I’m the seller, representing a software company I cofounded while a senior fellow in the John S. And I find myself on the other side of the desk. Readers can go directly to a national or international source for their puzzles or comics. ![]() Now newspapers, at least online, appear to have lost this franchise. But there was still competition between papers in many markets, including Denver, and if you missed out on a winner, it could mean the other paper would gain a leg up. ![]() (They were all men.) I always bought something, and made sure to hold on to it long enough for them to earn their commission.Īlmost nobody in the newsroom spent any time on the features we bought. But I followed the lead of my predecessors and tried to treat syndicate sales people as men bearing gifts. It was the ability to deliver them to a local area that gave papers their franchise.īy the time I became the editor of a metropolitan daily newspaper, the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News, the web had already started to disrupt our business. The comics, puzzles and games at that time were the same in communities across the country. Papers in those days had geographic exclusivity. They didn’t want to send them away empty-handed, because they wanted to make sure that when they had something hot, they’d bring it to them first. My teachers treated the travelers who dropped by a couple of times a year carrying new offerings for the paper with respect, and tried to make their visits worthwhile. The then-senior editors, who were younger than I am today, taught me something that their mentors had taught them: A newspaper editor needs to pay special attention to comics, games and puzzles. I learned this at the start of my journalism career at a small afternoon daily newspaper in Albuquerque, N.M., before the Internet upended local journalism. But an editor learns pretty quickly that it’s the features readers look forward to, the things they anticipate with pleasure, that keep many coming back for more. We journalists like to think it’s the quality of our news reports that drives loyalty to our work. Have a bad question - or a bad answer - and you wouldn’t hear the end of it. Make a mistake, leave them out of the paper for a day, and the telephone wouldn’t stop ringing. It was always astonishing to me as a newspaper editor how much readers cared about their puzzles.
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