Ted Rall, an editorial cartoonist for Universal Press Syndicate and the author of 14 books, is president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists.
Dwindling editorial cartoonists still connect with readers
WHY HAVE SO MANY NEWSPAPERS fired their editorial cartoonists? Some variation on that question typically serves as the lead of articles about the current state of American political cartooning. More telling is the answer to the question no one ever asks: Why are so many political cartoonists still working?
Complaining comes naturally to cartoonists. True to form, my colleagues have been howling about job cuts for as long as I can remember, from the cartoonists who lost their staff positions when their afternoon papers closed, to the slots that went unfilled at big-city dailies when artists retired or died, to the most recent bloodletting that has claimed more than a dozen out of the hundred full-time gigs that still existed when I became president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists in September 2008.
We've fired off angry letters. We've convinced reporters to write articles bearing headlines like “The Death of the Political Cartoon” that bemoan firings, urge shortsighted publishers to reconsider them and — inevitably — cite Thomas Nast's supposed role in dethroning Boss Tweed. (It was really his secretary.) A couple of years ago, the AAEC orchestrated a “Black Ink Monday,” when the nation's political cartoonists devoted the day's panel to the importance of their own art form. (Few papers ran them.)
No doubt about it: Cartoonists are suffering tremendous economic hardship. There are barely 80 full timers left in the United States, down from around 280 in 1980 and as many as 1,200 in 1900 — like passenger pigeons, we were once too numerous to count. But it isn't personal. Cartoonists are losing jobs because newspapers are shedding them. There's no evidence that cartoonists are getting downsized at a faster rate than other categories of newspaper employees.
According to the U.S. Department of Labor Statistics, newspapers employed 336,000 workers as of the beginning of 2008. By the end of the year, 22,400 had lost their jobs. The blog Paper Cuts, which tallies announced newspaper industry layoffs, counted more than 6,000 more reporters and other staffers out of work during the first quarter of 2009. A lot of papers don't publicize layoffs, so that count falls short of the full picture. If anything, cartoonists are holding up relatively well.
One political scribbler even kept his job when his paper closed. Of 150 staffers at the doomed The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, only 20 landed spots at the Hearst Corp.-owned Web site that replaced the late print edition. One of the lucky survivors was cartoonist David Horsey, a two-time Pulitzer winner and one of the P-I's “marquee names,” as the Associated Press put it.
Why, when publishers and their corporate parents are ordering the closures of foreign bureaus, while they're giving up investigative journalism and canning local beat reporters, are so many papers still paying six-figure salaries to guys who draw silly pictures of the president?
One reason is reader surveys. Newspapers consider the results of polls of their readers' preferences to be proprietary information, so they rarely release them to the public. However, we do know that people read the editorial page. The newspaper research firm Belden Associates found that roughly as many newspaper readers read the editorial page as check out the sports and business sections. Moreover, newspaper experts believe cartoons are a significant part of the appeal of a section that would otherwise read like a sea of gray text. “I've long had the impression that a good part of regular readership of editorial pages consists of looking at the cartoon and then glancing at the various headlines on the page,” said Brent Stahl, vice president of MORI Research.
We in the AAEC have heard from countless staff editorial cartoonists that their papers' surveys show that their work consistently ranks among their subscribers' favorites. At many papers, the editorial cartoon is often the only feature on the editorial page read by most readers. True, there have been some baffling cases of papers going without a staff cartoonist. (How could The Chicago Tribune, which didn't replace legendary editorial artist Jeff MacNelly after he died in 2000, fail to understand the advantage of hiring a graphic satirist to tackle the foibles of Chicago and Illinois politics?) Still, editorial cartoons remain popular with readers, and thus with savvy editors and publishers.
