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September 24, 2006


Go, Read: Newspaper Editor Writes To King Features About Daily Ink

In an article I'd recommend to anyone with even a peripheral interest in the newspaper strip, Editor and Publisher reports a newspaper editor named Dean Miller of Idaho Falls' The Post Register has sent a letter to King Features Syndicate Vice-President George Haeberlein suggesting that their DailyINK online service puts them into direct competition with newspapers like his own, going so far as to suggest King should start paying them for the exposure of appearing in their daily.

I honestly don't think this is an important story in terms of the specific issues raised. Despite Miller's stated desire for dialogue, the "you should maybe pay us" stuff reads more like empty grandstanding than a starting point for substantive talks. I'm also not totally convinced that in today's market papers buy a monopoly with their syndication fees. Not on all fronts. The advent of the Internet has changed the strip market in one of those fundamental ways, comparable to the rise of the DVD market for television shows, and you can't argue your way to a simpler time and more traditional consumer impulses.

In addition, I think Miller misanalyzes what kind of services compete with a newspaper's comic strip page. I'm sympathetic to the thrust of King's official response that DailyINK more likely serves as a supplement for hardcore fans who want to pursue strips not in their local paper than it exists as competition for newspapers. That feels right; the subscription fees seem significant enough to serve someone other than the average newspaper reader. King Features spent more time putting together DailyINK than Terrence Malick takes prepping a film; there's no way on earth they would have gone forward with a model that genuinely and directly competes with their syndication sales. Could this have been the result despite King's best intentions? It's a possibility, but not on one editor's assertive say-so.

What pushes Miller's letter from a few moments of potential musing into a must-read is that it exposes the chasms of difference between various conceptions of what on-line newspaper models do and how they work in conjunction with traditional newspaper efforts, calling into question how the newspaper strip business should move forward. There is no industry standard, no emerging vanguard that informs newspapers as to how they should approach content, syndication, exclusivity and competition. Until some sort of stable model develops that the majority of newspapers can embrace, real dialogue about what the syndicates should do may be impossible, and fundamental differences allowed to linger could be outright harmful in their keeping pace with the rest of the media world.
 
posted 10:06 pm PST | Permalink
 

 
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