Tuesday, February 03, 2009
Disappeared Comics – 2/3/2009
by Larry Geller
In December the Advertiser skipped printing the paper one day, so Disappeared News stepped in with links to the omitted comics. Well, today, they re-ran Monday’s comics. So here we go again.
You’d think someone would notice. For me, the comics are part of why I subscribe. Anyway, I called the Advertiser customer service, first because my paper wasn’t delivered today, a second time to ask if they plan to print an extra comics page tomorrow. No plans.
Strange, the paper is shrinking, good staff have been let go, several features have been dropped, they might save money if they don’t run today’s comics tomorrow…but the subscription price hasn’t changed—my bill still asks for $203.
At least we still have a paper, some parts of the country are losing their dailies. But as the Advertiser continues to shrink, it also is losing quality, and at what point does it pay to just read your comics on the web?
I asked the customer service person if people were calling about the comics, and indeed they were, she said.
One of my friends cancelled his subscription because the TV listings were gone. Let’s see if they care about us, or if we take second place to the advertisers.
It’s not like the paper has no space to run an omitted comics page. This ran yesterday. It’s a full-page ad for themselves.
Back to production issues. On some papers you can tell when the one person doing the copy editing is sick—suddenly the continuation jumps don’t work, typos increase and things get sloppy. Due to modern computer technology, we actually expect higher quality than we got in the olden days. I’d hate to go back to reading a typo-ridden paper. It shouldn’t happen.
So what’s happening at the Advertiser?? I noticed a classified ad that got messed up a day or two ago. Not important. Then there was this, last Wednesday:
Can you find the missing letters? They are there.
Then there’s this in Sunday’s Travel section. A big, glaring misspelling.
No, none of this really matters, and there are probably more typos lurking, waiting to be discovered by anyone who still cares.
Today they reprinted yesterday’s comics. When does it begin to matter? When do they reduce the subscription price because we’re getting less? (Ha!) Will the Advertiser survive? We really need them, and not just for comics.
Oh, sometimes there are funny juxtapositions, not really related to the topic of this article, but where else can I put them? How about the ambiguously worded headlines, many of which come from the wire services, but still… I love when this happens.
Ok, who was playing tricks on Lingle? No one knew…
Unless you spied this article after the above. It seems to provide the answer:
Aha! So it was Palin, now we know. Or someone in her office, anyway. Ok, I’m not as funny as David Shapiro. But I thought the above was amusing. Maybe it’s a former copy editor thing.
When I was a copy editor of the college newspaper I was suitably chastised when I goofed or something funny got through, so I think it’s only fair to give back. Quality is still important.
And so are comics.
Post a Comment
Requiring those Captcha codes at least temporarily, in the hopes that it quells the flood of comment spam I've been receiving.