Three readers called or emailed today to take issue with the Wednesday “Meaning of Lila” comic strip in which the Boyd character is referred to as gay by another man. One reader termed this “sickening,” and another cited it as an example of The Eagle “sanctioning this social conditioning.”
I’m not a regular reader of the Lila comic, but I do read it occasionally. What’s clear in the trio of complaints today is these are not regular Lila readers either - past Lila comic strips have made clear that Lila’s friend Boyd was gay, so these are obviously readers who stumbled into this comic strip Wednesday, or who had someone point it out to them.
One challenge of newspaper comics pages is offering comics that appeal to a wide range of readers. Newspapers have worked over the years to find new comics that will interest younger readers who don’t see some older comics as representative of their lives.
In publishing the Lila strip, the newspaper isn’t making a social commentary on what anyone “should” do, contrary to one reader’s assertion. It’s simply acknowledging that for a great many readers, this reflects the reality of the friendships in their lives.
You can read the writer of the Lila comic discussing his viewpoint at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s letters page from June.
Also in the Inbox today is a new one in my 23 years of newspaper work. I have a letter and clipping sent to me from a reader complaining that there’s less in the paper these days. The example she mailed that upset her is a day when we had only a handful of obituaries in the paper, and she apparently wanted more.
All I can say is that there’s only so far I can go to make readers happy. I’ll have to stop short of making new obituaries.
2 Comments
But you’re not discounting her claim that there is, in fact, less content in the newspaper these days? And not just at The Eagle, but at newspapers all around the country? I find it interesting the spin that some newspaper executives (not necessarily yourself, this is a commentary on the industry as a whole) use to say their products aren’t diminished despite catastrophic job eliminations in newsrooms all across the country (the Tribune Company, anyone?). That aside, I have to give you some credit. You can’t make everyone happy and not that you should. But in this business, the only feedback you get, for the most part, is that of complaint. There will always be someone to tell you how to do your job. Usually, I’d guess, they have no idea what they’re talking about.
mcs, No, I certainly would not make the argument that the reductions in staff and news space that have happened here and at just about every newspaper in the country are not felt in the newspaper. I would make a other arguments, of course: that there are few places to get the volume of local news for the low cost (50 cents per day) that a newspaper offers, that we’ve worked very hard to keep cost reductions from impacting our core mission of covering local news, and that if newspapers continue to struggle financially, communities will be worse off for it. But I won’t pretend that the economic environment of the industry hasn’t impacted the paper. (And yes, there are a lot of people who are pretty sure they know how to do the editor’s job, and do it better. I take that as a good sign that people care enough about their local newspaper to take the time to fuss at us. I think I’d be more worried if the complaints stopped. But as always, good comments are welcome, too.)