The comics are perhaps the most read pages in the newspaper. Why then are so many editors reluctant to give them their time and attention?

When you change your comics, you risk angering long-time readers who have grown attached to their favorite strips. But if you don’t change your comics, you risk not attracting new and younger readers who have a sense of humor different from their parents’ and grandparents’. The goal is to strike a balance and keep your comics pages fresh while upsetting as few readers as possible. Easier said than done.

From our travels and talks with editors around the country, we think we’ve hit on some foolproof (or nearly so) methods for keeping your readers happy, engaging them in the comics process, and making sure that you’re serving not just your long-time readership, but potential new readers, too.

Your comics hole—comics “real estate”— is limited. The unavoidable truth is that to keep your comics page up-to-date, first you have to remove some of the deadwood. How do you decide what stays and what goes while limiting reader outrage? For many papers, the answer is the Guest Comic concept. For others, a comics survey is a better choice because it allows them to make substantial changes at once.

Unscientific though they may be, comics surveys help you get a sense of your readers’ tastes, so you’re not making decisions in a vacuum. And when readers complain that their favorite strip was cut, you can defend your decision by pointing to the survey and reminding them that you’re trying to serve as many of your readers as possible.

On the downside, certain kinds of comics are always going to be at a disadvantage in surveys, namely new comics that are still building a following, political comics that challenge (and sometimes incite) readers, and comics that appeal to a younger audience (who are less likely to vote). The problem is that these are also exactly the comics you don’t want to remove from your page.

To avoid these common comics survey pitfalls, we recommend:

• Select a number of comics from your page that you, as editors, think are past their prime, are in repeats, or are serving the same demographic as other, stronger strips.


• Present this list to your readers and ask them to vote for the ones that they “could live without.” Set a time limit, allowing them one to two weeks to cast their ballots. With this strategy, your readers will know upfront which comics are on the chopping block, so there won’t be any surprises. Fans of these strips will be motivated to speak out during the poll — as opposed to appearing out of nowhere after you’ve cut their favorite comic.


• Promote, promote, promote. To get full buy-in from your readers you need to let them know, both before and during the survey, that this is their chance. You can place house ads, rack cards, banner ads on your Web site, and if your paper sends out daily e-mail news blasts, add a link there too. You can also entice readers to vote by entering their ballots in a drawing to win a prize -- like some newspaper gear or a free subscription. This might attract some readers whom you wouldn’t usually hear from.

Now for the technical part -- collecting votes. How you do this depends on your preference, but here is a basic rundown of a few different methods.

• Set up an electronic poll on your Web Site. An electronic poll will count votes and make calculations automatically, saving you a lot of work. But it is also vulnerable to ballot stuffing. Take steps to prevent this by requiring voters to log in with a valid e-mail address or by only accepting only one vote per unique computer ID.


• Print paper ballots in your newspaper. Paper ballots make it easy for readers without home computers to vote. On the downside, counting the votes and entering data are a lot of work, and your poll will likely skew older.


• Solicit e-mail votes. Set up an e-mail drop box where readers can send their votes. You still have to count votes, but this is easier to manage than paper ballots. You can ask readers to put their vote in the subject line of their e-mail, and then sort e-mails into different folders based on vote.


• Have a phone-in survey. Some papers have a regular "comics hot line" where readers can call and leave a message with their feedback. This might not work very well in a comics survey, however, because of the number and length of responses. An alternative is for readers to call and vote by punching in certain numbers. This is easier than mailing in a ballot, and it doesn’t leave out the computer-less. On the other hand, there is no way to prevent ballot-stuffing, so resign yourself to letting people vote as many times as they want.