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I’m the guy who tried to cancel Alley Oop.
So when I read on Jim Romenesko’s blog about an 8-year-old boy who called an editor a ‘s—hole’ for canceling several of his favorite newspaper comics, I could relate.
Alley Oop was created as a comic strip in 1932. When I came along as editor of the Nevada Appeal more than 60 years later, I wondered why the newspaper was still running Mr. Oop. I couldn’t believe people were still reading it.
So I canceled it. I started running some new strips.
I got an earful.
I don’t recall anything quite so colorful as the boy’s ‘s—hole’ comment, and most of the comments were from people approximately the same age as the comic strip. They’d been following the antics of Ooola and King Guzzle for decades. They weren’t about to stop just because some young whippersnapper came along and thought he knew what they wanted instead.
Boy, that was a valuable lesson.
Although a few people on Romenesko’s site have criticized the boy’s use of profanity, I applaud his passion for his favorite parts of the newspaper. I know I was pretty peeved when the Sporting News stopped running baseball box scores about 30 years ago.
At one time, newspapers tried to have something for everybody. Piece by piece over the years, we have tended to cut parts — a horoscope here, international news there, stock prices, TV listings, wedding engagements — that we thought had low readership.
Every time we did that, we cut somebody’s favorite part out of the newspaper. We gave them a reason to go find it someplace else.
Guess what? They did.
By the way, Alley Oop was back in the Appeal in a day or two. It’s still running today.