The Wenatchee (Wash.) World has slashed their comic strip content by half.
Publisher Sean Flaherty is “excited” about the “improvements”:
Changes are coming to some of our regular features beginning today, with this Saturday, Jan. 9 Weekend Wenatchee World.
I am excited that many of these changes will be improvements to the content we are providing.
Among the exciting improvements is moving their Sunday Funnies from a stand-alone broadsheet section to the middle of their tab-sized TV World weekend insert, while at the same time halving the comics content:
The weekend comics section has moved to the center four pages of TV World. There will no longer be a stand-alone comics section on the weekend, though it’s easy to pull out the center pages of TV World to read them. As part of these changes, we have reduced the number of comics we publish.
Which weekend comics did we keep? You will still find Beetle Bailey, Dilbert, Doonesbury, Garfield, Pearls Before Swine, Pickles, Wizard of Id and Zits in your weekend comics pages. Unfortunately, we cut some favorites: BC, Breaking Cat News, Frank and Ernest, Lio, Peanuts, The Born Loser and Tundra [emphasis added].
Below is their broadsheet Sunday Funnies section from last year (May 31, 2020).
But wait, there’s more! They are also taking an axe to the daily comics page:
We have reduced to eight the number of comics we are printing each weekday. We have increased the size of each comic strip by about a third to make them easier to read.
Which daily comics did we keep? Baldo, Dilbert, Non Sequitur, Over the Hedge, Pearls Before Swine, Pickles, Tundra and Zits. These daily comics were cut: Beetle Bailey, Breaking Cat News, F Minus, Mother Goose and Grimm, Peanuts, Phoebe and Her Unicorn, RIP Haywire, and Rubes [emphasis added].
The Wenatchee World daily comics page from June 2, 2020 below.
Publisher Flaherty empathizes:
We do understand how important the comics are to our readers. They bring laughter to us with their interesting takes on life. We are sorry if one of your favorites was cut.
One of my favorite strips, Peanuts, has ended in The Wenatchee World.
“We do understand how important the comics are to our readers . . . ” so we dropped half of them.
They “understand;” they just don’t “care.”
Or maybe they really don’t even understand, since they only apologized for the possibility that a reader may be unhappy if “ONE of [his/her] favorites” was cut, although I’m sure a lot of their readers saw that in fact six or eight of their favorites were cut.
“One of my favorite strips, Peanuts, has ended in The Wenatchee World” Excuse me? If you said Peanuts was your favorite, you could’ve just kept it in unless fans were tired of the endless rerun format. I don’t think I’ve ever been this disappointed about a paper dropping Peanuts since the Tampa Tribune did so back in 2005 (using a flawed reader poll as an excuse to cut Charlie Brown, Snoopy, etc. loose).