Reading Out Loud

Writing for the Nieman Journalism Lab blog earlier this month, Justin Ellis called The Goods, “McSweeney’s latest love note to newspapers.”

If I was looking for an easily identifiable trigger for my love of reading, it would most likely be devouring Peanuts (and later Calvin and Hobbes) in the Sunday Star Tribune as a kid.

Mac Barnett, the editor behind McSweeney’s The Goods, had a similar experience. “One of my big memories as a kid, on Sundays, my dad would peel off the funny pages as he would read the newspaper,” Barnett told me. “I think that trained me to have a certain fondness for the newspaper. I don’t think kids have that now.”

The Goods is a half-page weekly comics section, to be edited by McSweeney’s and distributed via Tribune Media Services. The idea is to appeal to get kids reading the newspaper, any part of the newspaper, as well as to get their parents to keep buying it.