CSotD: Pollish joke
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Bill Hinds takes Cleats away from youth sports for a moment to comment on the comics business, and, specifically, on the stupid "comics polls" that editors use to determine the fates of the strips on their pages.
Comics polls are a major source of irritation and frustration for syndicated cartoonists, who hate having their fate determined by something that is lazy, invalid and basically stupid. Which seems like a reasonable way to feel about it.
To begin with, comics polls aren't "polls." There is no attempt to reach out to readers, or non-readers, in order to get a scientific sampling. They simply ask readers (see: "preaching to the choir") to tell them what strips they like and don't like, and are guided by the people who bother to respond, which method starts by not being representative and then skews into reflecting the opinions of people who are retired and have time for this sort of thing. Which is why so many cartoons from the 1930s and 1940s remain on your page.
Still, while newspaper editors are not a cartoonist's best friends, they don't actually hate the medium. Start here:
1. They don't understand comics. In the 19th century, editors were intellectual jacks-of-all-trades. At very small papers, the editor was often the publisher and perhaps also the sales manager and the circulation director. Times have changed and growth has increased the emphasis on specialization and efficiency. Publishers are mostly drawn from the business side these days and don't understand news writing, while, in large part because of that, editors rise based on productivity and capacity for organization, not because of genius and imagination. The copy editor who can spot a dangling participle and turn out pages in time for the early press run ends up in the Big Chair. That type of editor understands rules of grammar, not comic metaphors, and, while they can be very sarcastic, they are not often very funny. They do not have mobile minds or active imaginations and they honestly just don't get it.
2. They don't deal with the comics page. Even before the heyday of "doing more with less," the comics page was laid out in the back shop. Look at the comics page in your local paper: 99 times out of 100, the format is locked in. Each strip has its assigned spot, and the rest of the page is syndicated features: An advice column, a puzzle, a medical column. If anyone in the newsroom even sees it, it would be the newest hire, the greenest graduate, the lowest peon of all. With computers, much of it is automated and you can even outsource the layout of your comics page overseas.
3. They hate being yelled at. Don't we all? Editors accept angry phone calls over their local news and features. They see it as inevitable, and, as long as negative reader response doesn't bring the publisher into their office, it's even a badge of honor, since they see it as reflecting their "hard-hitting coverage," even if the hard hit was delivered below the belt. But this doesn't mean they enjoy the abuse, and they certainly don't want to be yelled at over a poop joke in some comic strip that was laid out by the backshop or in the Philippines. (Which is why, if the syndicate sends out a heads-up that an upcoming strip may offend a few readers, many editors will reflexively ask for a safe replacement. Why take flak over something you don't have anything to do with?)
It's also important to realize that, as much as today's editor is a stickler for proper grammar and follows rules in a way that would make the most tightly-buttoned librarian look like Oscar Madison, journalism majors don't study a lot of math. Since they don't understand the polls that other organizations run, they certainly can't devise or interpret a valid poll of their own. And, since they aren't good with numbers and don't feel the need to fuss with comics, the last thing they want to do is get hung up in a lot of numbers having to do with comics.
Remember, too, that "monkey see, monkey do" is standard operating procedure in a lot of businesses, not just this one. Innovation is great when it works and will get you fired when it doesn't, but, if you do something everyone does and it doesn't work, you can shrug your shoulders. It should have worked. I followed the rules. It's the economy. It's the Internet. It's not my fault.
Hence the standard "comics poll," which isn't a poll at all but which has precedents that you can cite.
There are better ways of doing it. Nearly a decade ago, I was asked to help re-do the comics page at the paper where I was working. I knew the standard practice was not only a joke but inevitably ended with a mountain of angry phone calls and letters. So, instead, I took the 21 strips we were running (we ran 22, but one was by a local artist and was not on the block), and divided them into three groups of seven strips, roughly by theme: Family strips, old favorites and social commentary.
Then we asked readers to tell us which strip in each group they would most like to keep, and which they would least miss. In other words, they were invited to choose three strips to keep and three strips to drop, but they couldn't all be from the same category.
As expected, the vast majority of our responses were from readers 65 and over, but that was okay, because I was looking at the responses in each of a number of demographic groups. The 18-and-under group was under-represented, the 65-and-over was over-represented and we had a decent if not spectacular response from those in between, but they weren't lumped in together.
If a strip did poorly in one group but well in another, I considered that. There were some easy choices, strips that did well across the board, and ones that didn't. And it was easier to see results because people were only indicating the strips they really felt strongly about — I tossed the inevitable responses that tried to pick all the strips in one category and dump all the strips in another.
And here's what else we didn't do: Not only did we use the numbers only to assist, not dictate, our judgment, but we didn't release them. Why would you release numbers that aren't statistically valid? It only inflames readers and reveals the shortcomings of your methodology. (The answer is "for the same reason you let those numbers dictate your decisions." You would do it because you don't know how spectacularly innumerate you are. See above.)
In the end, we replaced about a third of our strips. We had fewer than a dozen calls objecting to the decisions, and most of those were along the line of "I'm sorry to lose X, but I'll give Y a chance," which is hardly the kind of response editors fear.
Our experience got a mention in Editor & Publisher and another industry newsletter, and I heard from one or two editors about it. I think one other paper followed our lead.
The rest have continued to do it the traditional way. And, as Hinds notes in today's Comic Strip of the Day, it would be funny if they made their other content decisions in the same way, but, of course, they would never do that.They may be stupid, but they're not … well …
Well, never mind. Fact is, some day, we may look back on this strip and say, "At the time, the idea really was just a joke."
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