According to Poynter, Cleveland Plain Dealer readers complained loudly after the paper pulled a rather benign Non Sequitur last Friday. Readers sent in letters to the editor and posted “175 comments on former columnist Connie Schultz’s Facebook page.”
Poynter asked Universal Uclick President Lee Salem how often features are dropped and what impact they have.
Lee Salem agrees. The president and editor of Universal Uclick, which syndicates Non Sequitur and other comics, said by email that pulling a strip is “a very rare occurrence (I scratched my head over that move), made more complicated for newspapers because the strip in question is so easily available from online sources. In many cases, the pulling of a strip or sequence just draws more attention to it.”