By: E&P Staff In his first syndicated column since becoming president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists
last Friday, Ted Rall discussed newspapers and editorial cartooning.
"As I've written before, daily newspapers -- the biggest source of income for cartoonists -- are in crisis," noted Rall, who does a weekly column in addition to his Universal Press Syndicate cartoons. "Bottom lines dependent on ad revenue, decimated by the migration of advertising money to the impecunious Web, are now getting killed by the recession. Layoffs and buyouts of reporters and other news staffers are at pandemic levels.
"As circulations have declined, cartoonists have paid a heavy price. At the beginning of the 20th century, most U.S. newspapers had a full-time staff editorial cartoonist, possibly 2,000 or more. In 1980, after many cities had lost all but one or two of their papers, there were about 280. Now there are fewer than 100 -- six lost their jobs in the last several months.
"Alternative weekly papers print political cartoons but pay nominal reprint fees, not real salaries. The Internet doesn't pay at all.
"The professional political cartoonist -- the man or woman who spends their life living and breathing politics, history, and sociology and devotes their career to distilling new ways of thinking about the world with a drawing -- could become extinct."
Rall, who's also acquisition and development editor for United Media, added: "Ironically, this is the golden age of political cartooning. Never has the form been blessed by so many talented artists drawing in such a dazzling variety of visual styles. And never have so many Americans wanted to read them."
His full column can be read
here.
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