Papers Pulling Next Week's Doonesbury

The Post is my tab of choice too. The Post has a point of view, and is a fun read. The News? It's the Daily Snooze.

And, the Post's comics page? It's like the Island of Misfit Toys. There are strips that run there I've never seen run anywhere else. If you're choosing your paper based just on the funny pages, you're picking the News over the Post every time.

 

How the hell does it hurt their brand?

 

The Post also happens to have the best cartoonist in Sean Delonas.

 

How does it help it?

Do you want to be a trusted news source, or a community bulletin board? Maybe you should run a daily cartoon from lolcats. People like those.

 

Why can't you be both -- and haz cheezburgers as well!

 

The funnies sell newspapers. Trudeau's one of the richest people in papers who doesn't own one. That's why they were put in the paper in the first place. If the Globe removed its comics, I'd cancel my subscription immediately.
Life isn't all politics and money. A newspaper is supposed to reflect the life of its readership. Sports is a superfluous frivolity, too -- and it's 10 times more expensive to operate than the funny pages.

 

Top three papers in the country don't carry the funnies. Two of them are the best, and most respected papers in the country (with only the Washington Post even having a claim to being in the conversation).

Now, you might say they're "national" newspapers, but they sell a shit load in their home market as well.

The only reason I see for putting comic strips in the paper is to introduce kids to newspapers.

 

My 15-year-old reads the comics in the paper every day before school. And he often notices and reads other stories while he is looking for the comics.

 

Yeah, but he's a political/editorial cartoonist -- big difference. I don't see any problem with a paper running someone like him.

 

As I said, that's the one reason I can see for having cartoons.

As a kid, my dad would buy the Sunday Times & Daily News on the way home from church. My brothers and I would argue about who would get the comics first. The sports page had a lot of appeal too.

Odds your boy becomes a paid subscriber one day?

 

A hell of a lot better than if he didn't read the paper every morning, I'd say.

 

True.