Now, cartoons are cheap content that keep a certain number of readers habitually picking up the paper week after week. Those readers might not take the time to write the editor if they disappear; they’ll just stop picking up the paper. Or they’ll write us to complain. I do understand that low ad revenue means low page counts, which means space is at a premium. (Space is a mysteriously complex issue even in “normal” times.) But it seems to me that the few crumbs — and I do mean crumbs — these papers save by axing cartoons is self-defeating. Heaven help us if the cost of cartoons makes or breaks the industry.
I’m actually not as pessimistic as some people about the fate of altweeklies. I think the web blows as an advertising vehicle for local businesses — who doesn’t tune out the ads on a cluttered web page? If I owned a restaurant, I would rather put my money in a print ad. I actually look at the more interesting print ads. Altweeklies are community, and advertising in one makes you part of that community. If the papers can hang on through Great Depression II: Revenge of the Credit Default Swaps, I think they’ll do okay when the economy improves. At least, the ones that aren’t leveraged up the ass.
I hope she’s right. I love the altweeklies, I really do. It would be a diminished world without them. But a lot of bad business decisions were made over the past decade, and we’re definitely going to see some of these papers fold as a result.
Overall, though, I’m probably inclined to agree — there’s still a place in the world for altweeklies, and more to the immediate point, there’s still a place in those altweeklies for cartoons, if their editors are only wise enough to see it. And remember: the path to editorial wisdom is paved with voluminous reader feedback.
Oh, look! Here’s a handy directory. Follow the links and you can usually find contact info.
Update … cartoonist Derf’s statement on the situation:
OK. This is it. We’ve reached the apocalyptic final struggle for the future of cartoons.
Village Voice Media is the largest group of weekly newspapers in the biz. It is suffering from
the ills that have befallen the rest of the newspaper industry: dwindling revenues and withering
readership. Their corporate response, which was delivered to me Monday, is to “suspend”
all cartoons across the chain, said suspension to last at least through the rest of the first quarter,
and quite possibly beyond. That’s right. NO more cartoons. None.
This is very probably a fatal blow to me. Not only is it a significant income hit, but these are
six of the largest and finest papers in the weekly industry. I’ve been in the pages of some of
these publications for years. The Riverfront TImes was one of my first papers. I started run-
ning there in 1991! This isn’t about me “sucking ” either. Since I won the Robert F. Kennedy
Award in 2006, one of the highest honors bestowed on a cartoonist, I’ve been losing papers
steadily. The reason cited is always budget cuts. Always.
I want to stress this isn’t a good vs. bad guy situation. This company has been very good to
me over the years and I like and respect the individual editors. VVM publishes outstanding
papers, full of great and important work. I’d like to think I was a part of that.
The newspaper industry overall, both the daily and weekly “alternative” press, is in a state
of total panic right now. 2008 was the worst year I’ve ever had, with panicking editors
cutting cartoons right and left. Dailies, for all the suicidal moves they have made, at least
aren’t axing cartoons. They run wretched ones, to be sure, but they recognize how vital
comics are. For years, weekly papers have bragged that they will flourish after daily papers
bite the dust. I believed that once. But over the past few years, weeklies have commited the
very same short-sighted mistakes that are killing dailies. Weeklies should be ADDING
features and content, especially cartoons, which are both popular and inexpensive. Instead
their response seems to be “let’s give our readers LESS to read!” Yeah. Wonder how that will
work out for them?
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So this is what I was alluding to last Friday: Village Voice Media is hurting in this economy like everyone else, and their corporate response is to “suspend” cartoons and (I think) all other syndicated material across the chain, said suspension to last at least through the rest of the first quarter, and quite possibly beyond.
The papers I was running in are: Dallas Observer, New Times Ft. Lauderdale, Houston Press, LA Weekly, Minneapolis City Pages, Nashville Scene, OC Weekly, Pitch Weekly, Denver Westword, Village Voice and Seattle Weekly.
