The Opposite of Wrong » newspapers

Is the LA Times trashy?

Donna Barstow — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 02:44:02 +0000

I get the paper (4 days a week) but I don’t check it first thing. So I was shocked when my friend Bruce told me he cancelled the Los Angeles Times today. He’s one of only a couple of friends who still get the paper! Oh, no! We can’t exchange complaints and info!

I asked him why, and he said “Johnny Depp is on the front page.”

“I don’t understand. I don’t like him either, but…”

“No, his face was all over the front page. They did this once before, and it just makes the paper look so trashy.”

I had no idea what he meant, but I wanted to tell him about a trashy editor of a woman’s magazine who had been so rude to me today, so we changed the topic.

Now I just heard John and Ken on KFI talking about the same thing! I ran to get the paper out of the plastic bag, and, um, it does look pretty bad. It’s a fake front page, with a hideous photo of Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter in the new release of Alice in Wonderland. (Does Johnny Depp have a big space between his teeth? Euwww. His hair is wild orange like Carrot Top.)

The photo and the ad, all in color, covers the entire front page, except for a few paragraphs on either side and the top pretend masthead. It really looks like the front page – they call it a cover-wrap.

Unattractive, but this is an industry town. I’m not offended.

Oh My Gah, I just saw that the NY Times reported on this!

The top editor of The Times, Russ Stanton, and several of his deputies vigorously opposed the ad before it was published, but they were overruled by the paper’s business executives, according to people with direct knowledge of the dispute, who were granted anonymity to discuss private conversations.

John Conroy, a spokesman for The Times, said, “Stretching the boundaries was what we were going for.” He said Eddy W. Hartenstein, the publisher and chief executive, and other executives would not comment.

Mr. Conroy noted that however unorthodox the ad may be for print, it mirrors a common practice online of having an ad cover part or all of a Web site’s home page for a few seconds.

Well, that’s true.

The “Alice in Wonderland” ad, which also wraps around the paper, introduces a new wrinkle, lending the name and work of The Times to an advertiser.

Oh, fun, the LA Times is spinning this as a creative success story!

Timed to coincide with the release of the highly-anticipated “Alice in Wonderland,” starring Johnny Depp, The Times is the only major newspaper in the country to carry the innovative ad unit, conceived to launch the film in the most creative and unexpected manner to Southern California’s key movie-going audiences and creative community.

No, I’m not going to make a dumb joke about the Times going down the rabbit hole. Unh unh.

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People who don’t read a newspaper are dull.

Donna Barstow — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 13:00:53 +0000

One of the sites that I never go to -oh, perhaps once every couple months, if I must – is Huffington Post. Or as I call it, PuffPost. I remember when it started – Arianna Huffington had parties out here, got bloggers together. But it was super-liberal, so I never paid much attention to it.

All they do is rewrite real journalists, or use the news verbatim published elsewhere, and slap a provocative (and usually misleading) title on it. Now PuffPo has gone local, with a Los Angeles subsection. Watch out, LA Times, for plagiarism and attribution without links.

But the part I take personally is that they don’t pay anyone!! They are the biggest blog in the country now, if not the world, run by one of the richest women. Check out this article in the LA Times. Arianna Huffington is quoted:

Huffington said ads will run on the site, and the Huffington Post and Causecast will split the ad revenue. Any money donated to any cause goes directly to the cause, with nothing coming out of it.

Her site continues to expand, reinvesting its proceeds in the product. “We’ve had a very, very good advertising year,” she said. “We would be in the black if we were not expanding. Whether you are profitable or not depends whether you’re standing still or expanding. This is a window we need to take advantage of.”

The article is about how the PuffPost is adding a bunch of news about causes, called Impact, because they’re so liberal and they want to help. Well, wanting to help is a good thing. Yet…her own writers and worker bees get NOTHING, NO MONEY, in their best year yet! Yet she wants them to donate from their non-existent wages. This doesn’t sound liberal to me, it sounds like a medieval caste system. Ugh, PuffPo is pathetic.

It’s been a cliche for a few years now – everyone online loves to write how they never read a real newspaper anymore. Like this is something rare, unusual, and quite cool. They have Twitter, all the news websites, social media, etc, and newspapers are dead. Um, yeah, right.I’ve been doing Slate editorial cartoons for a year now, and most of my best ideas still come from the hardcopy newspaper. I get the LA Times delivered Thurs, Fri, Sat and Sun, for some very low price. (I miss the Weds food, though!) Newspapers are dirty, and take space in an apartment, and aren’t as much fun as a book or TV. But damned if I don’t find interesting, important, informative info that I really need and enjoy, all the time.

I’m all for saving time and taking shortcuts. And when I don’t have an idea for my next Slate cartoon, I cruise right on over to the New York Times, Washington Post, and usually, but not always, the LA Times.

