Support Ted’s Work

Help Wanted: Web Designer

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Ted Rall

I am looking for an experienced, ambitious and brilliant web designer to become a full partner on a start-up business venture.

You must be extremely energetic, self-motivated, have a strong sense of graphic design and aesthetics as well as intuitive sense of how people interact with the Internet. You should be a voracious consumer of news in all formats and media. You will be responsible for designing a game-changing Big Idea website, maintaining it and growing it into the foreseeable future.

You will be working directly with me. Also joining our team will be brilliant out-of-the-box thinkers from the world of journalism, cartooning, politics and the arts. We will all (yes, including me) be working gratis as full equity partners, with a view toward being able to paying ourselves salaries in the not-distant future. If I could pay you, I would. But I’m broke. The fact that I’m broke led to me to begin pursuing this new idea.

Since there will be no money for many months, this would be perfect for someone who is unemployed and looking to do something new and exciting. If we pull this off, we may literally change…everything. If not, well, it will have been fun. And interesting.

Commitment is not short-term. We’re only looking for someone ready to kick ass for at least a year. Mostly for no or little cash.

So anyway, if this sounds like you, please get in touch. A resume and portfolio would of course be useful. Left-wing politics helpful but not required.

Please Read! Support My Computer Fundraiser

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Ted Rall

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Regular readers of this blog are well aware of the meltdown in print media and the collapse of the economic support for cartooning. The Herblock Foundation recently issued a white paper about the crisis of American editorial cartooning, to which I contributed one of several essays that explain the situation in detail. Columbia Journalism Review did another piece that explains how editorial cartooning has been reduced to hobby status. (Irony alert! Shortly after this piece appeared, I lost my gig cartooning for CJR.)

In 2000 my cartoons appeared in TIME, Fortune, Silicon Alley Reporter and Bloomberg magazines, along with some 140 newspapers. It was a nice living, and I had no complaints. Now I’m in no magazine whatsoever, in but a fraction of the newspapers I was in, and those papers pay less than 25% each of what they paid then. Double irony alert! I have never been as widely read as a cartoonist, but my income has been reduced to where I was in the early 1990s, when I was just starting out.

My situation is typical. Now that print media is no longer willing or able to pay salaries or even modest reprint fees to cartoonists, the only way cartooning can continue as an actual job is if cartoon fans support it directly.

Is this feasible? I don’t know. Certainly fans of gamer comics have provided more than adequate support for the cartoonists who draw about role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragon to make a living. In one breathtaking example that has the political cartooning community shaking its collective head, an unknown, novice gamer cartoonist whose work appears primitive to outside eyes just raised $1.2 million on Kickstarter to reprint a book–in other words, to do no work whatsoever.

Why did this cartoonist do so well? His readers care about gaming and they’re willing to support the artists who document their scene. The question for fans of my work now is—and I thought I would never ask this—do you care enough about what I do to help support it?

Unless I figure out some way to replace the catastrophic loss of income I have lost to the censorship I have suffered since 9/11 by the right as well as pseudo-liberal outlets like Mother Jones and The Nation, which have moved to the right as well, as well as the general print media downturn, I am going to have to find other work. And I don’t mean in 10 years. I mean soon.

Of course there will always be amateur and hobbyist cartoonists. But I don’t have the time to draw for free. I need to earn money to pay bills.

We have already lost great cartoonists like Lloyd Dangle, David Rees and Mikhaela Reid to the cartoon industry collapse. Most others are teetering on the edge of disaster. I am one of the latter.

Some of the ways I reach out directly to readers are through the Ted Rall Subscription Service, auctioning off the right to select my ideas, and even auctioning off dinner and drinks with me.

I recently asked you to consider supporting my computer fundraiser. Like other cartoonists, I need a laptop to take on the road and a desktop computer for home.

I’m halfway there! Thanks to everyone who contributed, my modest but beautiful 15-inch MacBookPro just arrived:

20120221-154345.jpg

If you’d like to kick in toward the desktop computer–I’d like to get an iMac–here’s what I’m offering in exchange for contributions:

$50 – rough sketch/drawing

$200 – original syndicated editorial cartoon

$500 – three original syndicated editorial cartoons

$2000 – five original syndicated editorial cartoons plus an original cartoon just for you, drawn to your specifications, about anything you want (you can choose the dialogue and everything)

To contribute simply click below:





And thanks!!! It’s been a nice run, and I’m very grateful whatever happens.

