The economics of newspaper comics pages

Cafe Society
1

Couldn’t decide whether this should be here or in GQ, but the question came to mind when I was responding to the Opus thread. Mods, do what you will.

What’s the deal with the cramped nature of newspaper comics pages - not just in the size of the individual strips, but in the limitations on the number of strips?

ISTM that most people read the comics pages, and I’m not talking just about little kids and old farts. And the best place to place ads is on pages that see a lot of readership. Given that there’s no intrinsic limit to how many pages are in a daily newspaper, why don’t newspapers have more pages of comics to sell ads on - and why don’t they have more ads on those pages in the first place? I’d think if you put comics that people liked on the top half of a newspaper page, you could sell serious display ads on the bottom half, and charge a better rate than in the back pages of the news section, where you see plenty of display ads now. (Or I see them on those days when I have time to read the interior of the front section, which is about half the time at best.)

But this doesn’t happen, and there must be a good reason why not. I’m sure we’ve got Dopers with actual experience in the news biz who can explain this one to me. Any volunteers?

Because if they could charge higher rates for ads on the funny pages, they’d have an incentive to have more funny pages - meaning more strips rather than fewer, and enlarged strips rather than shrunken drawings. And a reason for them to seek out new strips as well.

2

Interesting. I have no answers, I’d just like to see this in GQ because I think you may get a larger audience.

3

IIRC, one of the San Francisco papers (May have been the Examiner, when they were an afternoon paper that was actually sold) tried that some time ago, and the public outcry was horrifying, so they quickly abandoned the idea.

4

The smaller panels are because the newspapers both want to avoid giving up space without ads and want to put as many comics as possible on the pages.

If you look at old newspapers, you’ll see the comics were about twice what they are today. They also were often scattered around the paper instead of appearing on one page. If they went back to the scattering, the comics could be larger, but I doubt people would like it.

5

The point isn’t to scatter the comics (I’ve got enough problems already with having to dig Dilbert out of the business section) but to simply spread the comics over a longer series of consecutive pages, with more (presumably high-rent) space on each page for ads.

6

The point isn’t to scatter the comics (I’ve got enough problems already with having to dig Dilbert out of the business section) but to simply spread the comics over a longer series of consecutive pages, with more (presumably high-rent) space on each page for ads.

I agree that people wouldn’t like having to flip through more pages to see the same funnies, especially at first. But they’d get used to it, especially if it meant that there were more comic strips to read. And at least some of them would appreciate the bigger drawings with more detail. And if there was money to be made this way (which is my hypothesis), the newspaper would have reason to weather the storm.

To soften the blow, newspapers could group their strips by their likely audiences, with all the old-fart comic strips such as Beetle Bailey, Blondie, Shoe, Born Loser, etc. grouped together on a page or two, with more up-to-date stuff like Boondocks, Get Fuzzy, and Pearls Before Swine a page or two away so that the old farts wouldn’t even have to look at them.

7

It might be hard to sell ad space on the same page as Rex Morgan, MD or Mark Trail

8

Shrinking comics has been a gradual problem for decades. Charles Schulz and Johnny Hart made it a selling point in their early days that their strips were designed to be run at a tiny size.

I work for a newspaper that stays exactly 24 (tabloid) pages every day. Editors won’t surrender a print inch that they don’t have to.

9

I make it a point to NOT shop at stores that advertise by wrapping their ads around the Sunday comics.

10

Typically I read the newspaper while eating breakfast before work… I imagine if I’m like anyone else, most people probably don’t devote a lot of time to reading everything in the paper in depth. Too many comics, regardless of ads, would make a bulkier paper to carry around overall and make it take longer to read what’s there (or decide which ones you do and don’t want to read.) I would guess that over time they’ve just figured out what works best for them… or they could just be comic-hating stupidheads. Who knows?

11

How much does it cost for a newspaper to buy a typical strip? And how do they figure out how much a given strip is worth? Does Johnny Hart’s livelyhood really depend on the notion that people are buying newspapers just to read B.C.? Has any paper’s circulation ever dropped signifigantly after dumping a popular strip?

12

–Less than $10 per day per strip. Maybe a lot less. And the cartoonists see about a quarter of that. Big city dailies pay more than local Pennysavers, but not a lot more. According to Berke Breathed, the break-even point is, get it run in 40 papers. Frank Cho, about a year into Liberty Meadows, told me that he was in 35 papers, but a lot of them were big papers like The Washington Post and Detroit Free Press, so he was more than breaking even.

