It’s time to add some movement to cartoons on content sites

By J.D. Lasica
Online Journalism Review

Nearly a decade since the birth of Web publishing, you’ve got to wonder: Why don’t more content sites carry animated cartoons?

Three factors loom large: Holding down expenses in this cost-cutting era. The fact that fewer than one in six home users have high-speed broadband connections. And many of these newfangled moving cartoons are (shudder!) controversial.

To which I reply: Bosh! In many cases, the cost is a pittance. Tens of millions of us check in to news and content sites from offices with fat broadband pipes. As for controversy, its absence is what makes most news sites dull as doornails.

More important, though, is the principle involved. There’s no excuse for limiting your cartoon offerings — whether they’re political op-ed cartoons or comics — to transplanted print cartoons in a digital, interactive medium.

Cartoonist Mark Fiore puts it well: “This is a totally different medium, and you can do some many things you can’t do in a newspaper with animation and interactivity and sound. It makes my heart drop when you go to a news site and you see a cartoon that worked beautifully in print but just sits there on screen at 72 dpi (dots per square inch). It’s the worse of both worlds.” [Read more…] about Animated cartoons: Time for news sites to get animated