Tomorrow is the deadline set by The Hearst Corporation to have a buyer for their Seattle Post-Intelligencer or they’ll shut down the newspaper. Last week, news leaked that some 20 or so employees were offered a provisional contract to stay on in a web-only version of the newspaper indicating that perhaps the company will try to keep it going on the web. For those of us in the cartooning community, the question is what will happen to David Horsey, their two-time Pulitzer winner. Mike Cavna has interviewed David and we learn that fortunately, David is technically employed directly by Hearst Corporation not the P-I which will allow him to provide cartoons for the 16 papers plus his additional writings that he’s been doing lately.
Seattle PI to go web; Horsey to remain employed
4 thoughts on “Seattle PI to go web; Horsey to remain employed”
Comments are closed.
That’s great news for David and the people of Seattle.
As historians of the form know, working for a chain of newspapers resurrects an employment model that used to be quite common. I think we’ll see more of this sort of micro-syndication in the future.
I spent 13 or 14 years working at the P-I with David, and never knew that he worked for Hearst, although at least one old columnist also had that setup, and David’s arrangement might have come around the time I left there. He’s always had an elevated standing within his paper and the community that almost nobody else in the profession has had, and it was clear he would survive in some form.
The Seattle P-I has been an excellent paper and a feisty competitor, and its closing is tragic. An online-only paper that pays crap wages to a handful of survivors is no substitute.
If David was an employee of Hearst, why hasn’t his work been distributed among those 16 newspapers before now? It seems like an obvious way to save those other papers money by having David’s cartoons run in their newspapers too.
“He?s always had an elevated standing within his paper and the community that almost nobody else in the profession has had”
Indeed. I hope this arrangement allows him to continue doing local cartoons, even if only occasionally…