–It’s rare for one strip to make or break a newspaper’s circulation (and B.C. hasn’t been a contender in about 40 years), but if you’re in a two newspaper town and one paper has all the cool strips, that’s bad news for the other paper.

In 1979, The Evening Star (Washington, DC’s largest paper that wasn’t the Post) snagged the rights to Doonesbury. The Post lost a couple thousand subscribers over that, including my father. Ultimately, the Star went out of business and the Post got Doonesbury back (although it went on a really long hiatus almost immediately afterwards). I’m pretty sure Doonesbury and Calvin & Hobbes involve(d) something better than the standard contract.

13

What makes you think that putting ads on the funny pages will result in larger comics? The Cleveland Plain Dealer has been putting ads in the comics for years now, with the result that the comics are now crammed even smaller to make room for the ads.

14

I work at the paper, but don’t have much input on the original question. One thing I’ve definitely noticed, however, is that any change in the paper will be met with incredible vituperation for a short time, and then people will totally forget it was ever different.

About two years ago we went from our old standard paper width to one that’s about two inches narrower (about one inch narrower when folded, of course). You’d have thought we’d run F* GOD** on the front page; people were outraged. People threatened to cancel their subscriptions, get their news on-line or from TV, anything but read this pathetic excuse for journalism. I’m not exaggerating this a bit.

And then after a week or two, they stopped. They got used to it, and I’m sure that today if we switched back to the wider paper we’d get equally furious letters again.

Oh, and lawoot, how do you expect the Sunday comics to be paid for without ads? Most of those pages are ad-free, plus they’re in color, which is more expensive to print. The Sunday paper is more expensive, but the extra charge for the paper mostly pays for distribution (Sunday paper is bigger, heavier, bulkier).

Sorry to hijack.

15

Maybe it’s just my slacker lifestyle, but I can’t believe are arguing against having more comics in the paper.

16

As an editor/reporter at a small daily newspaper with an interest in comics, I’ll just rephrase the Heinlein quotation that whenever the question is “Why don’t they…?” the answer is “Money.”

As RealityChuck pointed out above, in the early days, comics were scattered in random pages where room was available. But when I look through our bound volumes from the 1920s and even early 1930s, the paper carried only one or two comics. Also, the comics were larger because (A) the pages were much wider. In the earliest days, our paper was an 8-column “bedsheet.” and (B) the paper ran them many columns wider, sometimes across the width of the page.

When standard broadsheet papers went to a six-column format and then decided to shrink the comics to get more of them on a single page, they came up against the limits of the format. If you start with a six-column-wide comic, it doesn’t make sense to shrink it to five columns, because that would leave you with an awkward vertical single column. It would be possible to shrink them to four columns, leaving two columns to be filled with crossword puzzles and panel cartoons, but the likeliest solution is to shrink the comic to three columns. Then you get the standard two rows and fill the page up solidly. (In the case of Doonesbury, which is strong enough to insist on a four-column minimum, some papers run it on the op-ed page, and others pair it with a panel cartoon or some other two-column element).

The most recent development is the shrinking of the page itself, as jackelope alluded to above. For years, the standard broadsheet paper (as opposed to a tabloid) was defined by the SAU or “Standard Advertising Unit” which was based on a 14-inch-wide page. In the last few years, the growing trend has been to convert to a newer, skinnier format.

The reason? Newsprint costs.
That’s a lot more relevant at the larger papers. Our state’s dominant daily has a Sunday circulation of 425,000 for a paper of perhaps 150 pages. Trim an inch from each page, and it doesn’t take long to see significant savings.

And once the big boys convert, the ad agencies start to design ads in the new narrower dimension. If your paper hasn’t changed, and an ad comes in in the new narrower width, the editor must either “float” it, by centerting it between existing column dimensions, which surrounds it with white space, or increase the size of the ad to the proper width, which also stretches the height proportionately, and the advertizer gets more inches than are paid for.

For that reason — and because smaller papers like to save money on newsprint costs, too — more and more papers are converting to the narrower width and shrinking the comics even more.

Sorry for the longwinded post; it’s a subject near and dear to my heart.

17

IIRC, the circulation for the South China Morning Post dropped 10-12% (about 60,000 copies) during the week long period in which they removed Calvin & Hobbes. Circulation bounced back to normal once the comic was reinstated.