Yet more bad news for those of us who love newspapers and/or those of us who’ve worked in newspapers: the Denver Post’s award winning cartoonist Mike Keefe will take the Denver Post’s buyout and he doesn’t think the paper will replace him. If so, it’ll mean yet another newspaper that has ended an era when newspapers had cartoonists on their staff. Here’s the lead in to Daryl Cagle’s column that has an interview with Keefe:
Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Mike Keefe, my pal and staffer for the Denver Post, has decided to accept a buyout and leave the position he’s held for more than 35 years. It’s sad news, as the Denver Post could become the latest in a line of prominent cartooning positions that have either been eliminated or no longer exist (Los Angeles Times, Dallas Morning News, Seattle Times, Newark Star-Ledger).
Keefe’s last day at The Post will be November 29, but I’m happy to report that he will continue to draw cartoons (at a somewhat lessened pace) for Cagle Cartoons to syndicate.
Mike Keefe / Denver Post (click to view Keefe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoons)
I did a quick interview with Mike via email between plates of turkey and sweet potatoes.
What made you decide to take the Denver Post’s buyout offer?
Go HERE to read the whole interview.
Here are just few more recent Keefe cartoons (some of which have already run on TMV — where we love cartooning):
The process of cartoonists vanishing has gone on for several years, now. For instance, here’s a piece by David Fitzsimmons, written in 2007:
The American Association of Editorial Cartoonists is so old it qualifies for the AARP. A number of newspapers, however, are retiring their cartoonists.
Celebrating its 50th year, the cartoonists association works to keep its members from going the way of the gargoyle carver and the dodo wrangler. The ferruginous pygmy owl of the newsroom, the American cartoonist is a cranky and endangered critter.
A century ago America’s papers fielded nearly 2,000 cartoonists. Today there are fewer than 80 staff cartoonists interpreting events, zinging their targets, challenging the perspectives of their readers and making their editors uneasy.
Few journalists can skewer with the entertaining unfairness of these First Amendment cage-rattlers. Searing visual satire is as American as an apple pie in the face.
Cartoonists, right and left, are being erased from newsroom budgets. Kenneling and feeding a rabid local cartoonist seems like a poor bargain when benign drawings scrawled in distant newsrooms about distant topics are available for peanuts.
Therein lies the value of the local cartoon. Occupying a space the size of a Pop-Tart on our nation’s opinion pages, the hometown cartoon is a unique local voice addressing issues.
The New York Times has no staff editorial cartoonist because it views cartoons as a grotesque, low art form that oversimplifies and distorts the truth to convey an opinion.
Bingo! A sharp, unforgettable cartoon does all that in an instant.
Read the rest of it in full.
Part of a Los Angeles Times 2008 piece by James Rainey:
I had already been talking to some of America’s best editorial cartoonists about the enduring power of a single well-drawn image when the New Yorker delivered the proof with megaton force — this week’s cover depicting that closet jihadist, Barack Obama.
Put a turban on the senator from Illinois, dress his wife up in camo and an assault rifle, and you get the whole country talking. Some folks were outraged at the elite magazine’s insensitivity; others thrilled at the satiric skewering of an absurd myth.
Newspaper publishers and editors take note: Even in that wildly divided audience, no one doubted the cartoon’s power to engage and provoke.
Because cartoonists have such a potent ability to excite, infuriate, perplex and amuse, you would think that newspapers — struggling to maintain audiences in the Internet Age — might lovingly nurture them.
Instead, cartoonists are disappearing like brunet anchors at Fox News — about a hundred are scratching out a living today, compared with about double that a couple of decades ago. And this presidential election cycle has been less engaging for their absence.
“Thanks to the Net, newspapers need more than ever a way to stand out in the crowd,” said John Cole, cartoonist for the Times-Tribune of Scranton, Pa. “And having a give-’em-hell cartoonist is an excellent way to do that.”
I talked to David Horsey of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer about cartoonists going the way of the dodo bird, and that got us wondering about a time when there will be no professionals left, leaving drawing the candidates to — well, see Horsey’s accompanying cartoon…
I might have asked The Times cartoonist to sketch out this problem but — oops — the paper ditched Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez in 2005 for reasons that remain murky. Ramirez was not replaced — part of an un-proud tradition at Tribune Co., which owns The Times and has been paring away cartoonists with some abandon.
The loss feels especially painful in regard to The Times, because many of our readers faithfully began their day with the opinion pages. They felt compelled to see how Paul Conrad (a three-time Pulitzer winner) would find yet another way to peel back the veneer on Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and scores of others.
The latest blow to the diminishing art comes in Raleigh, N.C., where the News & Observer recently decided to make 33-year veteran Dwane Powell part-time and restrict him to local issues.
What will be lost? The kind of zingers Powell fired with regularity which, in recent weeks, included: a lampoon of Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton as bulls led around by the rings in their noses by a Wall Street steer, and an acid take on GOP alienation — a pair of Republican elephants so distraught over McCain they are prepared to jump into the abyss from a (flat) Planet Neocon.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.