Not Comics: Tom Mohr’s Manifesto For The Future Of Newspapers On-Line

I found this massive article by former Knight-Ridder Digital President Tom Mohr calling for newspaper companies to work in close partnership in order to better secure vital partnerships with branded vertical partners like CareerBuilder.com interesting not because change is likely to occur exactly as Mohr describes but because it's clear that the North American newspaper business has within its DNA at least one more potential paradigm-defining growth period which, if it happens, would cascade throughout all businesses and individual contractors that serve the newspaper industry. This includes the syndicates that sell comic strips and the hundreds of cartoonists that receive checks from them.

The current way comic strips make money is through an aggregation of sales at the local print and on-line level. This has become supplemented by a few ambitious mechanisms -- like King Features' Daily Ink -- which I think serve a) strip enthusiasts looking for material beyond what their paper supplies and b) a growing readership approaching news and comics and other features as distinct products with worldwide reach to be assembled on their computer screen according to personal taste.

If papers began to operate more and more on-line and more and more in partnership with each other, as Mohr describes, it seems like it would slowly diminish the local enhacement element of print and individual on-line site comics sales. This indicates that for comics to retain their sales levels, distinct purchases of comics would need to grow, or some sort of way of distinguishing comics according to individual newspapers' participation on-line would need to be enhanced, or some sort of third way of doing business with Mohr's proposed consortia or their rough equivalents would have to take place. Otherwise, we could see a massive drop in comics' overall revenue.

I'm not doom and gloom on this. Radio was able to retrench when television came along. But we could be entering into a phase of either more modest expectations for syndicate success or, to look at it another way, a shift as to who the buyers are. If you're a cartoonist and you hear that Monster.com and Philadelphia Inquirer are entering into a partnership, with which entity would you prefer a 20-year deal?

As a sign of things to come, it's also worth noting how many reader surveys there are now and how quickly comic strip features move in and out of today's papers. This is a volatility that didn't exist 10-20 years ago. Alan Gardner at DailyCartoonist.com tracks the Labor Day weekend's worth of movement.
 
posted 1:38 am PST | Permalink
 

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