Newspaper Cartoonists Engage Audiences Online

Source : www.minnpost.com

Like it or not, most of us are fans of the comics in our daily local newspapers.

According to Walsh ( 2006) who states that audience are inclining towards favoring text that has features of multimodality, such as the use of images to enhance the interesting factor of conveying a message. That is one the reasons why most of us are searching for the comics section in our daily local newspapers. .

As fans or critics, we would like to reach out and talk to those cartoonists. However, cartoonist have traditionally remained behind-the-scene engimas, invisible but for their work, and the best readers could do was write to the syndicate and hope for their letters got passed along ( Rosen-Molina 2009).

Not to worry!!!

Today, cartoonists learn to venture online so that they can be in contact with their readers and receive feedbacks and comments. The web is also a useful tool for cartoonists to generate readers' interests.

According to John Naughton (2006), our communication environment is changing. The combination of digital convergence, personal computing and global networking seems to have ratcheted up the pace of development and is giving rise to radical shifts in the environment. The web is a pull medium. Nothing comes to you unless you choose it and click on it to pull it down onto your computer ( Naughton 2006). This means that those who visited the comics sites are genuinely interested in reading comics as they are the ones in charge of surfing the internet in search for materials to read.

Reep (2003) states that content on a website is the attraction that lures users to surf. With that, cartoonists should update their comics strips regularly in order to keep their readers' interested. Too much waiting would definitely burn their interest, hence readers will surf the internet for other interesting and attractive website.

Thanks to the internet, now cartoonists are given the opportunity to receive and reply feedback from their audiences, hence providing them new ideas and chances to improve their skills in the creative industry.

The new ecosystem will be richer, more diverse and immeasurably more complex because of the number of content producers, the density of the interactions between them and their products, the speed with which actors in this space can communicate with one another, and the pace of development made possible by ubiquitous networking - John Naughton ( 2006)


For more information : http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2009/03/newspaper-cartoonists-engage-audiences-including-haters-online089.html

References

Naughton, J 2006, Blogging and New Media Ecosystem, viewed on 9th June 2010,
http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/fileadmin/documents/discussion/blogging.pdf

Reep, DC 2006, 'Chapter 4: Principles of document design', in Technical writing, 6th edn, Pearson Education, Inc., New York, pp. 173 - 190

Rosen-Malina, M 2009, Newspaper Cartoonists Engage Audiences ( Including Haters) Online, last viewed on 6th June 2010,
http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2009/03/newspaper-cartoonists-engage-audiences-including-haters-online089.html