A Powerful Form of Journalistic Commentary Falls Victim to the Digital Dark Ages
This week I’m heading to Salt Lake City for an annual ritual that may soon come to an end: the annual convention of the nation’s top political cartoonists. This is bad news for my summers. It’s terrible for America, which is about to lose one of its most interesting art forms.
The AAEC convention is always a blast. Hundreds of intelligent, quick-witted and hilarious guys — sadly, it’s almost all men — talking politics, the media and culture, one-upping each other with one witticism after another, even during serious panel discussions and the you’d-think-it’d-be-deadly-dull business meeting. Partisan divisions fall away as drinks flow, gossip unfurls and jokes fly; one of my dearest friends is a conservative cartoonist.
Turns out, even the dumb editorial cartoonists are smart. The same men who crank out Uncle Sams and avenging eagles blasting feckless Talibs, cartoons choked with outdated labels and metaphors no one understands, turn out to be hilarious, funnier and a shitload smarter than the stand-up comics (hi, Louis C.K., hi Jon Stewart) we’re supposed to be worship these days. (Why the dumb cartoons? They say that’s what their editors want.)
Alas, editorial cartooning is dying in the United States. After decades of decline (punctuated by countless warnings), there are so few political cartoonists left that it’s hard to see how the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists can survive much longer. If the current trend continues, political cartoons — which are thriving in pretty much every other country on earth, helping to effect radical change in places like Syria, Iran and Spain — will disappear from the United States, which perfected the art form, at the peak of its golden age.
A hundred years ago, political cartoonists ruled the earth. Like dinosaurs. There were thousands of newspapers and thousands of cartoonists working at them. Bill Mauldin, Paul Conrad, Jeff MacNelly and Pat Oliphant were stars, boldface names. As newspapers declined, cartooning jobs vanished. In 1990 there were about 280 professional political cartoonists left. By 2000, roughly 80. Now less than 30. Many states don’t have one.
The layoffs continue. The Bergen Record just laid off Jimmy Margulies. He won’t be coming to Salt Lake City.
It’s the same story with syndication. It costs a paper about $15 or $20 a week for three to five cartoons by an award-winning cartoonist, but even that’s too much for cash-strapped newspapers. They’ve slashed their syndication lists. (They say they’ll use the savings to hire local cartoonists — but never do.) Many papers are doing without cartoons entirely.
In a field where bad news is the new normal, the New York Times’ 2012 request to cartoonists to produce hundreds of pieces a week for free stood out. Enough, we said. We refused. So the Times told us to take a walk. No other change at the Times has prompted as many reader complaints — but editors don’t care.
We joke — what else would we do? — that we should, like World War I veterans, go in on a bottle of champagne to be opened by the last man standing. Demographically and actuarially, that will be Matt Bors. At age 29, Bors is the youngest professional political cartoonist in the U.S. Despite the long hours he puts in supplementing his syndication income as an editor, blogger and freelance illustrator, he earns $30,000 in a good year. “I feel honored to be the youngest band member on the Titanic,” Bors says.
No wonder no one else wants to get into the field.
One of this year’s convention speakers is Victor Navasky, the author of a new book about political cartooning. Its subtitle references the “enduring power” of political cartoons. Yet Navasky mostly ignores developments since the 1980s, when Jules Feiffer and Matt Groening (“Life in Hell”) sparked the “alternative editorial cartooning” movement that includes artists like Bors, Ruben Bolling, Tom Tomorrow, Jen Sorensen, Keith Knight, Stephanie McMillan and yours truly.
American editorial cartoons have never been this smart, funny or relevant. Yet the best and brightest cartoonists of our generation are being pushed out of work because they can no longer earn even a meager income. In recent years talented cartoonists including Lloyd Dangle (“Troubletown“), David Rees (“Get Your War On”), Mikhaela Reid (“The Boiling Point“) and Tim Krieder (“The Pain—When Will It End?“) have called it quits because they couldn’t pay their bills.