This still leaves me with eighty-odd papers, as well as Salon and Credo, so it’s not a fatal blow. And believe me, I wasn’t so naive as to imagine I was going to get through this economic mess without taking some hits. Nonetheless it’s a serious chunk of major cities to lose in one fell swoop (don’t get me started on the joys of consolidation this morning). Anyway, if you live in one of those cities and think this is a bad decision, you might want to share those feelings with the local editor. Politely, it should go without saying. And keep in mind: it’s not just my cartoon, it’s all of them, so put in a kind word for my compatriots while you’re at it. The only thing any of us have going for us in a situation like this is reader support.
The belt-tightening now only affects network-wide cartoons, Hoffman says; other syndicated features — like Dan Savage’s “Savage Love” and Rob Brezsny’s “Free Will Astrology” — will continue to run at City Pages.
So. How’s your week going so far?
… one thing I want to add here: while I am admittedly less than overjoyed by this turn of events, this isn’t a “me vs. them” situation. These are in many cases people who have supported my work and given me an audience for ten or fifteen years; some are personal friends. This is just an unfortunate decision made at the corporate level in response to a very difficult time.
–PENGUIN prints are going a lot faster than I expected. UPDATE: None left!
–speaking of income-generating activities, a little birdie just warned me that I’m about to take a pretty large financial hit. I’ll explain more about this later, but for now just remember what I said before: if your paper stops running TMW, complain vociferously. In a very real sense, my livelihood is in your hands, so if you like the work, let them know.
–George Bush is no longer president. It makes me happy every time I remember that.
Now that Alan Colmes has been exiled to the Siberia of Fox Radio (did he jump or was he pushed?), Hannity has remade his tv show like someone newly divorced, trying to scrub away any lingering trace of his former partner. There’s no longer even the slimmest pretense of being anything other than a showcase for the fringe right. For example: over the past two nights, he’s run an “exclusive interview” with — oh, the excitement — Rush Limbaugh!
And there’s a very telling passage, in which Limbaugh says, “The culture, we’ve lost the culture Sean. We have lost pop culture. It is unrealistic to expect that people watching MTV, going to see the rot Hollywood’s putting out, listening to the rot music is today, that every four years they’re going to go into a voting booth and vote Republican, vote conservative.”
After years of attempts to make conservatism cool somehow, this is its new face, much the same as it ever was: a cranky old man complaining about the movies and music the young people like these days.
As if to underscore the point, later in the program Hannity brings in Pat Boone to comment on the week’s news. Pat Boone.
They’re writing off most of the population — what else can they do?–and focusing on their true base: the over-75 crowd. And I wish them the best of luck with that strategy.
During the first episode of the new season of Battlestar Galactica, they ran a commercial for a product placement tie-in with Kentucky Fried Chicken: “Log on now to join the KFC Frak Pak Sweepstakes!”
Um.
See the thing is, for those of you who don’t watch the show, the BSG writers use the word “frak” as a network-acceptable substitute for “fuck.” “Frak you,” a charcter will say, or “frakking cylons!” Things like that.
So basically KFC is running the “fuckbag sweepstakes.” I’d like some chicken in a fuckbag please!
And adding an even more dissonant note, the commercial ran immediately after a character blew her own brains out, quite graphically. I think the only way it could have been more appalling overall is if that character had actually been Colonel Sanders himself, or maybe some sort of chicken-human hybrid created by the Cylons.
(And with this post, I have ensured that my site will rank #1 in Google searches for the phrase “chicken in a fuckbag.” It’s good to be king!)
Update: Oy! even worse product placement following aforementioned suicide, here.
Probably some redundancies here; blame them on your unreliable editor. First, from my friend Jack:
phonied up the charges against Miss Alabama gov.
is still drinking
appointed U.S. attorneys to make false vote fraud charges.
did tell the Palestinian leader than God told him to strike down the Arabs.
did phony up the yellowcake via Italian intelligence.
aggressively stovepiped the wmd intelligence.
worked with Katherine Harris to keep the Democratic voter lists under challenge.
rigged the Ohio vote in 2004
And more from readers:
–Of course Bush decided to invade Iraq on or before
September 11, 2001
–Of course the Bush administration withheld desperately-needed federal disaster aid from Louisiana after New Orleans flooded while at the same time the Bush administration launched a smear campaign against the Democratic governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Blanco, and the Democratic mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin.
