NEW MEDIA
By night, Jim Toomey pens Sherman's Lagoon, a daily comic strip syndicated to more than 100 newspapers through the King Features Syndicate. During the day, Toomey's helping to build a virtual equivalent of the company that syndicates his strip.
Toomey works in business development at iSyndicate (www.isyndicate.com), which provides Web sites with customized syndicated content from more than 100 sources, ranging from the Associated Press to the Motley Fool.
This month, iSyndicate debuts an expanded version of its self-syndicated content system. Any writer, artist, photographer, or cartoonist willing to commit to a regular schedule can publish through iSyndicate, in the hope of getting picked up by clients. The more sites that buy the creator's work, the more revenue he or she pockets. "We'll be able to let struggling creators focus on their work, while we take care of distribution and business," Toomey says.
Although iSyndicate's right of refusal on controversial material may sound like business as usual to fringe artists, the company hopes that by opening syndication to the masses, it will discover the next South Park, which began as an animation file passed around the Net. "We love edge," says Toomey. "If it gets publicity, it gets sales."
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