Andertoons (AMS) takes a daring step, making a joke based on the reader having a good vocabulary, but which is funnier if the reader has just enough of a good vocabulary to know what the word means and to feel somewhat proud of that. That is, if ubiquitous/ubiquity were more common words, there’d be nothing […]
Jack Ohman (Tribune) had this cartoon up before Jeff Bezos broke a pair of rules: Bezos has written a too-long piece for his newspaper explaining why he decided not to publish a presidential endorsement but not explaining why they earlier published congressional endorsements or why he waited until eleven days before the election to make […]
This Bob Eckstein cartoon came along at a propitious time, because I opened a Threads account and soon thereafter showed an interest in writers. Ever since, my feed has been filled with postings by people who ought to get off line and write something instead of talking about it. I took writing courses in college […]
Remember that graffito that read “We are the people our parents warned us about?” Well, as Non Sequitur (AMS) points out, we are now the people we warned ourselves about. I miss the old days, but when I really think back, I realize that most of the fun things I did then fall under the […]
At the risk of sounding like an incompetent, unpatriotic university president, I think context matters, and Jefferson’s oft-quoted remark about government without newspapers versus newspapers without government deserves some. He was writing specifically about Shay’s Rebellion, but he might have been writing about January 6, except that, while Washington had political opponents, most hard-core Tories […]
In case you missed it, Paul Fell summarizes the growing, and increasingly official, war on the free press. On one hand, we have a Civil War festering within the nation, by which I mean without the benefit of one set of states going off in one direction and another set staying put. Instead, the rebels […]
(Jack Ohman — Pulitzer Prize, 2016) (Joel Pett — Pulitzer Prize, 2000) (Kevin Siers — Pulitzer Prize, 2014) This is, alas, a Juxtaposition of the Fired. The McClatchy chain of newspapers, which has been struggling in bankruptcy for more than three years, has decided to cut costs by eliminating three of the nation’s leading editorial […]
David Fitzsimmons drew this cartoon in 2008, but now he’s “writing about us” himself, or, at least, “us” in a modified sense, since he took a buyout in January and became a freelancer. (h/t to Michael Rhode) Temporarily, he predicts: Readers familiar with the industry will reel in horror to learn that the Arizona Daily […]
The current question for political commentators seems to be “Can you walk and chew gum at the same time?” Adam Zyglis drew this cartoon before SCOTUS handed down their abortion decision last week, but it’s a good marker of where we’re at, because, amid all the uproar over that story, there has been a […]
If you haven’t read my Daily Cartoonist partner DD Degg’s report on Gannett’s killing of editorial pages, you really must. It represents a significant blow to editorial cartooning as well as to newspapers in general. I’m opening with this 2009 Pearls Before Swine (AMS) because it sums up the actual challenge, and, if it’s oversimplifying […]
You’ve likely already seen Sunday’s Doonesbury (AMS), which has not only been posted by a lot of editorial cartoonists but was featured here by my colleague, DD Degg. Now you get to hear what I think. Kim notes in that last panel that newspapers themselves are endangered, which — wit all doo respeck — seems […]
Graeme MacKay starts us out easy, with a supply chain gag that, for some reason, doesn’t depict a broken chain with some politician in the middle, hanging on by the broken ends. Perhaps he didn’t get the memo. However, he hit me at the right moment, because I bought my Halloween candy the other […]
First Dog on the Moon touches on several points, beginning with how stories get assigned, but you’ll have to go here to read the whole thing Most newsroom people at daily papers work from just after lunch until roughly 9 pm or so, which means that, for the most part, they only know each other, […]
(Some thoughts about newspapers, while I take Mother’s Day off to go visit the Aged P.) Here’s the protagonist of an 1867 novel, “Ned Nevins, the News Boy, or, Street Life in Boston,” in which the plucky lad worked to rise above his grim surroundings, as plucky lads would in popular literature for the […]
The railroads did not stop growing because the need for passenger and freight transportation declined. That grew. The railroads are in trouble today not because that need was filled by others (cars, trucks, airplanes, and even telephones) but because it was not filled by the railroads themselves. They let others take customers away from them […]