The firing of editorial cartoonists marks a steady decline in newspaper opinion pages

NEW YORK (AP) — Even during a year of heartening economic news for media companies, the layoffs of three Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonists in one day was a severe blow.

The dismissals of cartoonists employed by the McClatchy newspaper chain last week were a stark reminder of the death of an influential art form, part of a general trend away from opinion content in the ailing print industry.

And Jack Aumann of Sacramento Bay, California, who is also president of the American Editorial Cartoonists Association, lost their jobs. Joel Pitt of the Lexington Herald Leader in Kentucky and Kevin Sears of the Charlotte Observer in North Carolina. Aumann and Sears were full-time employees, while Pitt worked on a free contract. The shooting was first reported on Tuesday by The Daily Cartoonist blog.

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There’s a rich history of editorial cartoons, including Thomas Nast’s vivid takedowns of corrupt politicians in late 19th-century New York City, and Herbert Block’s cartoons of the sinister-looking Richard Nixon at The Washington Post.

At the beginning of the 20th century, there were about 2,000 editorial cartoonists working for newspapers, according to a report by the Herbert Block Foundation. Now, Ohman estimates there are fewer than 20.

The last full-time editorial cartoonist to win a Pulitzer was Jim Morin of the Miami Herald in 2017. Since then, as the number of cartoonists hired has decreased, the Pulitzer has expanded the category in which they compete and renamed it “Illustrated Reporting and Commentary.”

While scripted editorials can sometimes be heavy and scare readers, the impact of a good cartoon is immediate, Pitt said.

He said, “Usually when you look at an editorial cartoon, it’s (done) by someone like you who is angry and can draw.” “It’s just related.”

While economics is clearly a factor in the industry it has They lost their jobs dramatically Many newspapers are just ghosts themselves, experts say, cowardice also explains the dwindling number of cartoonists, experts say. Readers are already disappearing, so why give them a reason to be angry?

Pitt was involved in a fight with Daniel Cameron, the Kentucky attorney general and Republican nominee for governor. Pitt, a Pulitzer winner in 2000, said Cameron, who is black, accused Pitt of being a race snob in his drawings and called for him to be shot at a press conference — not knowing that hours earlier, his wish had come true.

Pitt said his bosses never told him to avoid cartoons about Cameron, but gave him a series of guidelines. For example, he was told not to photograph Cameron wearing his MAGA hat backwards.

“There’s a broader reluctance in this political environment to go crazy,” said Tim Nickens, a retired op-ed page editor for the Tampa Bay Times in Florida. “By definition, a provocative editorial cartoonist will drive someone crazy every single day.”

Pete agrees.

“I could have looked at the guy who fired me and said, ‘I’ll do it for free,'” he said, “and they would have said no.”

McClatchy insists that local opinion journalism remains central to her mission. McClatchy’s newspaper, The Miami Herald, won a Pulitzer this year for “The Broken Promise,” a series of op-eds about the failure to rebuild troubled areas of South Florida.

However, in the current atmosphere Opinion is less valuable. Janet, the nation’s largest chain of more than 200 newspapers, said last year that newspapers would only run opinion pages two days a week. Its executives concluded that these pages were under-read, and surveys showed that readers did not want to be lectured.

It also means less space for animations.

The reason is that there are plenty of places to find opinion online, especially on national issues. Political endorsements are rarer in newspapers. In 2020, only 54 of the nation’s 100 largest newspapers endorsed a presidential candidate, down from 92 in 2008, according to the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

“When posts don’t really represent anything in an editorial sense, it’s detrimental, whether or not the articles are widely read,” said Rick Edmunds, media business analyst at the Poynter Institute.

While the idea may be to move away from polarizing national issues to focus on local concerns, the irony is that newspapers that still like to use cartoons will have to turn more to syndicated services, whose business deals primarily with national or international issues.

That’s what Pitt paints in his contract with Tribune Media, not caricatures of Kentucky.

“This isn’t a cartoon crisis in particular,” said Mike Peterson, blogger for The Daily Cartoonist. “This is a crisis of newspapers’ failure to communicate with their community.”

Like the newspaper owners, some of the same cartoonists feared that the taste would now be less for political satire, and more for non-offensive and funny drawings of the sort popular in The New Yorker.

“At the end of the day, I think people love cartoons. But it’s hard when cartoons are ecumenical,” said Aumann, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2016.