UPDATE: 'CSM' Cartoonist Clay Bennett Talks to E&P About His Move to Chattanooga Paper

By: Dave Astor Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Clay Bennett is leaving The Christian Science Monitor to join The Chattanooga (Tenn.) Times Free Press for several reasons.

"I've had a hankering to get back to a metro paper," said Bennett, who joins the Times Free Press on Jan. 1 -- exactly 10 years to the day he started at the Monitor. "There's something to having a real constituency you can see."

This also means a number of Bennett's Times Free Press cartoons will be local, which he looks forward to. "Local cartoons give readers what they can't get anywhere else," said Bennett, who mostly did national and international commentary for the Monitor -- and will continue to do those kinds of cartoons for the Times Free Press along with local ones.

Bennett will replace Bruce Plante, who recently left the Times Free Press for the Tulsa (Okla.) World.

The Monitor cartoonist told E&P that he heard good things about the Times Free Press from Plante, including praise about the "latitude" the paper allows its cartoonist. And given that the paper has two editorial pages (one liberal and one conservative), it would be difficult to "go outside what the newspaper professes" in its opinions, Bennett said wryly.

"My political leanings are more liberal than not, but a lot of cartoons I do don't take a partisan position," he said.

Bennett, 49, is also looking forward to working in Chattanooga, a city he has known and loved since he was a teen. Indeed, it will be a return to the south for Bennett, who worked for newspapers such as the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times. And the South Carolina native went to high school and college in two Alabama towns along the Tennessee River, which Chattanooga also borders.

"I'm starting to feel a bit like Huck Finn," he quipped, adding: "I've always had this emotionally conflicted relationship with the South, but I can't deny the influence it's had on my life."

Bennett joined the Boston-based Monitor in 1998 -- four years before winning the Pulitzer. Bennett said he'll always be grateful to the Monitor for hiring him, because he spent three years unable to find a staff cartooning job after being let go by the St. Petersburg Times.

"The Monitor took a chance on me when no one else seemed to want to," he said. "So leaving is a bittersweet decision for me."

Bennett said he expects the Monitor, which has a history of employing cartoonists, to hire a replacement for him.

The Christian Science Monitor News Service has been distributing Bennett's cartoons, and the newly hired Times Free Press staffer said he's interested in signing with another syndicate to distribute the work he'll do for the Chattanooga paper.

Tom Griscom, publisher and executive editor of the Times Free Press, said Bennett's work will appear in color on the front page of the Perspective section each Sunday and four times a week in black-and-white on the daily editorial pages.

Bennett, who said his cartoons will still run in color on the Web, noted that he enjoys working in black-and-white. He creates his Monitor cartoons in black-and-white before adding color towards the end of the process.

Griscom also said: "The Times Free Press received inquiries from readers and from those in the cartoonist profession as to whether our newspaper would join the ranks of those jettisoning the position with the departure of Mr. Plante." The answer, obviously, is no.

Bennett -- a former president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists -- is now in the process of trying to sell his Massachusetts home and "move five people, three cats, and one guinea pig" to Tennessee in two months.