Cartoons Comic strips

New York Times executive editor: NYT is missing cartoons

Skip to comments

Alan Gardner January 24, 2014 1 minute 4 comments

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.