And probably my favorite so far:
–Of course the terror color chart and subsequent alerts were timed for maximum political gain.
… two more good ones:
Of course Bush intentionally skipped out on his National Guard service.
Of course Bush didn’t believe that his educational reforms would work. The whole point was to have public schools fail so that they could be privatized.
… they exaggerated and/or fabricated the details regarding Jessica Lynch’s rescue
My outgoing server isn’t letting me reply to email at the moment, but everyone who paid for a PENGUIN print last night will definitely get one. There are ten nine left; I’ll post a notice if/when those are gone. UPDATE: ALL GONE!
Here’s something I haven’t done before: I’m going to use my big-ass professional archival ink printer and print up an extremely limited run of 25 signed and numbered prints of this image, at 17×22 inches on heavy weight enhanced matte acid free paper. The first five are mine; the remainder are available for pre-order for $100 apiece plus $10 postage paypal to tomtomorrow (atsymbol) earthlink (dot) net. And once they’re gone, they’re completely gone — this one will never be made available again.
Olbermann’s guest, the NSA whistleblower, got me to thinking: what other things that we already pretty much understand to be true will be confirmed as fact in the weeks and months ahead? This is the list that I’ve come up with so far. (Spoiler alert: this feels like something that will probably turn into a cartoon in the next week or two, so if you prefer to be surprised there, you might want to skip this one.)
1. The aforementioned spying on journalists. Of course they were spying on journalists. And there was that oddly specific moment where Andrea Mitchell, in the course of interviewing New York Times reporter James Risen about his reporting on the NSA and government wiretapping, asked if he knew anything about the administration spying on Christiane Amanpour — a question the network promptly scrubbed from the transcription.
2. Of course Cheney was running everything, at least for the first term.
3. Of course they made backroom deals with their pals at Halliburton, Enron, etc.
4. Of course they were lying about Iraq from the start.
5. Of course torture was sanctioned at the highest levels.
6. Of course Valerie Plame was deliberately outed in retaliation for Joe Wilson’s op-ed debunking the yellowcake uranium story.
7. Of course male prostitute turned fake journalist Jeff Gannon was having an affair with someone in the White House.
8. Of course we came close to war with Iran.
9. Of course someone was feeding Bush answers during that presidential debate where you could clearly see a square shape under the back of his jacket — a camera angle that the administration had specifically demanded the network not use. And there’s the point where he interrupts his own answer to chastise someone no one else can see — of course he was wearing a wire.
10. I’m not sure if this one counts as an “of course,” but I’ve long suspected that Bush has some sort of neurological disorder which worsened over the course of the past eight years. If you go back and look at clips from his days as governor, it’s almost shocking how articulate and quick he seems. I mean, yes, we can all chuckle, ha ha those wacky malapropisms, in the way that you might have had a good natured chuckle about Ronald Reagan’s absent mindedness, until years later when you realize with dawning horror that the man with his finger on the button probably had early stage Alzheimers. Bush was inarticulate eight years ago but these days he can barely string a sentence together.
11. And maybe an overall generic entry: of course the truth will turn out to be much, much worse than we ever suspected.
This is all off the top of my head, so — what am I forgetting? Suggestions to tomtomorrow (atsymbol) ix (dot) netcom (dot) com.
… of course I go out and run a few errands, and am swamped with reader suggestions when I get back. Most of these came in repeatedly, including many suggestions that my “neurological disorder” theory might more easily be formulated as “of course George Bush was drinking again.”
– Of course Alberto Gonzales fired those attorneys for political reasons.
– Of course the White House emails were deliberately deleted.
– Of course more than two hundred thousand Iraqis were killed and more than a million displaced.
– Of course there were plans to suspend elections in the event of another terrorist attack.
– Of course Bush decided to invade Iraq in October, 2002.
– Of course the administration leaked important details of ongoing investigations by federal agencies before the completion of the investigation for purely politically expedient reasons, thus compromising the security of the cases, alerting accessories, and endangering Americans.
– Of course Whittington’s shooting involved a criminal coverup.