Computer Fundraiser: Halfway There

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Ted Rall

[show_olimometer]

Regular readers of this blog are well aware of the meltdown in print media and the collapse of the economic support for cartooning. Now that print media is no longer willing or able to pay salaries or even modest reprint fees to cartoonists, the only way cartooning can continue as an actual job is if cartoon fans support it directly.

Some of the ways I reach out directly to readers are through the Ted Rall Subscription Service, auctioning off the right to select my ideas, and even auctioning off dinner and drinks with me.

I recently asked you to consider supporting my computer fundraiser. Like other cartoonists, I need a laptop to take on the road and a desktop computer for home.

I’m halfway there! Thanks to everyone who contributed, my modest but beautiful 15-inch MacBookPro arrives next week.

If you’d like to kick in toward the desktop computer–I’d like to get an iMac–here’s what I’m offering in exchange for contributions:

$50 – rough sketch/drawing

$200 – original syndicated editorial cartoon

$500 – three original syndicated editorial cartoons

$2000 – five original syndicated editorial cartoons plus an original cartoon just for you, drawn to your specifications, about anything you want (you can choose the dialogue and everything)

To contribute simply click below:





And thanks!!! It’s been a nice run, and I’m very grateful for it, but I seriously have to consider giving up cartooning unless your support continues.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: How to Save Books

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Ted Rall

Why E-Books Need Print to Thrive

Borders and Barnes & Noble killed independent bookstores. Amazon killed Borders. Now Barnes & Noble, which sells more than 20 percent of pulp-and-ink books in the U.S., is under siege.

If B&N collapses: the death of books.

Cultural apocalypse.

Neo-feudalism.

You may remember such classics as “How the Internet Slaughtered Newspapers” and “How Napster Decimated the Music Business.” It’s always the same story: Digitalization destroys profits.

Whether it’s newspapers, magazines, CDs or books (“pBooks,” they call them now), the electronic assault on tangible media follows a familiar pattern.

First: Pricing is set too low; margins get squeezed.

I pay $43 a month to get The New York Times delivered; new digital-only subscribers get the app for $5. In the book biz per-unit net to publishers is actually a few cents higher for e-books. But that margin is deceptive. “If e-book sales start to replace some hardcover sales, the publishers say, they will still have many of the fixed costs associated with print editions, like warehouse space, but they will be spread among fewer print copies,” notes the Times. E-books also eliminate paperback editions, a big second chance for publishers to break into the black.

Second: Piracy runs rampant.

Piracy of print media was virtually unheard of. But digitalization makes piracy tough for even the most honest consumer to resist. It’s easy and it’s fast. E-book knock-offs look and feel exactly the same as the real thing. As of the end of 2011 an estimated 20 percent of all e-books downloaded onto Kindles, Nooks and iPads were pirated. That’s a 20 percent pay cut to authors, agents and publishers—a number that will only go up.

And “legal piratization” is on the horizon. On February 6th a federal court in New York City ruled that ReDigi, an online marketplace for “pre-owned” MP3 files, can continue to operate pending the outcome of a lawsuit by Capitol Records. And public libraries are already “lending” e-books to multiple “borrowers” with the click of a mouse—the same process as buying them. But free.

Third: à la carte sales whittle down revenues.

Twenty years ago if you liked a song you heard on the radio you paid $14 for a CD that had 14 songs on it—13 of which might be filler. iTunes’ 99-cent songs brought back the single—but cheaper. (45s used to cost $3.) The result: the collapse of the music biz. According to Forrester Research, total U.S. music sales and licensing revenues fell from $14.6 billion in 1999 to $6.3 billion in 2009—a decline of 57 percent in a decade. People still liked music. They just didn’t have to pay for it anymore.

There are already apps that sell e-books by the chapter. Some publishers give away free chapters as samples. Why should a college student assigned to read chapter two pay $40 for the whole thing? À la carte book sales will further depress profits.

Why should you care if traditional publishers go under? What about the democratizing effect of the Internet, which allows anyone—not just big-name authors hooked-up with fancy well-connected agents—to publish a book?

Granted, digitalization opens doors for writers who might never have been able to break through the “no unsolicited manuscripts” wall that surrounded old-media gatekeepers. Elitism was and remains a problem.

But there’s a bigger problem: removing the profit incentive from books means more titles about vampires and werewolves and fewer in the fields of history and sociology. Because lower profits make it tougher for publishers to invest in big time-intensive projects, it deprofessionalizes our highest form of popular culture. The historian Robert Caro began working on his brilliant five-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson in 1982. He expects to finish in 2015. Tiny digital royalties eaten away by piracy couldn’t have sustained Caro’s research for three years—much less 32.

