying for it.
Like ignoring Craigslist and losing their classifieds.
I watched this happen. And the people who objected to the direction HQ was going, who suggested that perhaps the Emperor was somewhat naked, were either marginalized or fired.
It was both micro and macro: I was on a committee that was supposed to design the paper's website. Of the 10 or so members, four of us ever went on-line and one of those was our techie, who was a gamer and knew nothing at all about newspapers.
The other six knew nothing about the Internet, did nothing between meetings to find out about it and yet had all sorts of opinions about how the website should work.
I quit going to the meetings because it made my head hurt.
At another paper a few years later, we had one of the early "e-editions," with a modest but respectable and growing number of subscribers to an online replica, with a "sample some, buy the rest" model for the website itself. Print circ was admittedly falling, but not free-falling. All-in-all, we were adapting well.
Corporate demanded we take it all down, because content was to be free throughout the chain.
Our suspicion was that they wanted to sell chainwide banners and needed our clicks to make it work, but they never sold the banners.
They just sold us out.
SO WHAT ABOUT CARTOONS?
Cartoons will survive, but maybe not a particular cartoon, or a particular type of cartoon.
This is a moment like when motion pictures began, or when the silent films gave way to talkies.
Movies didn't kill live theater, but they sure slowed it up a bit. There was a time when live theater was all you had, and — whether vaudeville or Shakespeare — touring companies mattered.
After movies came along, stage actors could find work in them, but not all stage actors had the right chops for film. Then, when it was time to convert from silent to talkies, even more fell by the wayside, which is the premise of "Singin' in the Rain," though the film celebrates those who didn't.
Similarly, as print syndication fades, not every cartoon, not every cartoonist, will be able to make the leap to the web. Web cartoons are a different animal.
Here's another myth: Cartoons sell newspapers. No, they don't. They help sell newspapers.
A book costs twenty bucks and you don't buy a new one every day. A newspaper is 75 cents and basically disposable.
So the analogy is that a book is a fine restaurant, while a newspaper is a diner. Diners are great places, but they aren't fine restaurants and nobody comes out of a diner saying, "The coleslaw was exquisite! And those french fries were divine!"
They come out pleased with having had a good meal at a fair price, and, yes, the cole slaw and the french fries were part of it. Moreover, if there are two diners side-by-side and one cuts its own potatoes for fries and the other one uses frozen ones, you might decide to go to the first.
But most towns have one newspaper, not two or three. People are gonna have to take the fries the place offers.
Now a major diner has decided not to even sell french fries. I think it's a stupid decision. But I don't think they'll look back and realize what they've done.
And before anyone points it out, yes, they are not the only diner in that town. But (1) the NYTimes has no comics page, and the Daily News has been cutting back theirs for years, and so even if comics fans are that rabid, where can they migrate to?
And (2) do you really believe that someone who has been reading the New York Post every morning would read the Times even if they had a comics page?
Someone could, in a market that size, create a comics paper and succeed. There are a couple of such things already. But they are niche publications. They aren't daily, they don't have six-figure circulation and they can't pay a whole lot.
And to succeed in a niche publication, you have to have a niche product. Those general audience, family-friendly cartoons about golfing buddies and home repair mishaps and bratty kids are not going to find a place in a specialty comics paper.
But, mostly, if other newspaper owners see that the Post has gotten away with canceling comics, they're apt to do the same without analyzing business models.
At that point, a tough market is going to become impossible for a lot of heretofore successful strips. And the Post will get away with it, not because it's a good idea but because they won't blame their own foolish decision even if it does have a measurable impact.
The Possibilities:
The web is a very geeky, niche-y place. The benefit of its reach is that, if you have a cartoon about left-handed lacrosse players, you can reach every left-handed lacrosse player in the world who appreciates comics and goes on-line. The drawback is that there may not be enough left-handed lacrosse players in the world to make this a viable strategy.
To succeed on the web, you have to have a hook, but not just any hook.
If you're doing cartoons in which a guy sits in a boat all day drowning worms, then stops at the fish market and has the clerk toss him a trout so he can say he "caught" it, you're not going to make it on the web.
A cartoon about a talking dog might explode or fizzle. A cartoon about a talking dog who programs computers on a space ship probably has a better shot.
But it's a crap shoot, and a damn hard point.
Aggregators: I don't know what cartoonists make from being on GoComics or Comics Kingdom, but I suspect they don't buy their yachts in bulk. The people who are making a living online appear to be doing so independently.
And I think that, while an aggregator — and there are a couple of them out there — can be a good incubator, it needs to be compact enough that your work isn't buried in a pile of other people's stuff or you will never reach the critical mass to break out and go independent, or even to sell an appreciable number of t-shirts and coffeemugs from your spot on the aggregator.
Subscriptions: The issue with selling subscriptions to your strip is that I don't object to paying $20 a year to subscribe to the major aggregator sites, and I would pay more, but I'm not sure how many people would, and my advice would be to go for the numbers, not the individual fees.
However, given the number of strips I want to follow, I can't afford $20 here and $30 here and $40 there to subscribe to each of them.
I think the jury is out on subscriptions, but certainly you have to build to a high level before you can begin to think about them. My question is, by the time you get there, are you better off selling books, t-shirts and coffeemugs to a mass of free visitors than narrowing your numbers with a yearly access fee?
And I don't know the answer: That's a question.
Here's what I do know:
Whatever the Post has done, whatever its overall impact, smart cartoonists have been stockpiling beans and rice in the bunker for a couple of years.
Some have developed web strips, some are spinning off greeting cards and other "by products" and quite a few are producing semi-graphic-novels for kids — that is, heavily illustrated novels, some related to strips, others independent of them — which seem to be a solid second market at the moment.
Cartoons will always be around. The trick is to be one of them when the dust clears.
Sorry for the downer. Thanks for reading. I'll be funny tomorrow, honest.
(Elderberries. Which, appropriately enough, is no longer in production)
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