Missed It: Layoffs At USA Today; Best Wishes To Whitney Matheson In Whatever She Does Next

A couple of e-mailers have alerted me to the fact that I missed a significant round of firings at USA Today that included the comics-interested pop-culture blogger Whitney Matheson. Matheson may be best known to denizens of comics culture for her attention to quality work in that medium alongside favorites in prose, music, TV and film. That matter-of-fact assumption that the best in comics stands with the best in these other media was significant for a lot of works individually, and influential on a number of folks' overall perception of the medium.

Matheson's high-profile platform made her an influential figure in terms of approach and tone with pop culture more generally. I don't know where she stands in terms of the beginning of people blogging about these subjects -- I don't see a lot of hard firsts with ways of writing that grow out of other approaches -- but certainly her genial interaction with the entirety of the creative arts is much more reminiscent of the way coverage stands now than it is of the snark-driven pieces more prevalent when she started, and I think she had something to do with that.

I've always liked Matheson's writing; she has a clear, friendly voice. It's difficult to write for that big and broad of an audience in a way that very few understand until they attempt something similar, in the way that doing a newspaper comic trip has a specific set of challenges that a personally distributed mini-comic will ever have. She was also really good with her readers in a way that was instructive viewed up close or even at a distance. It's hard to fathom the kind of meet-up she did in San Diego, for instance, being the kind of thing that could arise from arts-coverage culture now in quite the same way.

Congratulations to Matheson on her lengthy run and good luck to her in whatever she tries next. I selfishly hope she continues to write in a place where I can read the result.

Heidi MacDonald pays tribute to Mathson's run here.

As for the news story more generally, it's hard not to see USA Today as a rotting corpse with a timer wrapped around its neck. The longtime publication, once as national mainstream as any print offering out there, has yet to become a major factor on-line. It's hard to imagine a scenario where this happens for them at this point.
 
posted 12:15 am PST | Permalink
 

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