Buried at the end of this interview between John Seigenthaler of Aljazeera and Executive Editor of the New York Times Jill Abramson is an admission that if there was one thing that was missing from the New York Times is that there are no cartoons. Here’s the pertinent snippet:
What do you think is missing now from The New York Times?
Cartoons.
Seriously?
I mean, well, we’ve never had cartoons. We run, you know, the review section runs one.
Political cartoons?
But we don’t have, like, a strip, like “Doonesbury.”
You’d like to see that?
I don’t know. Maybe so. It depends on who’s in what.
I have a hard time believing NYT editors don’t know that comics are popular or that it isn’t an oft requested feature, but her last response indicates to me that they don’t lose a lot of sleep over it. Last thought: Given the paper’s brand, I would argue that the better option for them to add more cartoons isn’t to create a comics page and populate it with syndicated content, but do more what Matt Bors is doing over at the Nib and have a comic editor with a heavy rotation of cartoons.
I’ve sent the NYT offices Op-Ed cartoons often. The most I’ve ever seen back from them are form letters. I’m a stickler for persistence though.
There is strange, really strange and then there is the NY Times.
FYI- the last NY Times staff editorial cartoonist was Edwin Marcus 1959 and he only appeared weekly.
Let’s not forget the NYT’s attempt to get professional editorial cartoonists to submit their work for free for the chance to win a $250 “prize”! That should count for something!