Jul.14

electoral-vote.com

Dem 51

   

GOP 49

R.I.P. Editorial Cartooning

If you are a big fan of editorial cartoons, then yesterday was Black Thursday. McClatchy, which operates 29 daily newspapers, has decided that devoting space to such content no longer makes sense. And so, the publisher fired all of the editorial cartoonists on its payroll. Among the heads that rolled were those of three Pulitzer Prize winners: Jack Ohman of the Sacramento Bee, Joel Pett of the Lexington Herald-Leader and Kevin Siers of the Charlotte Observer.

The cartoonists who lost their jobs all said they were stunned and that they did not see this coming. That may be true in the sense of "I didn't realize I would be out of work by July 15." On the other hand, the trends that led the industry to this place have been evident for years, and even decades. In no particular order:

• Real estate, in print editions, is increasingly scarce and increasingly precious. Bill Watterson, of Calvin and Hobbes fame, may not have been an editorialist, but he was certainly a cartoonist. One of the reasons he left the business is that he was tired of being squeezed into increasingly small spaces. And that was in... 1995.
  
  
• Editorial cartoons use an idiom that is quite idiosyncratic, and that requires a learning curve before readers really "get it." If people aren't reading newspapers anymore, much less the cartoons in the newspapers, then they're not being initiated into the club.
  
  
• When editorial cartoons were first developed, roughly 150 years ago, they filled an important niche. Many readers weren't literate, or else weren't literate in English, but everyone can understand pictures. Needless to say, that niche doesn't exist anymore, even if American culture is arguably even more visually oriented today than it was in the 19th century.
  
  
• Garry Trudeau, of Doonesbury fame, famously operates under a very short deadline (his is about a week, the norm for syndicated cartoonists is about a month) so he can be nimble and respond to current events. Cartoonists who work for just one paper are able to be even more nimble. But neither Trudeau nor the single-paper cartoonists can compete with what has really supplanted the editorial cartoon, namely the meme. If, say, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) says something stupid or evil, that meme can spread to a million Facebook pages before Trudeau is even able to get out his drawing pencil.
  
  
• Given that editorial cartoons are old hat, newspapers have to think about things they can do visually that complement their coverage and that may not be so easy for a kid with an iPad and a copy of Affinity Photo to replicate. So, their resources are going into fine-art type stuff (think the "mugshots" in The Wall Street Journal) or into data-driven visual journalism. The Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning was renamed, in 2021, to the Pulitzer Prize for Illustrated Reporting and Commentary. And since 2018 (i.e., even before the name change) it has gone to non-cartoonists. The most recent winner, for example, was The New York Times' Mona Chalabi, who won for her series of infographics that put Jeff Bezos' wealth into some sort of context.

Naturally, just because we understand the reasons that editorial cartooning has one foot in the grave does not mean we cheer this development. It's a shame that an art form with such a celebrated history is headed the way of the dodo, but nothing lasts forever. It's really the print equivalent of AM radio, a 20th-century cultural force that has become a dinosaur in the 21st century. (Z)