Not even Superman can save print media.
Less than a week after Newsweek announced they are folding their print edition after 80 years in favor of a digital future, Superman's alter-ego Clark Kent has announced he, too, will be leaving his post as a journalist at the print publication, The Daily Planet, in hopes of creating a new media empire.
In "Superman" issue 13 out on Wednesday, the mild mannered reporter-by-day quits the Metropolis newspaper that has been his employer since the DC Comics superhero's earliest days in 1940.
And he doesn't go out quietly.
In the issue, USA Today reports "his still-strong feelings for Lois, combined with Daily Planet editor in chief Perry White getting on his case for not enough scoops on the Superman beat and his boss' boss Morgan Edge also giving him a hard time, leads to a Jerry Maguire-type moment where he quits in front of the whole staff and rails on how journalism has given way to entertainment — in a not-so-mild-mannered fashion."
New "Superman" scribe Scott Lobdell, who took the writing reigns just last month, explains to USA Today, "I wasn't going to test the waters. I was just going to do a cannonball in the Super-verse ... This is really what happens when a 27-year-old guy is behind a desk and he has to take instruction from a larger conglomerate with concerns that aren't really his own."
But don't expect The Man of Steel to take another day job anytime soon.
"I don't think he's going to be filling out an application anywhere," says Lobdell. "He is more likely to start the next Huffington Post or the next Drudge Report than he is to go find someone else to get assignments or draw a paycheck from."
In the issue, Clark Kent criticizes his Planet Daily editor Perry White, telling him, "I've been a journalist barely five years now. Why am I the one sounding like a grizzled ink-stained wretch who thinks that news should be about -- I don't know, news?"
"Go easy on us mere mortals, Clark. Times are changing, and print is a dying medium," White responds.
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