Comic strips

News Corp Australia consolidates all of their comics pages

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Alan Gardner August 20, 2013 1 minute 3 comments

News Corp Australia used to allow their local editors to select their own comics. That changed recently when News Corp consolidated all comic pages to a single national page. According to The Feed, many Aussie comic strips were lost in favor of cheaper U.S. comics (citing Fred Bassett, The Phantom and Garfield as examples) took their place.

To understand how big this is, one needs to look at how many papers News Corp Australia controls. The Prime Minister (on a completely unrelated issue) claimed the chain had 70% of Australian newspapers. Pundits sliced and diced the claim and came up with several different views. Looking at only newspaper titles, News Corp is 23%; if sliced by newspapers audited by circulation (Audit Bureau of Circulation) it jumps to 33% (circulation typically sets a comic strip’s pricing); if you look at purely sales News Corp newspapers account for 59%.

Either way, this is a huge shift for those cartoonists down under. Ginger Meggs cartoonist Jason Chatfield and Squishface Studio founder David Blumenstein are quoted in The Feed story.