Gone Tomorrow: City Pages’ parent suspends comics, including ‘This Modern World’

The too-familiar story of media cutbacks hits close to home for progressive readers this time. A month after laying off famed writer Nat Hentoff at its flagship paper, Village Voice Media, the owner of a chain of alt-weeklies, including City Pages, has suspended publication of all its syndicated cartoons. That means readers from Seattle to Ft. Lauderdale to the Twin Cities will have to go without Tom Tomorrow’s “This Modern World.”

Confirming the network-wide move, City Pages editor Kevin Hoffman said he expects some reader backlash over the suspension of “This Modern World,” which he called a popular feature. “I’m a big fan, but unfortunately it’s one of those functions of a bad economy,” he said. Cutting out syndicated comics, he added, is part of an effort to “trim where we can while inflicting the least damage — realizing that we’re already cutting bone.”

City Pages finished out 2008 by laying off food writer James Norton and Assistant A-List editor Ben Palosaari. Hoffman said Norton was offered a job blogging about food for the City Pages Web site, but because he already writes at Chow.com, he refused. (At his blog, Norton wrote that he’ll be “starting up a new venture, a web magazine dedicated to food in the Upper Midwest).

Food blogging is one area Hoffman said the paper is hoping to make gains. And it’s part of the mix that’s delivered success to the paper’s online endeavors. According to internal numbers, Web traffic was up 40 percent in December, Hoffman reported, with The Blotter blog doing much of the heavy lifting. In October, Hoffman said, the blog garnered around 35,000 page views; by December, that number rose to around 250,000.

He said he hopes that in the second or third quarter of the year, the economy will have improved enough that cartoonists (and theater reviewers, he said) can be brought back on. The belt-tightening now only affects network-wide cartoons, Hoffman says; other syndicated features — like Dan Savage’s “Savage Love” and Rob Brezsny’s “Free Will Astrology” — will continue to run at City Pages.