The Chicago Tribune is holding an American Idol-esque contest - for its Sunday comics.Editor & Publisher reports that for the last several months, the Chicago Tribune has run a Comics Carousel in its Sunday comics pages. What is a Comics Carousel? According to associate managing editor Geoff Brown, it's the paper's "court of last appeal" for the strips that the newspaper will be dropping if they don't win the readers' vote. For the past months, the Tribune has been running the strips side by side with readers voting for their favorite. If a strip does fall from readers' grace, it will be discontinued. Brown hopes that the contest will keep the comics alive, but writes, "There may be times that we elect to drop multiple strips; Carousel can handle only one at a time."

But what does this mean for the long-time familiar Sunday tradition? Once a popular collector's item, comic panels are now slowly disappearing with the prevalence of online news distribution. Newspapers generally include comic strips in their daily papers, many being black and white during the weekdays, and in color for the Sunday edition. Now, however, the color seems to be fading for many newspaper comics as papers are evolving into digital versions.

The Chicago Tribune's standards editor Margaret Holt wrote that the Comics Carousel was a wonderful way to bring readers' voices' into the equation. Should newspapers be considering their readers' viewpoints more often? Or would this have a negative effect on the paper's editorial voice?

Source: Editor & Publisher