Newsfinger

It's a sad state of affairs, and potentially the end of an industry—if you want to call it that—where a small handful of ragtag scribblers like myself have slaved for many years (for very little money, if you ever wondered) to bring you a laugh or two every week in the pages of your local alt weekly. Over the last year or so, cartoonists such as myself, Derf, Tom Tomorrow, Lloyd Dangle, Ruben Bolling, Jen Sorensen, Ted Rall and many, many talented others, have watched our strips steadily and systematically dropped from the pages of your local weeklies and alternative publications. Times are tough, to be sure, and most of these free publications rely on discretionary advertising by local businesses and classified ads to keep the presses rolling and issues on the stands. And when money gets tight, the first line item in any small business budget to get slashed is advertising, so I understand and sympathize with the precarious position in which many weeklies now find themselves.