“Inside [the Kindle’s] plastic case, other things lurk,” Sarah Lee writes in the UK Guardian. “Sci-fi and self-help. Even paranormal romance, where vampires seduce virgins and elves bonk trolls. The e-book world is driven by so-called genre fiction, categories such as horror or romance. It’s not future classics that push digital sales, but more downmarket fare. No cliché is left unturned, no adjective underplayed.”

Goodbye, Mr. Caro. Hello, 99-cent fan fiction.

You might not care. But you should.

Fourth but not last: the loss of a product’s brick-and-mortar distribution outlets reduces consumer consciousness of a product. In New York, where I live, all the music megastores—Tower, HMV and Virgin—are gone. So are most small record stores.

I used to spend at least one day a week hopping from one CD store to the next. I probably spent $50 to $100 a week on music. Now I spend the same amount in three months. I still love music. I just don’t think about it as often. iTunes is just a list of names and titles.

Now Barnes & Noble and what’s left of the independents are all that’s standing between an uncertain present and a disastrous—music-like—future.

“Sure, you can buy bestsellers at Walmart and potboilers at the supermarket. But in many locales, Barnes & Noble is the only retailer offering a wide selection of books,” notes The New York Times. A broad, deep book industry requires retailers willing to sell midlist titles and books that don’t do well—i.e., most of them.

Publishers say they want to save B&N, which is locked in an existential fight against Amazon. Things turned ugly after Amazon urged bookbuyers to visit stores in order to use their smartphones to scan barcodes of titles so they could buy them elsewhere—online, from Amazon, at a discount. B&N retaliated by banning books directly published by Amazon from its stores.

Amazon says it doesn’t want to drive B&N and other brick-and-mortar stores out of business. Their actions belie that. But if Amazon management were smart, they would subsidize stores like B&N. Remember what happened to the music biz when record stores disappeared—the overall music business cratered. All music sales, including those of iTunes, would be higher today if Tower et al. were still around.

Sadly, Amazon doesn’t seem smart. Like most American companies, it’s looting its own future in favor of short-term, quarterly lucre.

“Shopping on Amazon is a directed experience—it works best when you know what you’re looking for,” says Charlie Winton, CEO of Counterpoint Press. “But how does that help with, for instance, a first novel? When independent bookstores were in a healthier state, staff picks and hand selling could bring attention to great books people didn’t know they wanted. Now that’s much harder.”

And many of those bookstore “customers” would have eventually bought that book from Amazon.

E-books are here to stay. But there’s a way to save the overall book business for both print and electronic editions. The solution requires three parts.

Congress should join the other countries that have major book industries in passing a Fixed Book Price Agreement, in which booksellers and publishers agree on what price books may be sold nationally—i.e., no $25 books selling for $10 at Costco. In France and other nations studies have shown that FBPAs protect independent stores, increase the diversity and quality of titles sold, and support more authors.

Recognizing the unique cultural contribution of books as well as the threat to our national heritage posed by digitalization, Congress should exempt publishers from antitrust laws. This would allow publishers to collude to set prices and hold the line against predatory discounting.

Finally, publishers should flip the current arrangement, in which Amazon enjoys steeper discounts than brick-and-mortar stores. Even if Amazon gets charged a higher wholesale price they still have big advantages; many people don’t live near a store or are simply too lazy to visit one. And they carry everything.

It’s more than a question of preserving print as a fetish commodity. E-books won’t thrive if their print forebears vanish.

(Ted Rall is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto.” His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2012 TED RALL

Is There a Handyperson in the House?

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Ted Rall

I need to know what this is. Is it a 3/4″ galvanized aluminum (it’s not magnetic) flange? Or something else?

It would also be awesome if you know where I could buy 50 of them.

Viva la Difference!

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Susan Stark

Susan here.

I have a housemate who has an 11 year old daughter. Every day after school the girl hits the Disney Channel to watch Hanna Montana and her various clones.

I thought it might be fun to demonstrate what I watched when I was 11 years of age. Can you spot the differences?

60 Cartoonists Protest New York Times Spec Policy

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Ted Rall

Occupy Cartooning!

The following letter has just been sent to The New York Times. It has 60 signatories, including six Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonists who resent the Times policy on spec work and substandard pay rates.

The origin of this letter was organic. Editorial cartoonists were discussing what to do in response to the Times’ announcement that it plans to ask scores of cartoonists to submit cartoons on spec, paying only one lucky winner—and then only the below-market rate of $250. The effective pay rate works out to a few cents per hour on average. Is this a newspaper, or the Triangle Waistshirt factory?

