And They Will All Live Like Cartoonists: The US Economy And Comics, Post #27

* the book chain Borders, one of the big ones of its type in the US and a key player in the explosive growth of manga this decade, cut a number of jobs late last week. I think what may surprise some people is what this tells us about how many folks Borders is employing overall -- that might have been lost with the chain being sick for a while now. A lot of people to whom I've spoken about Borders recently say that they were the drivers of a massive amount of returned material in January, which if true could be another dangers sign for the beleaguered retailer.

* I meant to get to this one earlier, and I may have in a way I'm just not able to find right. The point is important enough it bears repeating. As much as the failure of newspapers like Rocky Mountain News and (potentially) the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has an impact on the comics page by being big clients and competitors for other papers in their respective markets, you are likely to see as many comics dropped in the next year or so from newspapers adjusting their orders.

* here's a provisional breakdown of an online-only Post-Intelligencer and the various projects that may be competing with same for staffed positions. On the one hand, this is as brutal a cutback as I can imagine, which is actually a good thing in that a big worry about companies trying an Internet version of a print publication is their ability to pare staff. On the other hand, do editors at an on-line publication really need to outnumber the reporters by 50 percent. That seems kind of crazy to me.

* finally, the other Seattle standard newspaper isn't doing so well either.
 
posted 8:30 am PST | Permalink
 

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