Sunday, December 06, 2009

TFP cheats readers, and others, again

With circulation dwindling (gee, I wonder why) and, thus, income and profits, publishers of "news" papers cut every corner and finagle every way they can.
One way the TFP publishers have found is to compress the funnies and slap some advertising onto the "extra" space.
Never mind that making them smaller makes them harder to read, and never mind that certain cartoonists, such as "Doonesbury" artist Garry Trudeau, even have contracts mandating a certain size, half of the front page of the Sunday funnies of 6 December is devoted to an ad for a satellite TV service (with a bargain rate of $19.99 for "over 120 channels") and the entire back page is an ad for a heater.
Never mind, too, that, as often stated here, the funnies are not only the best feature on this or any paper, often they are the only readable part, especially in this paper.
The number of strips has been cut over the years, with budget constraints and retirements ("Fox Trot" and "For Better Or Worse," for example), but this compression is really an insult.

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