The State of Local Journalism

John Oliver's "Last Week Tonight" had a good segment on the sorry state of newspaper journalism Sunday night. Newspapers are slashing staffs and discounting investigative journalism and simple monitoring of government in favor of clickbait ("You'll Never Believe What Happened Next!") and incomprehensible marketing buzzwords.

The cost-cutting affects every aspect of the business from writing to production.

On the same day, someone traveling around Wisconsin might have noticed an eerie similarity on several different newspapers' front pages, as shown in this screen shot from newseum.org. Not only did the Fond du Lac Reporter, Green Bay Press Gazette, Manitowoc Herald Times Reporter, Oshkosh Northwestern, Sheboygan Press and Wausau Daily Herald run the same feature story on page one with the same graphic and layout, they also all used the same photo of Brett Favre in the same spot on top of the page to tease the story of his induction into the Football Hall of Fame.

The colored circles might put you in mind of what national newspaper owns these six.

This Week's Sneak Peek

This week's cartoon probably should have included a credit line somewhere to John Oliver's This Week Tonight program for borrowing its recurring "The Most Patient Man in the World" feature. After going off on "Wm. Charles" for making a career out of plagiarizing other people's artwork, I realize that someone might think I'm trying to claim the moniker as my own idea instead of sneaking a sly reference to him into a very small part of the cartoon.

Besides which, now that I've googled it, the feature is called "The Most Patient Man on Television," which I'd have caught in time if it had been on Oliver's show last night.

Apologies in advance for my oversights.