I haven’t posted one of these polls in a while. The Las Vegas Review-Journal polled their readers to gauge popularity in their comics. Blondie (always a perennial favorite) takes the number one spot followed by Garfield and Family Circus. Of the top 10, Zits and Pickles are the youngest.
Full results over at their site.
The paper will be making changes in the near future. I suspect any features at the lower end (Doonesbury, Wumo, Over the Hedge) of the results are prime candidates for removal.
My guess is that their “reader panel” is just as unrepresentative of potential audience as whatever random group of people would have responded to an in-paper request for feedback.
Maybe a greater question in this perennial foolishness is why anyone should trust the analysis on any other topics of a newspaper that does not understand how an actual survey works, the concept of demographic balance or why a company should be looking to attract new customers rather than simply placating the existing-and-shrinking customer base.
Why do newspapers do these polls now? Who has time to do them, the elderly? That’s why these old strips hang on. I guess in about 5 years, if newspapers are even still around, will have a comics page no one reads anymore. If you cater to one demographic, you’re done. How can a strip like WUMO, which has only been out for six months, compete against a strip that has been around for 50 years? Good Lord, these editors are lazy.
Interesting to see these silly poll results, but no surprise since these polls are a fraud. Having visited Las Vegas many times, three major strips weren’t in the poll: Dilbert, Get Fuzzy, and Pearls Before Swine. All three appear exclusively in the Las Vegas Sun, which is a separate section of the daily shared paper. I’m sure the Sun is happy to keep those three great strips entirely for themselves. Lord knows it appears the Review-Journal is dumb enough to cancel them too.