Mr. Breathed must be sitting at home giggling his head off.
For years, syndicated cartoonists have been complaining about how newspapers treat the funnies. Berkley Breathed is one of the leading complainers.
The primary concern is two pronged. The first prong revolves around the fact that newspapers have routinely shrunk the number of funnines in favor of bigger pages on weather and tv listings as well as more advertisers. The other prong is that newspapers have shrunk the funnies themselves - making them smaller takes up less real estate in the paper, which makes the cartoon harder to read and gives more room for obituaries - one of the most popular features in a media who's demographic continues to age.
A newspaper must be printed and delivered. This costs money. The cheaper you can do that, the more money you make. However, out on the Internet, there is no printing or delivery costs. Sure, bandwidth costs money, but that decreases with time as well.
So, I go out and look at this strip and I am met with one glaring newspaper constant: I can't read the damn thing! I pressed my nose up against my monitor and I could just make out what the silly thing said. It's as if the Washington Post JUST DOESN'T GET IT!
Yeah, bandwidth costs money, the hardware to host and serve this material costs money, but, this strip is less than 100k in size. Tiny.
IrateWeirdos.com pays $25 a year for 1 Gigabyte of throughput a month, plus our domain registration and hosting. Even if we said the $25 was just for throughput, that's about $2.08 a Gigabyte. This means I could serve a 100k comic strip to 5,000 people for about a penny. I would be willing to deliver a 200k strip to 5,000 people for 2 cents if it improved readability. I would hope that the Washington Post could get a better deal on bandwidth than IWDC.
The point is that I don't have any trouble reading most on-line strips. Take for example one of my favs, Questionable Content (totally work safe, btw) - todays strip at 112k has much more text, is far larger and is completely easy to read. QC uses .png for compression and the WP uses .gif, which might account for the difference in size. I have no problem with that, .gif is old tech. How is it that a free comic is doing a better job than a major news paper?
The newspapers and current media outlets have to come to grips with the fact that their demographic is changing. If these media outlets can't keep up their quality, the online strippers, bloggists and cell phone photo journalists are going to drown them in a wave of a genuine FREE press.
Were you wearing your glasses? It is only just barely readable, but readable none the less, on my screen.
Newspapers, like most corporate beasts, go where they think the money is. They may be incorrect in where they think that is, but money is their magnetic north
2 Comments:
Mr. Breathed must be sitting at home giggling his head off.
For years, syndicated cartoonists have been complaining about how newspapers treat the funnies. Berkley Breathed is one of the leading complainers.
The primary concern is two pronged. The first prong revolves around the fact that newspapers have routinely shrunk the number of funnines in favor of bigger pages on weather and tv listings as well as more advertisers. The other prong is that newspapers have shrunk the funnies themselves - making them smaller takes up less real estate in the paper, which makes the cartoon harder to read and gives more room for obituaries - one of the most popular features in a media who's demographic continues to age.
A newspaper must be printed and delivered. This costs money. The cheaper you can do that, the more money you make. However, out on the Internet, there is no printing or delivery costs. Sure, bandwidth costs money, but that decreases with time as well.
So, I go out and look at this strip and I am met with one glaring newspaper constant: I can't read the damn thing! I pressed my nose up against my monitor and I could just make out what the silly thing said. It's as if the Washington Post JUST DOESN'T GET IT!
Yeah, bandwidth costs money, the hardware to host and serve this material costs money, but, this strip is less than 100k in size. Tiny.
IrateWeirdos.com pays $25 a year for 1 Gigabyte of throughput a month, plus our domain registration and hosting. Even if we said the $25 was just for throughput, that's about $2.08 a Gigabyte. This means I could serve a 100k comic strip to 5,000 people for about a penny. I would be willing to deliver a 200k strip to 5,000 people for 2 cents if it improved readability. I would hope that the Washington Post could get a better deal on bandwidth than IWDC.
The point is that I don't have any trouble reading most on-line strips. Take for example one of my favs, Questionable Content (totally work safe, btw) - todays strip at 112k has much more text, is far larger and is completely easy to read. QC uses .png for compression and the WP uses .gif, which might account for the difference in size. I have no problem with that, .gif is old tech. How is it that a free comic is doing a better job than a major news paper?
The newspapers and current media outlets have to come to grips with the fact that their demographic is changing. If these media outlets can't keep up their quality, the online strippers, bloggists and cell phone photo journalists are going to drown them in a wave of a genuine FREE press.
Were you wearing your glasses? It is only just barely readable, but readable none the less, on my screen.
Newspapers, like most corporate beasts, go where they think the money is. They may be incorrect in where they think that is, but money is their magnetic north
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