Philadelphia’s local CBS station is reporting that Pulitzer Prize winner Tony Auth, the editorial cartoonist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, is leaving the paper after 40+ years. The two Philly papers (Inquirer and Daily News) and their joint website (philly.com) are currently up for sale and newsrooms are being combining. The Inquirer’s owner is also trying to trim 37 positions from the paper. The Daily News has a Pulitzer winning cartoonist Signe Wilkinson.
The CBS station reports that it is rumored that Tony will be working with a “non-profit website associated with public radio.”
I’ll post more news as I learn about it.
And there will be yet another full-time editorial cartoonist position that will go unfilled.
Auth is great, sad news, hope Signe is safe and wish they look for another cartoonist to fill Auth’s position… or are both things too much to ask for?…
Right now, I’d take Signe being safe over filling Tony’s position.
But let’s face it we are an endangered species.
Is Free Speech inherently “politically incorrect” if it involves pictures? Seems like newspapers have been jettisoning political cartoonists since the rise of ‘political correctness’…
One aspect of “political correctness” (a term which should cut both ways but never seems to) is that we’re a good half-century removed from the days when most towns of any size had two papers: One blue-collar and one white-collar, that would go at it hammer-and-tongs along partisan lines, much as people today choose between Fox and MSNBC for their dose of self-righteous stroking.
In those days, strong opinions were part of the marketing strategy, but, invariably, when the merger came, there would be an editorial from the now-hyphenated newspaper promising that they would be, well, fair and balanced.
There are still newspapers with editorial pages dominated by extremists of a particular side, but the majority are trying to be neither hot nor cold. (A small joke for the Biblically literate)