CSotD: The Vision Thing
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The Oatmeal speaks for this blog.
I've been advised from time to time to make CSotD more phone-friendly but haven't, and I don't know how well it comes across on phones because the nearest thing I've got is an Amazon Fire which is at least medium-sized. And which I generally use as a Kindle anyway.
IMHO, artwork that fits in your hand is best left to jewelers. Even simple cartoons deserve to be actually seen, and, besides, we can't complain about newspapers shrinking their print product if we're going to shrink the on-line equivalent.
Though Oatmeal is complaining about another thing, which I can assure you afflicts the full-sized computer experience as well.
There are several cartoonists — especially those at Gannett papers — whose web pages are deliberately obscured with advertising and then, when you click through that, are only one corner of a display of windows if they are still there at all.
If I did not feel an obligation to check out their work for this blog, I would say to hell with it and I imagine a lot of readers have done just that.
I don't know how much of this is an attempt to go to a format that works on mobile devices and how much of it is pure, fat-headed stupidity, but I worked in newspapers long enough to venture a theory.
At the paper where I worked in the days when the Internet was becoming a factor, we created a committee to plan our website and we set up one of our few Internet-ready computers in a conference room.
The editor and I put up some bookmarks to newspaper websites we felt had elements worth considering, and there was a notebook for other committee members to leave comments or URLs for sites they had found that they thought should be considered.
Then, when we met as a group, it turned out that nobody had visited the bookmarked sites or touched the computer at all.
This, you will realize, did not stop them from voicing their opinions, which would simply be a funny story if it were only at our little newspaper, but all evidence suggests it was how things were happening at Corporate headquarters throughout the country.
The Craigslist disaster swept in so quickly that newspapers can be forgiven for their failure to react in time. It did take away nearly half their revenues, money that had been achieved (A) by being part of the community and (B) in drips and drabs that people accepted.
They should have given up the (B) in order to maintain the (A), and a number of papers did start giving away their personal classifieds — the lost dog/garage sale ones — but too late.
However, it happened so quickly that the only fault is that most local papers were chain-owned and didn't have the autonomy to respond quickly.
The real cancer is when Corporate, rather than refusing to allow change, insists upon it.
Comics fans may remember that there were once three major papers where you could create your own comics page: the Houston Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News and the Philadelphia Daily News.
Back then, I asked a syndicate head if this were the direction comics were headed and was told that, in fact, those licenses had been handed out before the implications had been considered, and that there would be no more. (GoComics and Comics Kingdom launched a year or so later.)
The Philly page was so randomly, incompetently updated that people abandoned it as useless, but the other two fell more deliberately on their swords, dropping the features as part of Corporate's ongoing reluctance to give readers what they wanted effort to centralize operations.
The loss at the Merc was part of a more remarkable move in the final, flailing days of Knight-Ridder, when Corporate decided that all their web pages should look the same, removing any vestige of local character to a level that made it hard to even figure out what city a particular website served.
(Knight-Ridder's collapse would simply be a bizarre sidenote if anyone had learned from it, but the lesson was "We're smarter than they were" which falls under the category of "Famous Last Words.")
Another paper where I worked had an innovative IT department, but every time they put out something interesting — like the first e-editions — Corporate would "decide to go another way," invariably into one of those painted-on-the-canyon-wall tunnels so beloved by Wiley Coyote.
It's one thing to experience this as a consumer, but to be a party to the memos and conversations was ghastly, because you didn't have to speculate about why it was going so wrong: You had a front row seat.
It was like a version of Groundhog Day that kept accelerating and ramping up the force with which the Acme Newspaper Company steered us smack into that canyon wall again.
Meanwhile, among those who get it:
Ranan Lurie has announced the winners of his annual awards, First Prize going to Slovakian cartoonist Miroslav Barvircak.
Lurie once published an educational magazine of political cartoons aimed at high school students, but I think it was too expensive for schools to purchase and I haven't seen it in years. However, his dedication to the form is unaltered and his annual awards, given in conjunction with the United Nations, are an example.
US cartoonists got a few plaudits:
Third prize went to Steve Sack …
… and Mike Luckovich was also honored.
There are more there and it's well worth the click, particularly if you scroll to the bottom and visit previous years.
And the Washington Post has a feature at Medium in which its three cartoonists discuss their work in the past year.
Ann Telnaes shows the process that resulted in the above piece, while Tom Toles not only provides his insights on cartooning Trump but posts a video showing how he does it, and Michael Cavna discusses using espresso in the aging process — graphic, not his own.
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