ARE MEMES BECOMING THE DIGITAL COMIC STRIP?

(This was written to be assessed as part of my Journalism course. This was in Semester 2 of Level 4 and was for my Introduction to Digital Publishing module, where we were tasked with writing three blog posts and designing a website. This was one of the posts I wrote, and each had to detail distinct aspects of the Journalism Industry

The target audience was: Journalists- an informed audience, aimed at Millenials (26-41)/ Get Z (Get Z are aged 10-25, but I was aiming it at the 20+ section of this), based on the language used in the blog posts)

From Bernie Sanders and his mittens to ugly crying Kim K to Taylor Armstrong yelling at a cat, memes have taken over every platform, and there is a meme for everything.

Newspapers may be filled to the brim with current events and interesting stories, but one feature that has always been a big hit is the comic strips. Since the 1890s, comic strips have been a part of newspapers, including selling more copies. But now, as news is moving increasingly online and it is being argued that newspapers are becoming obsolete. If this argument is correct, that would mean that digital humour is also replacing traditional comics.

Memes have been around since the beginning of the internet, but gained most of their popularity in the early 2010s, with ‘Bad luck Brian’ and ‘Grumpy cat’ being some of the earliest formats. Now they have grown in popularity so much that is even used by companies as a form of marketing- here is an example of BarkBox using the Kombucha girl meme to engage with their customers:

Even when being used to advertise, they still have comedic purposes. The most important part of a meme is that they are fairly universal, and can be enjoyed by everyone- making them a real evolution of the comic strip. An example of this includes the distracted boyfriend meme.

This meme is entirely imagery, and understandable by virtually everyone- and will get a laugh from almost every cat owner who understands the struggle of buying a cat nice things and then them playing in the box instead.

An advantage of this for publications is they can be easily seen by more people, here Pop Buzz uses a meme to relate to a test that is on their website, to engage with readers and make their post stand out.

The media company, Buzzfeed, has also integrated memes into their website, with full articles entirely about memes. As well as writing about memes, they incorporate them into their social media to interact with their audience, making it even more accessible and also more visible.