The causes:
No jobs. No newspaper or magazine has hired a cartoonist from the new generation in more than 20 years.
Fewer opportunities. Fewer papers or magazines are running work by freelancers. Just last week, Time magazine quietly announced that it would no longer run cartoons. They’d been buying reprints for $20 each — a big change from 2001, when they were paying $800 to four artists, including me, for original content — but it was still too much.
Shrinking rates. The Village Voice, which gave Feiffer and Groening their starts, was famed for its cartoons. Groening got the Voice to pay $500 a cartoon in the 1980s. By the time I came on board in 1999, it was $100. Five years later, they slashed it to $50, take it or leave it. Now they don’t run comics at all. If I had a dime for every email I get from editors that start out “I’m a big fan of your work but I don’t have a budget for cartoons,” I’d be rich. Yet there’s always a budget for writers.
Censorship. It’s often what you don’t see that has the biggest effect. The cultural and political establishment has ruthlessly suppressed the new generation of cartoonists (I’d say young, but it’s been going on so long that some of these “new” cartoonists are over 50). You’d have to ask the gatekeepers why, but I suspect that our style (snottier, influenced by punk rock), politics (further left) and demographics (Gen X and Gen Y) are hard to relate to when you’re a Baby Boomer editor, producer, museum curator or book publisher. They don’t hate us; they don’t get us. So they don’t give us any play. (For example: Navasky’s book.) Which translates to less visibility and fewer dollars in our pockets.
There are bright spots. The liberal blog Daily Kos reposts edittoons. Nsfwcorp, a subscription-only print periodical, commissions original work, exclusive to them. But those are not nearly enough to sustain the medium.
Anyone who reads cartoons understands that they’re unique. Mixing words and pictures delivers commentary in a compelling, memorable way that prose — I say this a writer — can’t match. As editorial cartooning disappears, reformers lose an arrow in their quiver. Corrupt politicians and greedy CEOs get away with more.
The bloodbath in journalism in general and cartooning in particular is usually blamed on the Internet. Professional cartoonists work for newspapers and magazines; they’re forced to cut back as print display ad dollars are replaced by digital pennies. What revenues cartoonists can earn by selling directly to their readers — books, original drawings, merchandise — is getting sliced ever more thinly by online competitors: online meme generators, amateur webcartoonists, YouTube videos.
But that’s not the whole story.
At newspapers, cartoonists are the first fired, the last hired. When media gatekeepers — including those on prize committees — reach out to a cartoonist, they gravitate toward old-fashioned cartoonists who use hoary tropes like donkeys, elephants, labels and lots and lots of random crosshatching. Fetishizing the past is counterproductive because it discourages innovators. Also, it doesn’t work. Readers don’t respond. But editors blame cartooning as a medium when their real problem is their lousy taste in cartoons.
The New York Times Book Review is rightly skeptical about Navasky’s optimism about the future of editorial cartooning online: “An increase in distribution channels is not the same thing as a creative renaissance, and so far major online news sites have resisted the chance to hire their own political cartoonists.”
As a writer and cartoonist, I’m constantly looking for jobs. Sites like The Daily Beast, Salon, Slate and Huffington Post always post listings for writers. Lots of them. But they never hire cartoonists. From U.S. newspaper websites to the new Al Jazeera America, there’s lots of work for writers (albeit, for the most part, poorly paid). No one wants to hire cartoonists.
Why not? I don’t think it’s a conspiracy. It’s probably just groupthink coupled with a general lack of understanding of the “enduring power” of the medium. Newspapers first hired cartoonists because they were popular with readers. They still are. Portable electronic devices and the Web are quintessentially visual — duh — and cartoons — especially political cartoons — are massive clickbait with awesome viral potential. Someone at some point is going to re-figure out that people like comics. Then there’ll be a scramble to find edgy graphic content — comix journalism, editorial cartoons, animated cartoon videos — followed by the unwelcome discovery that due to years of censorship and impoverishment, there aren’t many cartoonists left creating professional work.
