On The AAEC’s Pro-Cartoonist Rhetoric

I'm all for encouraging statements like this one about the role of the editorial cartoonist in today's newspaper landscape, both as it traditionally exists and as it may exist in the future. I agree with the sentiments behind the statement. I also think there's some truth to be found in the way that many editorial cartoonists have added blogging and animation to their repertoires that indicates just how little newspapers have demanded of many of their newsroom denizens that are just now feeling the heat from the changing news landscape, a heat that's been a familiar, warm sensation to cartoonists for a decade or so now. I think cartoonists are ahead of the curve when it comes to embracing the likely future of newspapers, and deserve extra consideration job to job for their displayed ability to expand and change their roles. I'm even sympathetic to the notion that a great editorial cartoonist has value that's hard to quantify and this should factor in as to whether or not they're let go as well.

Still, I think if if I were a cartoonist at a paper and not a big name member of my field -- and maybe even if I were -- what I'd really want right now from my peers isn't exhortations and assertions and ways to save all of journalism but some practical models and numbers and/or testimony that at least qualify the value the best cartoonists have for their home publications. I would want fewer debates on the wisdom of syndication and more testimony from advertisers that they buy into the Washington Post because of Tom Toles, or that Nick Anderson's cartoons are X percentage of Y number of hits at his publisher's web site. Because right now, all that freshly worded arguments for a change in conventional wisdom seem to be providing is a sense of novelty when a cartoonist that meets those standards is fired just like the last dozen that didn't blog, or animate, or do local cartoons only. The new editorial cartoonists have talked in terms of proactive information for several months now. It's time to break out that information.
 
posted 8:15 am PST | Permalink
 

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