Blitt, Ohman, & Sorensen on the Future of Political Cartooning
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Barry Blitt, Jack Ohman, and Jen Sorensen discuss the promise and many perils of their chosen artform.
[I]n the year 2025, editorial cartooning was back on the front page. Washington Post Opinion editor David Shipley released a statement that the paper had killed Telnaes’s cartoon to avoid redundancy because they had just published a column on the same topic and had another in the hopper.
It immediately became a stand-in for much bigger conversations around media ownership, American oligarchs, objectivity and myriad subjects beyond—including, of course, the role of the editorial cartoon in 2025.
To probe just that, we arranged a Zoom roundtable with a trio of some of the best political artists and illustrators working today: Pulitzer Prize winner Barry Blitt, Pulitzer Prize winner Jack Ohman, and Pulitzer finalist and Herblock Prize winner Jen Sorensen.
Our conversation proved to be insightful, stirring and at times depressing, but ultimately honest. Collectively, not unlike the best editorial cartoons.
Zachary Petit for Fast Company hosts a discussion “on the uncertain future of political cartooning.”
Have any of you ever dealt with incidents similar to Ann’s in your careers?
Ohman: Oh God, yes. I mean, I’ve worked on five daily newspapers. I’ve been in national syndication with four different syndicates…
How has the field changed since you all started out?
Sorensen: The percentage of income that I make from the web relative to print has changed dramatically. I mean, I started out in papers like The Village Voice and other alt-weeklies, and I still actually am in quite a few of them, but I was all print at first. I guess this was the early 2000s. And then, very gradually over time…
How would you all describe the financial side of cartooning in 2025?
Blitt: Shit. [Laughter.] I mean, I feel a bit like a fish out of water here because I’m really not a regular editorial cartoonist, but just speaking as an illustrator, I’m getting a quarter of what I might’ve got for something 15 years ago…
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