Understanding the changes

Newspapers are going through an evolutionary period, and the end result

may not be encouraging for newsprint. The Internet has become a more and

more popular venue for aspiring cartoonists and even veteran cartoonists to

upload their cartoons.

Two factors have hit newspapers hard in recent years:

 ✓ The economy and its effect on advertising. Advertising is one of the

largest streams of income for newspapers, and without it they’re forced

to make big cutbacks, layoffs, and in some cases fold altogether.

 ✓ The generational shift to getting news from the Internet. This has had

a profound effect on newsprint, and not for the better. Although newspa-

pers have made the shift to the Internet, the operations are more scaled

down and pale in comparison to the print editions.

One problem with marketing online is that the traditional syndicate model

doesn’t work on the Internet like it does in newsprint. For example, newspa-

pers cater to and service individual markets, so a syndicate could take the

same comic feature and sell it to multiple newspapers. This worked because

the people in Denver weren’t reading the same newspaper that the people in

New Jersey were reading, so it didn’t matter that the same cartoon content ran

in each paper. The syndicate could essentially sell the same feature content

over and over again.

The Internet basically destroys this model. Unlike newspapers, which rep-

resent many markets across the country and throughout the world, the

Internet by comparison is one big market. Why would a newspaper’s Web

site pay for content that can seen by the same set of eyes elsewhere just by

clicking a button? The Internet puts access to almost every newspaper in the

world right at your fingertips.

The answer to this changing market is exclusivity. One comic feature is put

in one place and all readers must come to it, instead of the old syndicate way

of the cartoon going out to readers via their local paper. This model changes

the dynamic considerably and points to webcomics as an eventual successor

to traditional comic strips.