Short Takes —

The Future of Magic Bullets

Cartoonist Ted Rall shows us how to save the news business

By Ted Rall

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Two things.

1) It's sad that CJR is now doing using ridiculous click-click-click slideshows to generate page views.

2) To make #1 even worse - you require yet another click to even get to the click-click-click page.

This is a sad development. Sheesh.

If you're doing to have pointless click-click-click pages - merge step #1 and #2 and put something like "[slideshow]" in the title so those of us in the know won't waste our time.

Yes, I didn't say "please".

#1 Posted by F. Murray Rumpelstiltskin, CJR on Wed 14 Dec 2011 at 12:16 PM

Believe it or not, the slideshow thing isn't a naked page-view grab... it really did seem like the most elegant and efficient way to present Ted's cartoons. They were scattered throughout the print edition, and we wanted to mimic that page-turning experience, rather than just dumping them all on one page. Your point about putting "slideshow" in the title is a good one, and we'll do that in the future -- though, to be sure, I don't expect us to do very many slideshows in the future.

FYI, "The Moments," which went up on Tuesday, is also a slideshow, just in case you want to stay away from it.

#2 Posted by Justin Peters, CJR on Wed 14 Dec 2011 at 02:36 PM

@ Justin Peters

Oh, good - happy news! And thanks for the FYI heads up.

#3 Posted by F. Murray Rumpelstiltskin, CJR on Wed 14 Dec 2011 at 05:11 PM

I think the Ted Rall suggestion of settling another planet - but not giving them internet - has real potential for the future of newspapers.

Maybe they could do a special edition, without cartoons, for people without a sense of humour, or with nothing better to do than get twitchy about how many pages they turn. Twitch, twitch. In space, no one can hear you twitch. And other assorted space memes. Twitchelstiltskin?

Wonder what the F stands for.

#4 Posted by Jason Brown, CJR on Thu 15 Dec 2011 at 04:50 PM

You might want to put an upper bound in your slide show, I could keep clicking on inexistent panels until id=50 and beyond. And yeah, you don't need a slide show to do a multi-panel comic, eg..

http://www.leftycartoons.com/its-a-tidy-system/

http://www.leftycartoons.com/who-to-blame/

#5 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 15 Dec 2011 at 08:18 PM

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