Paper Media Poll: 'I Stopped Reading the Comics When Doonesbury Went Into Reruns'

SAN FRANCISCO -- Steve, a retired city government accountant, sat in Mission Street Peet's on a rainy Monday before lunch. On his table was an unflipped copy of San Francisco Chronicle's "Sunday Pink" section, aside his power bank and smartphone. He stopped subscribing to home delivery "in '17" he estimated. Still, on Fridays he buys the analog edition.

"When Michael Jackson died, the L.A. Times' home page didn't have anything," but the Daily Mail did. Steve's been reading a handful of British papers on his phone for years.

"It's too expensive" he said, naming the price jumps that sloughed him from the Chronicle's daily reader rolls. "One dollar, two dollars, two and a quarter." (Steve was surprised to hear the Sunday bundle dropped back to two dollars flat.)

Price drops aside, Steve only reads three sections now: Sports, the "Pink" (Datebook/Entertainment,) and Travel.

"I stopped reading the Comics when Doonesbury went into reruns," which started five years prior, he said.

Steve had missed that Sunday's strip, when Doonesbury's "Duke" loses out on a "Dickie" award, granted for "Distinction in Lobbying for a Foreign Dictatorship" to winner "Paul Manafort." ("Duke" was not the only loser that night in the comic strip's fictional awards banquet. "Michael Flynn" also was a runner-up.)

In other words, Doonesbury is current again. Reruns are over, characters from the headlines are back in the strip.

Coming Up, in Part 2: Steve, like many lay readers in the U.S., tallies conglomerate owners from the top of his head, to argue independence in journalism is scarce now. ->



| Paper Media Poll: Lay Reader Names Conglomerates From Memory -->


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This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.