The (Columbia) Missourian has moved their Sunday Funnies. No longer a free-floating insert, the Sunday comics are now a part of the regular newspaper pages just like the daily comics.
The June 24, 2018 Missourian front page.
Dear Reader,
You may have noticed something different about today’s print Missourian — the Sunday comics aren’t in their own little section any more.
But they haven’t left the Sunday paper. Now they can be found each Sunday on pages 5B, 6B and 7B. They’re followed by the Timeout page on 8B. .
We made this change to save money.
For a number of years our comics sections were printed by a commercial printer outside Missouri, trucked to our printer in Jefferson City and inserted into the Sunday papers. As you can imagine, this wasn’t cheap.
We can save a considerable amount of money by doing this, avoiding the cost of outside printing, hauling and inserting.
As seen above The Missourian Sunday Comics for June 24, 2018 remain in color.
If they do, indeed, save money doing this I can see other papers following suit.
But…I wonder if they contract out the work to a pagination service or do it in-house?
The Columbia Missourian is a digital-first newspaper based in Columbia, Missouri, published seven days a week on www
.columbiamissourian .com and five days a week in print. The newspaper is affiliated with the Missouri School of Journalism, the world’s first school of journalism, and is owned as a 501c3 non-profit under the Missourian Publishing Association.
Interesting to know if they are printing on Flexo or the far more common offset presses. That much ink on an offset press would be a mess, coming off on readers’ hands, plus I think you get a better color image on Flexo.
Most large metros have both, but there aren’t a whole lot of small to midsized papers that do, and far fewer that are Flexo-only.