In the meantime, the Internet will continue to be something few people would have predicted: a sea of text as bland as the op/ed page of The Wall Street Journal.
(Ted Rall’s website is tedrall.com. His book “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan” will be released in March 2014 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.)
COPYRIGHT 2013 TED RALL
6 Comments.
[…] and as the annual AAEC convention looms later this week in Salt Lake City, . Ted Rall’s latest column explores the slow withering of the field and the reasons whywith an appearance from me, the […]
Ted.
You so rarely screw up that I’m almost grateful for the occasions when you do.
“Yet there’s always a budget for writers.”
Oh, Ted.
I get what you’re saying about the budget for cartoonists being microscopic, but let’s not turn this into the Monty Python “I used to have to get up at half past ten, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of freezing cold poison, work at mill …” sketch.
Almost every editor I’ve ever approached with a piece of writing has acted as though the notion of wanting to be paid for my work is a heresy. All that’s missing is the wailing and the “bread from my children’s mouths. You’re stealing the bread from my babies’ mouths.” They love what I’ve written, but it’s like they cannot believe that I want to make a living and pay my own way through the world.
So many people have to walk on glass nowadays, because God forbid anyone should criticise a sacred cow or newly “annointed” hero – political correctness has become so ridiculous that lampooning someone or something can get you labled as unpatriotic or worse. Bill Maher, Steve Colbert, and John Stewart say things that many people can’t understand, but they are not watched much by people who find their use of “bad” words the reason not to watch them, their tender sensibilities get offended and they are though of as having bad attitudes, but the monstrosity that the US Government has become and perpetuates is unknown to them as they live inside their bubbles.
Hi Alex_ the_ tired, The simple fact is that there is no longer a lack of writers – in fact, there are so many self-appointed ‘writers and pundits” avaiable on the Internet nowadays, that the people who have made their way to an editors job at any publication can no longer fight their way through the overwhelming piles of submissions. Plus – they have to consider whether anything they touch may offend someone. I’ve had the same experience – they want everything for free, because so many people do not want anything more than to see themselves published as a reward for their barking. Alex, like you, they are tired also…
[…] Ted Rall RIP’s Editorial Cartooning In America […]
The economics.
Once, presses were (relatively) slow (or outrageously expensive). Most newspapers had presses that could produce only a few tens of thousands of copies, so most cities had dozens of newspapers. Chicago had a newspaper for Democratic Hungarians, and another newspaper for Republican Hungarians back in the ’30s.
Then presses got cheaper and faster, and the economies of scale changed. The newspaper with a slightly larger circulation had more money, could hire better writers and cartoonists, and cities went from dozens of newspapers to two: one morning and one evening. Most reporters and cartoonists lost their jobs.
Then presses got cheaper, faster, and on-line. My father got the local city newspaper, the local village newspaper, and the Sunday New York Times for the magazine and the crossword. The New York Times Sunday edition arrived Thursday, so was useless for news. Now, a local press prints the New York Times, so it can compete with the city newspaper (the village paper still has stuff that’s only of interest to those who are still in the village where I grew up, but it’s struggling). So the Dallas Morning News laid off its cartoonist (who was once carried by the New York Times, but now he’s gone, gone, gone). The Dallas evening newspaper is gone. The Dallas Morning News is struggling.
So most of the reporters and cartoonists of the ’90s lost their jobs. Not because people read on the Internet, but because national newspapers can print all over the US and deliver today’s paper today, and have more and better reporters than the local newspapers. So, again, the economies of scale changed to favour fewer and fewer newspaper, and now favour a tiny number of huge newspapers, with a total staff that’s about 1% of the number of reporters and cartoonists supported 30 years ago.
Still, I notice Mr Rall is on the very short list of gocomics most popular cartoonists.
And that and $5 will buy him a modern coffee (that I remember as never costing more than 5¢).