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The San Luis Obispo Tribune Ditches Dailies – A McClatchy Trend?

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Beginning April 15, 2024 The San Luis Obispo Tribune will reduce the frequency of it print edition, from six days a week down to two days a week. The paper informed readers Sunday (also at Yahoo):

Tribune readers will notice several major changes beginning Monday.

Print schedule: Starting this week we will publish print newspapers on Wednesdays and Sundays and continue to be delivered alongside your regular mail delivery. The Sunday newspaper will arrive on Saturday as it has since December.

[December 2023 The Tribune went to strict mail delivery]

eEdition schedule: The eEdition will continue to publish seven days a week at sanluisobispo.com and in our digital app available on your cellphone and tablets. And we’ll continue to publish news digitally throughout the day, every day, including late-breaking news

The changes above means the end of the daily comics page for hard copy readers:

Comics: Comics will be published daily in the eEdition. In print, we’ll continue to publish the Sunday comics.

The favored puzzle fans will not miss anything:

Puzzles: Puzzles will be published daily in the eEdition. The print editions will include puzzles from nonprint days — so the Wednesday paper, for example, will have the Monday and Tuesday puzzles, too.

So cartoonists in the standard McClatchy daily comics page, that ran in all six daily editions, will lose a client.

The McClatchy Standard Daily Comics page consists of Off The Mark, The Argyle Sweater, Loose Parts, Garfield, Crabgrass, Mother Goose & Grimm, Sherman’s Lagoon, Luann, Pearls Before Swine, JumpStart, Baldo, Pooch Cafe, Peanuts, Baby Blues, Zits, Pickles, Crankshaft, Close To Home, Cornered, The Flying McCoys, and Rubes.

The Sunday McClatchy comics supplement remains.

Even more disturbing is this is not the first McClatchy newspaper to go this route. The Tri-City Herald in the State of Washington and The Bellingham Herald, also in Washington, did the same six months agoand three months ago respectively. (The Tri-City Herald continues to print a comics page in their Wednesday editions.)

Is this something we can expect more of? McClatchy shutting down daily schedules and doing away with daily comics pages every three months? Or maybe with increasing frequency?

feature Peanuts image © Peanuts Worldwide

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Comments 3

  1. We comic enthusiasts simply need to accept that daily delivery of fishwrap editions (especially for smaller regional newspapers) are losing whatever economic viability they once had, to the convenience of the Internet and ubiquitous mobile devices. People used to get milk delivered to their front doors, too, but nobody expects that old tradition to be revived.

    A century ago William Randolph Hearst had the financial muscle to champion artistic masterpieces such as “Krazy Kat” and “Little Nemo” in full page formats, but it would be irrational to expect modern venture capitalists to stick out their necks (or bottom lines) in defense of modern daily comic strips.

  2. HUH! I live in Bellingham and the Herald is SO widely disregarded as far as a paper edition that I did not even know they had changed from a daily schedule. The paper itself is worthless with almost no local news and a smattering of other stuff. Usually it is about 8 pages including sports, ads, etc. They do not even report local high school sports or our minor league baseball team.

    Me, I subscribe to King (they suck) and to Go Comics or whatever it is called now for all my comic strip needs. Only way to do it anymore.

    1. As a die-hard fan of the Richmond Flying Squirrels (AA-Giants), I’d be doing the torches and pitchforks bit at the Richmond Times Dispatch gates if the paper ever started cutting back on the Squirrels coverage. Happily, here, that’ll never happen when you’ve got the best attended franchise in AA baseball, with game attendance putting about half the AAA teams to shame.

      When a newspaper no longer carries the (I assume professional, I’ll admit I didn’t realize Bellingham had a team) local team’s scores, it’s definitely no longer worth reading.

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