You know what was fun about being a newspaper editor? Well, from my 30 years leading newsrooms, I might say a lot of things, but today I’m thinking in particular of this: picking the comics.
Did you ever think of that? Somebody had to decide whether Dagwood Bumstead and Beetle Bailey would show up in your local newspaper – whether you would follow the travails of Mary Worth and Rex Morgan, M.D. – and that was part of my job. I got to pick what showed up on what we used to call “the funny pages.”
I bring this up today in the context of a new study that assesses what people consider to be news, and how that has changed over recent years. And while the comics certainly aren’t news, they’re part of the package that used to be delivered daily to virtually everybody, and that now touches far fewer people. The digital revolution has obliterated the shared experience of content that we all consumed – for better and for worse – and it has changed America.
The comic pages in our newspapers reflected our way of life, and a thoughtful editor would try to pick an array of comic strips and panels that would speak to the diversity of the newspaper audience – varied race and gender and economic capacity – along with some stuff that might just elicit a chuckle. Even if readers didn’t like what they read in the news columns, you’d figure they might feel better if they turned away from news of warfare and political strife to the next page, where they might find a familiar face from the world of Peanuts or Doonesbury.
Every now and then, we would do comics surveys, to find out if an editor’s hunches in picking the comics were on target with what readers liked. From that, you’d learn that some strips were really popular with a lot of people, and some appealed to only a few – but sometimes those few were so passionate that you wouldn’t dare cancel that strip. Mark Trail – outdoorsman, adventurer – was like that: He didn’t have all that many fans, but those who followed Mark Trail absolutely would not forgive an editor who pulled it from the pages and substituted something else. People tend to like what they know, anyway – that’s human nature – but I always wanted to offer something new and different, in part to draw in newer readers.
All this has changed. When I started in newspapering a half-century ago, 85 percent of American adults read newspapers; now, just one-quarter of us read news in print often or sometimes. Almost nine in 10 adults at least sometimes get news from a smartphone, a computer or a tablet. That news may be reported and edited by the people who produce that ink-on-crushed-trees product called a newspaper, but not many folks are going to seek out Hagar the Horrible or Garfield the self-satisfied cat online. They get lots of other entertainment there.
What’s more important, though, is that people still care about the news it. Pew Research Center has just released a study that found that nearly 8 in 10 Americans still say they follow the news at least some of the time, and 45 percent say they often seek out the news. What has changed is that people now don’t agree as much on what news is: It’s not whatever a group of editors decides to include in the newspaper, or what network producers air on an evening newscast; no, the definition of news has become more personal, and it’s based on consumers’ identities and interests.
And there’s the sense – growing in recent years – that the news people get, wherever it comes from, can’t be trusted. While people told the Pew researchers that they don’t want news to be “biased” or “opinionated,” more than half said it’s at least somewhat important that their news sources share their own political bias. I guess that means they don’t want biased news unless it’s biased in the direction they prefer.
Overall, then, it’s clear that people don’t always like the news, but they say they need it. And that’s got to be encouraging to journalists, and to the news organizations that are struggling to do their important work in an era when that is routinely challenged and disparaged from the very top of society.
Not so many people nowadays get their news nicely tempered, and its impact softened, by its delivery alongside Linus and Snoopy, Calvin and Hobbes and The Phantom. But citizens need to know the news – however it reaches us. And if you’re among the 80 percent of Americans who follow the news, I urge you to support the outlets that deliver it to you – whether or not they come with “funny pages.” Donate to public media; subscribe to your trusted news sources. Because you need the news, and news organizations need you.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
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