CSotD: Biting the hand that doesn’t want to feed you
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Candorville this week is chronicling (heh heh) the death spiral of the newspaper industry.
There haven't been a lot of points over the past eight or 10 years where this story arc wouldn't be somewhat timely, but it's particularly so this week, given that the NY Daily News just slashed its comics by 33 percent and the tone-deaf management of the Las Vegas Review Journal frog-marched its staff cartoonist, Jim Day, out of the building.
Though I think both moves are self-defeating, I'm more concerned with the latter than the former. Dropping comic strips is a stupid move, particularly when it isn't done in order to better present the remaining strips. That is, it might be an okay move, had the News said, "We're cutting a third of our strips in order that we might present the remaining ones in a larger, clearer format for your enjoyment …"
Mais c'est a rire, and nothing is done to intentionally provoke laughter in this business.
Editors today are far removed from the editor/publisher entrepreneur model that built the industry. They are a species of grammarian bean-counters, obsessed with rules about the proper use of capital letters, honorifics and acronyms and layout rules about typefaces and spacing.
These are people so removed from the mainstream that they have conventions and email exchanges in which they come up with odd decisions like the one, about a decade ago, in which it was declared that "in lieu of bail" was jargon and should never appear in print. This is why you now read "he was jailed because he did not pay $5,000 bail" and other clumsy work-arounds for a simple, legal phrase that everyone understood despite the insistence of editors that they didn't.
I have met very, very few editors who actually "got" the joke in a cartoon. They know what a cartoon should look like, and they understand that someone falling off a cliff or getting a pie in the face is called "funny," but they don't actually grok it.
This is why Bill Clinton was so dogged with cartoons about his zipper — not because editors wanted him to clean up his private life but because they knew that references to zippers are funny, just like showing him being swept down a raging river was an appropriate reference to "Whitewater" as long as there was a "Whitewater" label in that river.
And a political cartoon showing George Bush with funny ears was a good cartoon, too, regardless of what else was being depicted in it. They know that a cartoon that insults the president — whoever that president may be — is "hard-hitting," which they have heard is a good thing.
Editors didn't have to be imaginative or insightful until recently, because the publisher had a good sense of the community and would generally guide the overall spirit of the paper. Publishers rarely came from the news side; more often, they came out of sales, where they had built a relationship with the street that was then nurtured over 15 or 20 or 30 years in that big chair, from which they not only ruled the paper but were influential in the local Rotary Club and the Chamber as well.
Yes, each year the newsroom was ordered to give lavish coverage to the Flower Show, which the publisher's wife chaired. And each year, the newsroom groused about it, and rightly so. And each year, it was one freaking issue and then it was over for another year. And, by the way, each year the publisher's buddies bought pages and pages of ads for that issue, and for several others as well.
In today's world of corporate journalism, however, publishers are not a meaningful part of the community at small or mid-sized papers. A publisher who does good work is promoted to a larger paper. A publisher who does bad work is fired. A publisher who is in place for more than five or six years is a rarity and probably stuck in a mediocre, permanently stalled career.
Which raises the question, "Who knows what the readers want?" and the answer is, "Nobody." There are some self-appointed experts who have successfully sold their balloon juice to others and so get trotted out regularly so that they can act as media roosters, taking credit for the sunrise each morning. But their successes are primarily the result of self-fulfilling prophecies that have very little traction on ground-level in any medium and none at all in print.
So let's talk about comic strips: There was a time when a good comics page could sell a newspaper. That was back when people wanted a newspaper and were choosing between the East Overshoe Tribune and the East Overshoe Gazette. The one with the better comics had an advantage. But now that the only paper in town is the East Overshoe Tribune-Gazette, it's no longer necessary to be "better."
The comics today are like the coleslaw at a diner — they aren't the reason people come there, but they are a small-but-real part of the reason people come back. You don't lose customers because you messed up the coleslaw. You lose customers because you messed up the coleslaw and the french fries and the coffee, but it's not any one of those things that made the difference. The difference came when you stopped caring and let all those little things slip away.
Which brings us to the local editorial cartoonist. A good cartoonist can be a large part of a newspaper's identity, not just with editorial cartoons but with spot illustrations and dingbats throughout the paper. A good local cartoonist is like the good local disc jockey at a good local radio station.
Only there's no such thing as a good local disc jockey anymore. There are still some people who play the songs corporate has decreed should be played, but most of them are at central locations, sending out their tunes via satellite and carefully never talking about the weather because it would ruin the illusion that they are actually in your town. And there are the Morning Zoo guys, cribbing their bawdy jokes from tip sheets they buy from various Morning Zoo sources.
And newspapers, bless their souls, are hell-bent on following the model that has made AM radio such a media powerhouse. So you march Jim Day out of the building and use the cheap, affordable syndicated cartoons and save lots of money.
And the coleslaw turns sour, and the fries are soggy and the coffee has that burnt-bitter taste of being left on the burner too long, and people drift away and you blame it on the franchises and you try to be more like them, when, all along, your competitive edge was that you weren't at all like them.
Here's a 19-year-old Jack Ohlman cartoon that gets funnier, or maybe less funny, every year.
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