The paper-based syndicates are gonna die!

[elfs]

This morning I tried to share with you a comic strip called Baby Blues, a banal but cute strip, inoffensive to most readers, that appears in thousands of newspapers nationwide. The problem with doing so is that today's strip is neither archived nor hotlinkable; tomorrow, you won't be able to reference the strip I wanted you to see. You'll get a different strip, tomorrow's strip.

It is not news that newspapers are dying, suffering the biggest revenue drop ever in their history in 2007. We all know why-- the rise of the news aggregator, the reader-enabled network, RSS newsfeeds and RSS-enabled browsers like Firefox or Thunderbird, make getting your news easier and more efficient than the newspaper ever was.

But the comic strip syndicates are gonna die early, and the reason for that should be obvious: webcomics are simply eating their audience's temporal bandwidth as a light snack. And webcomics, because they're beholden to no one but their audience, have stronger storylines and better development than these cheap one-shot half-grins. Unlike news, comic strips are meant to entertain; there's no requirement to gather reportage, so the means of production have already fallen into the web's collective paws. The syndicates are well and truly doomed.

Go read Questionable Content for an example.

Comments

[featheredfrog.livejournal.com]

There is an archive, and you'll be able to link to it in two weeks. The blackout is to allow all the papers have an exclusive right to it. THAT is left over from the early syndicate/newspaper interactions where the newspaper wouldn't take on a strip unless it was exclusive to that paper in that market.

[rhonan.livejournal.com]

Another advantage that web comics have is that they do not force the artist to appeal to a wide demographic. XKCD only appeals to a narrow demographic of computer geeks and science nerds, but we like it a lot. The other big weakness print has is that it has to avoid offending readers more than it needs to amuse them. Boondocks may have a large enough readership to be able to get away with being controversial, but that still makes editors sweat when the artist lets fly. It also keeps the strip out of a lot of papers.

[lucky-otter.livejournal.com]

If you want to link to a specific Baby Blues comic, note that they don't check POST vs. GET:
http://www.babyblues.com/index.php?date=2008-03-21

It also appears that older comics, not in the drop-down, are accessible:
http://www.babyblues.com/index.php?date=2006-03-21

But yes: webcomics will win. And ultimately, customizable taste-learning news feeds, such as can be generated with reddit, will probably eat the newspapers' lunch.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the hack. That's such a giggle. I've made that mistake, but I've always fixed it after it's been found, too!

[katybeth]

Or go to a newspaper:
http://www.chron.com/apps/comics/showComick.mpl?date=20080324&name=Baby_Blues

[abostick59.livejournal.com]

It ain't RSS aggregators that are killing print newspapers; it's Craig's List (and Match.com, Cars.com, Monster.com, etc.). The classified ads, which used to be a substantial revenue source and were what many people bought and read the paper for, have been deeply undercut by online alternatives.

Loss of eyeballs is ungood for newspapers; but loss of revenue streams is double-plus-ungood.