It’s That Scariest Time Of The Year



You can be forgiven not paying attention as times are tough all over, but lots of people are currently being laid off in the newspaper industry in that post-summer, pre-holiday window that seems to attract a lot of major personnel moves. To mention two this week that in previous years might have made for a month's worth of analysis and articles, the LA Times laid off a bunch of its staffers on Monday, and now the non-USA Today Gannett papers will reduce their staffs by 10 percent. And then you have today's jaw-dropper: the Christian Science Monitor will stop being a daily.

The problem is pretty clear: declining circulations paired with hemorrhaging ad sales. The latest figures were even scarier than usual because of the historical nature and expressed desire for content surrounding a very dramatic election year. The reason for all of this is less clear but is likely a combination of the generational shift between newspaper-users and newspaper-ignorers reaching a tipping point, the rise of on-line sources for services that newspapers have traditionally provided (movie listings, sports scores, community announcements), competition for newspaper revenue sources ranging from on-line classified services to local cable service advertising and likely a bunch of stuff nobody has quite figured out yet. Exacerbating the situation is how poorly suited the newspaper industry has shown itself to be weathering this kind of storm through choices like a move to models of profit that put a lot of strain on these companies to hit certain revenue goals every year rather than investing in areas that could be providing benefits now, as well as what I would say is a bit of very real bloat in terms of what was being read, how much local reporting was being done, emerging technologies and what their effect should have been on general productivity within those workplaces.

It's a dire, dire situation, to the point that the nascent credit crisis and potential resulting economic turmoil could snowball into an extinction event for a lot of major players. Since newspapers are a major client for newspaper comics, their plight should be of great concern to the comics world. The newspaper has long been one of the more stable and dependable ways by which at least some practitioners in the field could find fame and fortune, and has yielded more than its fair share of great art. The current crisis calls into question whether or not the comics syndicates are prepared to meet the potential loss of clients that could be on its way, and my guess is that they're not, and underlines the fact that no one really has an Internet strategy that can carry most of comics intact into a next phase or even envision what that next phase may be beyond a crude outline or two. To be fair, asking this of comics syndicates and newspapers is sort of like suggesting folks have a home decorating solution in case someone drives a Buick through their living room. Still, I think people feel its absence.

This is the paragraph where I say something hopeful, but frankly? I've got nothing. Comics in newspapers remain popular. They're an ingrained part of that experience. There is a lot spent on them, enough that I think even reduced the money involved will make it a viable career for many cartoonists. Comics are also of course uniquely transferable to the Internet in a variety of ways were someone to develop a strategy for doing so. While all of this puts comics in a pretty good position to outlast a storm, I'm not sure they get to choose exactly what course they'll chart. We should all spend some time keeping an eye on them.
 
posted 8:10 am PST | Permalink
 

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