But papers are better. Since I now mine news both online and in the paper, I’ve decided that reading the hardcopy paper is like getting a Bachelor of Arts degree instead of a Bachelor of Science – it makes for a more well-rounded, educated, interesting person!

This site, Compete, says Huff Post got particularly big after the 2008 election.

Site design and architecture likely factor into this widening gap, as sites like DailyKos and Crooks and Liars post their content in-full on the landing page, where the Huffington Post requires a few more clicks to read complete articles.

A commenter there had a GREAT point:

The Huffington Post employs some smart guys who know how to milk the Big-G. They create pages with great titles which are hot in the news, and then inside, there’s just a photo and a link to an article on the subject from the AP or some other MSM paper. (my bold) Plus, they’re heavily focused on celebrity pics and entertainment. So you can’t really compare HuffPo to the other liberal blogs.

That undelivered promise was going to be my point, but thanks for writing it up! This is a major reason why I despise the PuffPost, and pity the fool bloggers who keep quoting from it: It seems like almost every “article” there is a lifted photo, with no link, a ridiculous title, then a link to a real newspaper, where they get the actual facts, (If you’re lucky! Recently I’ve been seeing news stories with no link at all! Thieves!) and then the writer adds some lame, uninformed opinion, or, worse, a pathetic try at humor. I have never gotten any original news or even a new point of view from PuffPost.

The problem with online is you always have to be specific and drill down. Everytime you pick one thing, you miss all the rest. Sure, you can get your movie reviews, stocks, tech news, science, whatever grabs you. But you never see the entire paper that way, and it’s dissected like an unfortunate frog.

I’m constantly running into odd little items in the paper that I wouldn’t see taking the online, laser beam route. New analysis, in depth investigations (like the one I recently did about poor Mr. Broom) and other stuff that is too tedious to read online (ie, longer than 3 paragraphs). Crimes and mysteries are my secret indulgence. But I don’t want to go to those weird creepy sites like News of the Weird – I want the LA Times to vet things, clean things up. And I like the entertainment business news – I even got Slate to start a section of Entertainment cartoons that they never had before!

Huffington Post, eat it.

Cartoon caption: “You’ll start a great knitting blog, but Arianna Huffington will find it, and squish it.” This was my very first cartoon for Double X, Slate’s sister site!

And I haven’t done any knitting for the longest time, but I love it, and I have a pattern for a rug in mind, once I get time. And find the right color yarn.

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How many minority and women cartoonists are in the LA Times?

Donna Barstow — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 11:21:18 +0000

I wrote the post below last February in my Griffith Park Blog. It’s a popular post, so I thought cartoon people would like to take a look at it here. I update it below.

I just couldn’t believe this article in the LA Times and many other papers today.

But for one day — this Sunday — nearly a dozen cartoonists of color will be drawing essentially the same comic strip, using irony to literally illustrate that point. In each strip, the artists will portray a white reader grousing about a minority-drawn strip, complaining that it’s a “Boondocks” rip-off and blaming it on “tokenism.” “It’s the one-minority rule,” says Lalo Alcaraz (”La Cucaracha”). “We’ve got one black guy and we’ve got one Latino. There’s not room for anything else.”

Blondie comic book cover

Let’s respect syndicates like King Features for not allowing registered and copyrighted characters and cartoons to be uploaded, I really do, but it makes my life as a comic reporter much harder. However, came across this blogger who has some very cool comic book covers for you to ogle and enjoy. Blondie is written and drawn by two men, bless their hearts.
Or, as Darrin Bell says in Tampa Bay here:

Cartoonist Darrin Bell likes to call it the “two strip rule.”

It’s the trend he’s noticed while pitching his syndicated comic strip Candorville to newspapers across the country. Most newspapers, it seems, will make room for only two strips drawn by people of color, no matter the subject.

It does seem a little unfair, although the Times goes on to point out:

Still, others argue that it’s not that simple. For one, there are demographics to consider, says Rick Newcombe, chief executive of Creators Syndicate, (Hi, Rick!) which syndicates “B.C.,” “Herb and Jamaal,” “Working It Out” and “Cafe con Leche.”

“In defense of newspaper editors,” says Newcombe, “it’s only natural to buy [comic strips] according to categories. You might have one according to sports, or one according to office etiquette or work.

And some other syndicate editors remind us if one strip is picked up, another is dropped, the paper business is hard, yada, yada.

Immediately, I go to the LA Times to count strips (as if I haven’t done this before.) Hmm, the LA Times has three strips by cartoonists of color! The Times is ahead of the game!

