Not Comics: The Most Depressing Article On Newspapers Yet

Via Gil Roth comes this piece from Jack Shafer that casts the shrinking newspaper industry -- shrinking has two meanings there -- in terms of newspapers slowly liquidating themselves starting first with their build-up of goodwill. I have to admit, I share this piece's pessimism in light of 1) how many papers have recently moved away from serving their audience seven days a week, which to me is a parent flicking the lights in the basement off and hoping that all the teens will clear out in the next 20 minutes without more direct intervention; 2) how no paper has really come up with a way to provide superior service on-line in a way that would rally other newspapers to their model; 3) how many papers still feel brutally overstaffed to me given the technological advantages such folks enjoy now -- the difference between how established papers are staffed and how you'd staff a start-up with the same coverage goals is despairing; 4) what this all portends in terms of writing on the wall, and how close we are right now to what seems to me a real breaking point of multiple major communities without a daily newspaper and how this won't feel disastrous. It's a major U.S. cultural story, I think, and one that says a lot about the state of the country right now.

This of course has all sort of implications for the newspaper strip side of the comics business, and maybe even a thing or two to say about the future of print comics more generally.
 
posted 6:00 am PST | Permalink
 

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