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Every day I make dozens of decisions that shape the Free Press that lands on your doorstep and on your digital screen. Some days, hundreds of them.
What does our front page look like? Which stories top our website or lead our nightly newsletter? Those decisions are part of my job. So, too, are determinations on which stories we pursue and which we drop. If there are legal concerns with an article, those also land on my desk.
But among the countless decisions I make every day as editor, few are more fraught, it seems, than those involving our comics section.
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I was reminded of that reality again this week when our new-look comics page debuted Monday. We made the page easier to read and enjoy by increasing the size of each panel – and we also retired some longstanding strips.
The decision to give Beetle Bailey an honorary discharge was prompted, in part, by concerns voiced in the past about a brand of humour that was often seen as demeaning, rather than funny. In the case of Family Circus, I could riff on its longstanding gag by quipping, “not me.” But to be honest, the thinking was our readers had probably had enough of Billy’s wandering dotted-line meanderings.
There was another consideration at play, too. Our comics page comes at a cost, and this summer I had to make some cost-cutting decisions as the Free Press grapples with ongoing challenges in our industry and the impact of Facebook’s and Google’s decision to block news content on their platforms.
My goal in the exercise was to limit the impact financial cuts would have on readers, and to protect the capacity of our newsroom to deliver the journalism you deserve.
Cutting only a few comic strips while preserving our full-colour Saturday comic sections saves tens of thousands of dollars in fees to syndicates. Those savings might also allow us to add colour to the remaining daily comics in a bid to make the page look even better, so stay tuned.
Another cost-cutting decision earlier this summer saw the end of our Sunday e-edition. No other Canadian newspaper was producing an e-edition for a Sunday print edition no longer published. So again, I thought this was a prudent move — especially since all the content usually produced by our newsroom on a weekend can still be accessed on our website and in our NewsBreak app.
To be clear, I don’t like making decisions that take away comics some readers have enjoyed for decades, or that mark the end of a Sunday routine of flipping through e-edition pages.
However, I saw the flip side to those cost-cutting calculations today as nearly two dozen members of our newsroom gathered over the lunch hour to discuss how to cover the upcoming provincial election.
For years, the Free Press has been the only media outlet to staff the Manitoba Legislature every single day with not one, but two reporters. In the coming weeks, our newsroom will be the one with the most boots-on-the-ground reporting to give you everything you need to know to mark your ballot Oct. 3.
Given the choice between cutting comics or cutting journalistic capacity, I’d like to think you would have made the same decision in an age when delivering news you can trust matters more than ever.
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