Of course, analyses of existing readers only show part of the picture. Advertising revenues are circulation-driven, so forward-thinking publishers are always looking for ways to increase their readership. One way to do that — probably the best way in the long run — is to put together a package that appeals to potential readers of their print or online editions. Most of these would-be newspaper customers are “young"-under 45. Because they're more visually oriented than many of the older folks who compose papers' ever-shrinking client base, they appreciate graphics. As seen with the success of political satire shows like “The Daily Show,” “Real Time with Bill Maher,” and “The Colbert Report,” they also like snark. Political cartoons offer both.
Print newspaper readership, currently estimated at 53 million nationally, continues to drop. But approximately 75 million people read them on the Internet. That's a brand-new audience, and it exceeds print levels more than 10 years ago.
Editors of these growing online news sites have found that editorial cartoons are wildly popular with the Internet's younger, hipper audience. Both Yahoo! and Google feature political cartoons on their influential news sites. The Politico, a Washington newspaper whose Web site is far more prominent than its print incarnation, employs a full-time staff editorial cartoonist, Matt Wuerker. And the Web-based news magazine Slate “continues to prize its collection of editorial cartoons,” according to the Online Journalism Review. “The site, now owned by The Washington Post Co., would even consider adding more cartoons or political animations in the future, according to its new publisher, Cliff Sloan,” OJR reported in 2005. Since then, they've done just that. Newspapers out to generate excitement about their online editions can't ignore editorial cartoons.
A strong mix of cartoons includes a wide-ranging comics page, graphic illustrations, a comic strip or two about local politics and culture, and editorial cartoons. A good editorial page employs one or two staff cartoonists who focus on local and state topics, and runs a variety of syndicated cartoons about national and international affairs. Milquetoast cartoons that illustrate the news — the kind of boring pap that appears in Newsweek, USA Today and The New York Times — don't attract readers or stimulate discussion.
“Really great cartoons should have a point of view and they have to be funny and pointed — and they should also have a good drawing,” says The Philadelphia Daily News' Signe Wilkinson, the first female cartoonist to win a Pulitzer.
And staff editorial cartoonists are rock stars. They serve as community outreach officers during public appearances at local schools and civic organizations.
Is a paper that slashes its cartoon budget necessarily doomed? Of course not. It's impossible to quantify the effect on circulation of firing a staff cartoonist. But a newspaper is a holistic experience. People don't buy the local rag just for sports, just for movie listings or just for cartoons. They want all those things. When too many go missing, the paper ceases to be an essential purchase. Every day sees millions of newspaper tests at thousands of newsstands that publishers will never hear about, when millions of Americans who don't buy the paper regularly pick one off a co-worker's desk or steal a glance at one at the 7-11, and decide not to subscribe because they don't see anything they want, much less have to have. Cartoons are part of that mix. Editors and publishers who continue to employ staff artists and buy syndicated material understand that.
Editorial cartoons attract younger readers, engage existing ones and play an important role in the transition to the Web. But, most of all, cartoons are the future. “Cartoons were the first thing I read in a newspaper,” recalls Howard I. Finberg, interactive learning director at the Poynter Institute. “They are the first thing that most children read. Cartoons got me hooked on reading, and I still remember sharing that experience with my father.”
Nevertheless, some newspapers don't get it. In an era of budget-cutting, cartoons make a tempting target. Some editors are “word guys” who never thought about graphic art before beginning their journalism careers. Others shy away from controversy. “Years ago, cartoonists would receive letters that would argue an opposing point of view,” says Daryl Cagle, an editorial cartoonist who runs Cagle.com, an online compendium of cartoons. “Now the letters are written to our publishers, demanding that a cartoonist be fired, demanding apologies, describing the cartoonist as racist, containing threats, and describing how deeply offended the readers are.” They ignore the lesson learned by William Randolph Hearst a century ago: controversy fuels circulation, which drives advertising. The best cartoonists frequently elicit controversy.
Though times are tough now, my feeling is that the future looks good for editorial cartoons in print and online newspapers. Papers without cartoons have higher chances of going out of business; eventually they'll be replaced by new ones that understand the value of graphics and hard-hitting political satire. *