A Good Free-For-All Friday
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We’ll start with an editorial cartoon that uses a comic strip character of a Pulitzer Prize-wining cartoonist.
Dave Whamond does a very good Opus, created by Berkeley Breathed whose Bloom County won a Pulitzer. Dave has also used Charlie Brown and a psuedo-Dennis the Menace lately.
The Spokesman-Review of Spokane, Washington, has joined a small contingent of newspapers converting to nonprofit status. The move was announced Tuesday morning at the industry’s annual Mega-Conference.
Owner and publisher Stacey Cowles and his family are donating the Spokesman-Review to Comma Community Journalism Laboratory, a nonprofit created in 2022 by executive editor Rob Curley, who will remain.
Rick Edmonds at Poynter is reporting the attempt by The Spokane Spokesman-Review to move from a for-profit company to a not-for-profit organization.
Conversions to nonprofit status in recent years include The Salt Lake Tribune, bought by Paul Huntsman of the prominent Utah family in 2016, and the Portland Press Herald, sold by Reade Brower to a Maine offshoot of the National Trust for Local News in 2023.
A landmark in these arrangements was Nelson Poynter’s bequest in 1978 of the for-profit St. Petersburg Times (now The Tampa Bay Times) to the nonprofit Poynter Institute. Philanthropist Gerry Lenfest similarly donated The Philadelphia Inquirer to the nonprofit Lenfest Institute for Journalism in 2016.
Elsewhere:
To our readers:
It is with great sadness that I am writing to you today. Our Board of Directors have voted to shut down Houston Landing. Houston Landing anticipates it will cease publishing by mid-May of this year.
The nonprofit online-only Houston Landing news organization is shutting down.
Sewell Chan at Columbia Journalism Review:
The Houston Landing, a newsroom that launched two years ago with $20 million in philanthropic commitments, announced today that it will shut down in mid-May and lay off all forty-three employees.
The decision, which was made by the board of the Landing, represents a costly and prominent—but, so far, rare—failure of a local news startup after the launch of scores of such ventures across the country as local newspapers have shrunk or folded.
Sophie Culpepper at NiemanLab:
Houston, with a population of more than 2.3 million people, is the largest city in Texas — and the Houston Landing had funding to match.
The nonprofit news startup raised $20 million well before it began publishing, from the American Journalism Project and the Knight Foundation along with local philanthropies the Houston Endowment, Kinder Foundation, and Arnold Ventures.
But less than two years after the Landing officially launched, its board has voted to shut the news outlet down.
To commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Glasgow Looking-Glass, the world’s first comic, the Mitchell Library will present “Glasgow through the Looking-Glass“.
The Glasgow Looking Glass (later The Northern Looking Glass) was published in 1825 and is considered by many the first ‘comic’, using used speech bubbles and is believed to be the first publication to use ‘to be continued’.
John Freeman at downthetubes reports on festivities surrounding the bicentennial celebration of The Glasgow Looking Glass (“the world’s first comic”), including a new issue of the tile to be published.
We’ll point out that the G-L-G being the “first comic” is debated in comic historian circles.
As for the present … here are Amazon’s Best Selling Comic Strip Books at the time of this posting.
Join the Schulz Museum and local Bay Area cartoonists to celebrate cartoonist and illustrator Paige Braddock, whose work includes the graphic novel series Jane’s World and children’s book series Stinky Cecil and Peanut, Butter, and Crackers. Braddock is also the creative director emeritus at Charles M. Schulz Creative Associates, where she has promoted the legacy of the Peanuts comic strip for the past 25 years.
I think we mentioned this, but here’s reminder of Paige Braddock being feted at the Charles M. Schulz Museum tomorrow – April 19, 2025.
Robert Crumb, the outrageous, hilarious cartoonist whose work defined the look of the counterculture (think Fritz the Cat and Keep on Truckin’) has held up a mirror to himself and all of us for over six decades, revealing the id and superego of the American consciousness. Now, he is the subject of an expansive biography by curator and writer Dan Nadel: Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life, out this week.
Dan Nadel, Robert Crumb biographer, and his book are making the rounds.
Nadel interviews at Interview Magazine and at The Comics Journal.
Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life reviewed at Literary Hub, at The New Yorker (or here), and at The Toronto Star.
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