Happy New Year. The newsroom looks different today. Vacations are over. There aren’t random tins of brownies on every filing cabinet. And of course it feels like spring out there. With all the holiday comings and goings, some of you may have missed the news this past weekend about changes to our comics pages. Peanuts is back. Doonesbury is back (after a hiatus of around 15 years). Lio has moved. Over the Hedge is gone. FoxTrot is gone.
The impetus for this change was the decision by FoxTrot creator Bill Amend to change his schedule and just publish FoxTrot for Sunday. It’s hard to blame him. Cartooning is tough work. Seems easy. You get paid to draw cartoons? Just three little windows a day? But it’s a grind, and with all the calendars and collections of the best of FoxTrot that have been published, Amend doesn’t need the money at this point.
Peanuts and Doonesbury were natural choices. The reason: readers wanted them. We got rid of them for very different reasons. It’s tempting to say that the reinstatements are an admission of our error in the first place when we dropped them. Maybe. But I think there’s something larger—and hopefully better—at play. I still firmly believe that it wasn’t a mistake to drop Peanuts after Charles Schulz died. It was based on sound reasoning, and the idea that cartooning is a living art. That was the prevailing view of the other senior editors here. Enough readers thought otherwise, so Snoopy is back. It’s OK to try new things. If they don’t work. Try something else or go back to the old way.
I view the comics page as the menu at family restaurant.. You don’t have to like everything in there, but you ought to be able to get a good meal. Maybe not the chicken livers, but certainly country-fried steak or the spaghetti.
Your host is Ken Otterbourg, the managing editor at the Winston-Salem Journal. It's a forum to discuss the media, from
So drawing a daily cartoon is hard work. Too bad. Drop the slackers. Charles Schultz did it for years. So would “we were wrong” be a bad things, Ken? Oh, but then you’d have to admit, you goofed, which sounds too “breathless” for this blog, right? Give ‘em what they need not what they want.
I think you’re missing the point here. As I noted, there’s a component that it was a mistake for us to drop Peanuts, but the larger issue is more subtle. I have no problems with apologies or apologizing (You do it quite often in this job.). We made the decision to drop Peanuts for sound reasons. Many readers disagreed. They think it was a mistake and wanted us to bring it back. I can—and do—agree with their recommendation without necessarily accepting their reasoning and version of events. This sounds hypocritical, but it isn’t. People are motivated by different things, and restoring Peanuts made sense in terms of our entire comics page. Were we wrong to drop Peanuts? Again, maybe. Would we be wrong not to bring it back given this opportunity? Yes.
Once again, it feels like I’ve walked into a personal kerfuffle. (I’m just glad to know I’m not the only local blogger who riles people seemingly effortlessly.)
My only thought when I read this was that you skipped breakie this morning. Food comes up twice in four paragraphs that aren’t actually about food.
Happy New Year, Ken and Helen!
I never read the comics. Never have. Never will. Am I missing something here? People get awfully upset about any change to the comic pages. Too bad they can’t channel that energy into something that matters.
I never skip any meals.
You guys ran some article on “Peanuts” not too long ago talking about how legendary the comic is. However, you’re stupid enough to stop running it? The single, most popular, most important comic strip ever created and you geniuses drop it....and you wonder why circulation keeps dropping. Just another example of you crazy liberals running our hometown paper into the ground and alienating your core readership. Nice going, fellas.
All this fuss over the funny papers. Good grief, indeed.
Would you care to remind us why you ended your relationship with Doonesbury all those years ago?
Bill. Good question. (And by the way, I am sorry for all the spam. Our technical folks are working on it.) Doonesbury left the paper about 15 years ago at a different time and place. It was in essence a confluence of events. First, was the whole Mr. Butts episode, which was a story line involving a cigarette. That didn’t play well here for obvious reasons. Second was a story line involving Dan Quayle that alleged some drug use if my memory serves correctly. There was some question about the paper’s legal liability if the strip was considered libelous. I was a reporter then and not involved in the decision making. But I am glad the strip is back. It is not the Doonesbury strip that left here all those years ago. It is more mature, wiser and world weary. It is less reflexively liberal.
Hello there! I am not sure where else to post this so I will drop it here and hope someone that can solve this problem will see it.
I live in Winston and buy your Sunday paper every week. I buy the paper for the coupons as I find my fill of news online. Now, for the past several Sundays, I have been missing most, if not all of my coupons. Even when I buy the paper inside a store, they are missing. So what is a gal to do?? I have called you guys and after 2 calls, a wonderful woman sent me replacement coupons from last week. Then this Sunday, bam… no coupons again!! What is happening?? Why can’t you guys get the coupons right?? I fear I will have to just buy the Greensboro paper, which really sucks b/c it isn’t you guys. But what other choice do I have???
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