Comic stripped
Here's a small example of how oligopoly forces change the market.
The comic strip is an institution in US newspapers. From "Gasoline Alley" and "The Katzenjammer Kids" to "Dilbert" and "Broom Hilda," most daily newspapers have featured one or two pages of comic strips and even more, and in color, in the Sunday "funny pages." All that is changing according to a Newsweek story ("The Un-Funny Pages," 7/19/2004).
The basics:
- Comic strip artists get paid through syndication, and get fees somewhat related to newspaper circulation (big metro dailies pay more than local suburban rags).
- But newspapers are cutting back. With lower circulation and a wish to conserve newsprint, they are cutting back on the number of strips they want to take.
- And there are fewer newspapers. Due to mergers and bankruptcies, most cities are down to one daily. Therefore, there are fewer venues for comic strips.
- Newspapers control the shelf space, in this case, the layout of their pages. The space is finite, is decreasing, so the real estate is more valuable. (In addition, the perception is that comic strips are less widely read than they used to be.)
- Some newspapers, including the Philadelphia Inquirer, have asked syndicates for strips free of charge.
- Because of media consolidations, big newspaper chains like Knight-Ridder and Gannett are trying to get significant reductions in the fees they pay, with the threat of blocking non-cooperating strips out of all of the chain's papers.
It's a classic case of oligopsony forcing cost reductions on small suppliers that reduce their prices thanks to their complete control over the "shelves." It can argued that's the open market - some prosper, some fail. And, after all, dropping most comic strips would be no big loss. The real problem is that newspapers, like other media oligopolies, get smaller and more insignificant as they become only machines for selling ad space.
6:39:45 PM 
|
|