I suggested that the AAEC send out a letter along the following lines. One cartoonist after another began saying “I’ll sign that,” and here we are–sending out the letter that I drafted. Please note that this is not an official AAEC communiqué but rather an expression of the individual sentiments of the 60 signatories.

We hope that this will help to educate educators about the pernicious practice of spec work and phony “contests.”

Very truly yours,
Ted Rall

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TEXT OF LETTER FOLLOWS:

Ms. Aviva Michaelov
Art Direction, Graphic and Web Design
The Sunday Review
New York Times
620 Eighth Avenue
New York NY 10018

Dear Aviva:

While we appreciate and applaud your move to add more cartoons to the Sunday Review, we are concerned about your announced submission (no pun intended) policy and payment.

The current proposal has the effect of putting scores of cartoonists to work every week. But only one will have a (small) chance to be published. Like an old-fashioned “shape up” of longshoremen, this is demoralizing and will likely lead to a diminished number and quality of submissions over time. This works neither for the cartoonists nor for The Times. We suggest that you either commission cartoonists whose work you like directly, or return to the previous approach of running syndicated material which do not require additional work on the part of editorial cartoonists who are struggling mightily in the current economic environment.

Furthermore, the proposed payment is extremely low given the low chances of publication, the requirement that an artist clear his or her Friday schedule, and–most of all–the huge circulation of The New York Times, the largest newspaper in the United States. Although The New York Times in the past has paid only $50 for a reprint of syndicated cartoons, the market standard for a reprint for a newspaper of your size is $250. You are offering this $250 now for original content. An original cartoon for The Times should pay closer to $1500 to $2000. And the rate should be even higher if you maintain the New Yorker-style submission policy, to which many cartoonists have long objected and boycotted.

It is not necessary to reinvent the wheel here. There are long-established norms for submission and payment for cartoons in the newspaper industry that have functioned well and would work well for you going forward. We hope you will consider them.

Signed February 9, 2012 by the following cartoonists:

Kirk Anderson
Nick Anderson, Houston Chronicle*
Robert Ariail, Herald-Journal (Spartanburg, SC)
Steve Artley
John Auchter, MLive Media Group
Pat Bagley, Salt Lake City Tribune
Richard Bartholomew, Artizans Syndicate
Nate Beeler, The Washington Examiner
Charles Beyl, Sunday News (Lancaster, PA)
John Branch, North America Syndicate
Steve Breen, San Diego Union-Tribune*
Daryl Cagle, msnbc.com
Tim Campbell, Current Publishing
Cameron Cardow (CAM), Ottawa Citizen
J.D. Crowe, Mobile (AL) Press-Register
Matt Davies, Tribune Media Services*
John Deering, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Brian Duffy, King Features Syndicate
Tim Eagan, Deep Cover
Bob Englehart, Hartford Courant
Paul Fell
David Fitzsimmons, Arizona Daily Star
Garrincha, El Nuevo Herald
Bob Gorrell, Creators Syndicate
Phil Hands, Wisconsin State Journal
Roger Harvell
Joe Heller, Green Bay (WI) Press-Gazette
Jack Higgins, Chicago Sun-Times
Keith Knight, The K Chronicles/The Knight Life
Jeff Koterba, Omaha World-Herald
Jay Lamm, The Franklin Times
Chan Lowe, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Jimmy Margulies, The Record (NJ)
R.J. Matson, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Rick McKee, Augusta Chronicle (GA)
Stephanie McMillan, Universal Press Syndicate
Mike Keefe, Denver Post*
Angelo Lopez, Philippines Today
Jim Morin, Miami Herald
Jack Ohman, The Oregonian
Jeff Parker, Florida Today
Joel Pett, Lexington Herald-Leader*
Mike Peters, Dayton Daily News*
Milt Priggee
Ted Rall, Universal Press Syndicate
Rob Rogers, Pittburgh Post-Gazette
V. C. Rogers, The Independent Weekly (Durham, NC)
Marshall Ramsey, Jackson (MS) Clarion-Ledger
Jen Sorensen, Slowpoke
Scott Stantis, Chicago Tribune
Ed Stein
Tom Stiglich, Journal-Register Newspapers
Dana Summers, Orlando Sentinel
Dan Wasserman, Boston Globe
Signe Wilkinson, Philadelphia Daily News*
Karl Wimer, Denver Business Journal
Matt Wuerker, The Politico
Adam Zyglis, Buffalo News

*Asterisk indicates winner of the Pulitzer Prize in editorial cartooning

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