And how about cartoons by women? Let’s see…two. Two strips by women, For Better or For Worse, and Cathy. Huh. Of course, there are several strips ABOUT women, but apparently women weren’t able to draw or write them. That’s peculiar…

9 Chickweed Lane – by Brooke McEldowney, a man with a girl’s name.
Sally Forth – by two men. You know, to get a woman’s “voice” just right.
Blondie – by two men. But they’re very sensitive men, I’m sure…

A dozen minority (men) cartoonists, but I can’t think of even 10 syndicated women, and this is my business. Oh, dear, [slap upside the head], how did I forget Six Chix, by King Features? It’s not in the Times, but it’s in Daily News, so, in close proximity. King Features, the syndicate that figured one woman couldn’t “carry” a panel by herself, so it takes 6 (as in Six Chix) women, all patched and stitched together, to make some kind of funny impact.

Did I make my point yet?

UPDATED TODAY!

Hmm. Nothing has changed. Oh, For Better or For Worse is on hiatus, or retirement, or retreads, whatever they’re calling it now, so they are testing Between Friends, by Sandra Bell-Lundy for a few months. So, still only 2 women, 3 cartoonists of color (see, they can’t say minority cartoonists, because that would INCLUDE women). So cartoonists of color have more power and influence.

Say, that’s just how our recent election worked out, too!

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I need to frequent more bars.

Donna Barstow — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 06:30:33 +0000

Happy Hour Bar & Grill cartoon - Happiest Damn Place on Earth

The Idea

This is from my self-syndicated series, Daily Special. It ran in the LA Times for almost 5 years, and I slowly expanded it to reach a dozen other major newspapers (like the award-winning Minneapolis Taste section!) and alternates, like Nashville Scene. Daily Special is all about restaurants. Don’cha love them? I still think it’s a treat when I get to go out and be served a carefully configured meal with a smile. I stroke the lovely tablecloth, or get out markers to draw on the placemats, whichever seems more appropriate. Hopefully they’ll give us special restaurant bread, as we start drooling when we read the menus.

The Drawing

I was so nervous by the idea that hundreds of thousands of people would read me every week in the Times – including people I knew, some of whom were critical (Marty Murphy) some who were better! (Marty Murphy)- that I did the thing I know really well – signs! (went to sign school, did them in the studios.) Out of the 4 or 5 cartoons I did a month, one would just be a funny sign – without any people in the drawing. (Even though a person or stray dog adds some perspective to the size of a building or window.)

I fancied up the drawing by adding all the bricks here, and the little plants outside the bar. (I don’t go to bars very much, so had to imagine that part. I’ve never seen flowers outside a bar, but maybe in West Hollywood?)

My favorite drawings have minimal lines, so these details make it a worse drawing, I think. Gah.

Drawing theories aside, the idea is always most important, and one of my friends says it’s his favorite, and always makes him laugh! Thanks, Keith!

Newspapers

The great thing about doing cartoons for newspapers is that they pretty much leave you alone, although they do check on language. They trust you to know what’s funny, what’s appropriate, etc. They take what you hand them, because could they do it? No.

I did this one both with Damn and Darn on the window, in case any papers objected. The Times did, but the others, (including Salt Lake Tribune!) didn’t! Of course, damn is funnier. (The word damn is a little smeared because I was learning to use Photoshop Elements from scratch. Hell is learning new graphics programs over and over.)

Sometimes you just gotta draw it and send it out there, DAMN it.

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Dilbert isn’t funny anymore.

Donna Barstow — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 22:35:03 +0000

At least in the LA Times.

Hello, Dilbert, my old friend. (Can’t link to him on caption: http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/).

I know papers are trying to save money. The LA Times is laying off 150 more reporters this month. Really shameful. And haven’t I already been a victim from that?!

And so sometimes they shave a sliver off the page. I guess the columns just got skinnier, too, because a few months ago I noticed Dilbert, which runs in the Business section of the LA Times, was suddenly running vertically, instead of horizontally.

I think Dilbert is one of the funniest, if not the funniest, strips out there. Laugh out loud funny, which is rare for me. But I guess I can’t think in a North-South way, because I literally can’t understand it now. I keep looking at the shape, and then try to figure out the vertical action. ( It’s also compressed & distorted; I’m surprised you don’t have people throwing up when they try to read it, Times.) By the time I reach the bottom I forget what the premise was. And who wants to re-read a comic? This is not the way to showcase the biggest cartoonist in the US, editors.

A few years ago I was lucky enough to hear Wiley Miller, of Non-Sequiter, speak at a local cartoon group (CAPS). He was quite pleased with a solution he worked out with his syndicate. (He is really a single panel, but also draws as a rectangle to fit in with the other strips. I’m talking about his older stuff, before he had characters.) Many Sunday papers didn’t have enough room to run him on Sundays, so he told his syndicate, ok, he’d just draw the Sunday strip vertically, to squeeze into available space that way! You’ll have to decide for yourself if this works. Or if it’s funny.

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