Everyone knows the daily newspaper industry is in rough times. Is wiping out all remaining competition the only path to survival? That’s what’s being heard a lot more these days.

MediaNews Group, run by William Dean Singleton, has become the second-largest newspaper company (after Gannett) in America, thanks to amazingly leveraged borrowing schemes that might have made Countywide Mortgage risky-loan underwriters blush a couple years ago. MediaNews is also the latest newspaper company to go into bankruptcy to ease its debts.

Singleton has been able — and willing — to buy under-performing newspapers around the country, usually on someone else’s dime. He has partnered with such companies as Gannett and the Hearst Corporation to either take troubled properties off their hands (and their books), or to acquire collections of newspapers using their money, hoping that his expertise (he’s generally been put in charge of those properties) would reward their investments with nice returns. That might have been true five years ago, but in today’s distressed climate those investments are evaporating. Hearst, one of Singleton’s biggest investor-partners, stands to see perhaps $317 million disappear in the MediaNews bankruptcy.

Singleton’s signature strategy has been “clustering” — that is, buying up several adjacent newspapers in a region — and then using “synergy” efficiencies — that is, sharing resources and staffs among these properties, such as common printing facilities or sports reporters feeding the same pro sports stories to all the papers. It’s a smart strategy… and often a ruthless one.

He built a scary reputation for cost-cutting. Staffs have been whacked repeatedly at his properties, positions and departments eliminated and copy desks merged and purged. He also acquired his properties in Oakland and Long Beach via “asset sales” that were used to void union contracts, with all staffers forced to reapply for their existing jobs; those who were rehired had to come back at much-reduced salaries.

On the other hand, I do give Singleton points for being willing to buy up newspapers at all these days, and for having bought many that would have died long ago if it wasn’t for his intervention. Weakened papers with shrunken staffs are sad things, but certainly less sad than defunct papers.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, he bought up, bit by bit, many of the mid-sized papers serving the counties surrounding San Francisco: the Oakland Tribune, San Mateo Times, Fremont Argus, Marin Independent Journal and so on. I briefly worked for him when he bought the Marin IJ from Gannett a month after I started there (a purchase that initially panicked the staff, given his reputation), and I had a perfunctory handshake with him when he made one of his perfunctory tours of his properties.

When the once highly respected Knight-Ridder newspaper chain was forced by impatient, whining institutional investors to put its properties up for sale in 2006, McClatchy newspapers (based in Sacramento) grabbed them, including such prized California papers as the San Jose Mercury News and the Contra Costa Times. However, McClatchy wanted to concentrate on its most profitable papers and chose to quickly sell off several of its newly-acquired papers, including the Merc and the CC Times.

MediaNews, in part funded, oddly enough, by Hearst (owner of the rival San Francisco Chronicle), acquired the Merc, CC Times and other properties. Suddenly, it had the Chronicle completely surrounded, now with twice the Chron’s circulation.

In Southern California, a similar surrounding happened. MediaNews gradually bought up the Daily News of Los Angeles, Long Beach Press-Telegram, Pasadena Star-News, South Bay Daily Breeze and other properties, leaving the dominant Los Angeles Times nearly surrounded and, again, with a larger combined circulation than the big metro paper.

But the Southern California newpaper landscape is bleak. Beyond bleak. The L.A. Times, through its parent Tribune Company, is also in bankruptcy; like Singleton, Sam Zell over-leveraged in boom times, only to see the floor drop out when the recession hit the newspaper business.

Just down the freeway in the next county, the once-mighty Orange County Register is in the same bankruptcy boat. And one more county south in San Diego, the Union-Tribune fell onto hard times, selling to a private equity group from Beverly Hills in 2009 (that can’t be good!) and hiring a former Daily News publisher known for his vicious cost-cutting.

The talk lately has been that none of these newspapers can stay profitable, or perhaps even survive, alone. They need to merge into one unit to make it, they say. Think of it: the L.A. Times was so powerful that it was perhaps the biggest single force in creating Southern California as we know it. And the OC Register was so successful, it whipped the Times’ ass in the OC as its ad-fat newspapers thudded onto subscribers’ driveways.

A MediaNews- L.A. Times merger would mean one company controls nearly every daily newspaper in the most-populous county in the nation. Adding the Register would mean one company controls nearly every daily in the nation’s second-largest metro area.

And the exact same thing is being proposed up north, with even more urgency and liklihood: a MediaNews-San Francisco Chronicle merger would mean one company controls nearly every daily newspaper in another of the nation’s biggest metro areas. Similar mergers are being mentioned in Minneapolis-St. Paul and other regions.

Would the U.S. government give the green light to such outrageous consolidations of voices? They might. The newspaper biz is in such poor shape these days, their lawyers and executives will be able to make strong arguments that merge-or-die is the only choice. And you can kiss goodbye the few remaining Joint Operating Agreements that remain in places like Detroit and Salt lake City. Unprofitable second papers have not been saved by their JOAs (although that was the intention of the act decades ago)… witness the deaths of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, whose financial woes threatened the survival of the stronger Seattle Times as well, and Denver’s Rocky Mountain News.

And even if there was a mega-paper in L.A. or San Francisco, would it be great, comprehensive and fearless in its news coverage? Probably not. All the affected properties have been whacking their staffs in layoff wave after layoff wave. Sections have been shrunken, merged or eliminated. The editorial cartoonists have all been laid off or reduced to part-time status, and whole graphics departments have been wiped out. The comics pages have shrunk, along with the width of the printed pages, to become nearly unreadable, and popular columnists have been given the boot. Fewer local reporters mean fewer local stories, while fewer copy editors mean way more errors in print. And what kind of editorial voice and advocacy would it have? Even if it wasn’t watered down, there would at least be one less editorial voice — probably many fewer voices — in a merged product.

Thinner, crappier papers have turned off the readers. They’re getting less product for their money, and are lately being asked to pay more for it. Print newspapers may be getting killed by Craigslist and Google and by giving it away for free online, but their own fingerprints are on the knives in their bellies as they seriously weaken the very product they’re trying to sell.

The cartoons posted here are the national and L.A.-specific versions of my take on the subject.

Would I buy and read the mega-paper? Yes, because I’m a life-long newspaper reader, but there are ever-fewer of us. Would I work for the mega-paper? Not sure… the employment picture at newspapers right now is somewhere between insecure and downright miserable.

Would William Dean Singleton come out well in a mega-paper? No doubt. Hey, there’s at least some good news for somebody in all this.

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Be sure to see the huge archive of my work (organized by topic area) on my web site at http://www.greenberg-art.com

It is the month editorial cartoonists and other journalists look forward to. More than that, it is the month we dread. It is contest month.

January is traditionally the time when the numerous journalism competitions get entered, based on material produced in the calendar year just ended. A whole year’s worth of material has to be dug up from file cabinets and random piles on desks, sorted through and the best material from there pulled out. A whole slew of entries has to be assembled, packaged and mailed. Copies of cartoons have to be produced, entry forms correctly filled out and checks for entry fees written.

The Big One, of course, is the Pulitzer. The chances of winning a Pulitzer Prize are better than winning the lottery, but not a hell of a lot better. Pulitzer Prizes for editorial cartooning typically go to full-time staff editorial cartoonists on major daily newspapers (usually, the biggest or second-biggest in one’s state, and generally east of the Mississippi) who are also nationally syndicated and appear via reprints in such places as The New York Times and Newsweek. None of these things apply to me.

On the other hand, there are typically three names chosen as finalists (of which one is usually the recipient of the prize), and that part seems to be far more democratic, with dark-horse candidates sometimes popping up. Many people who never felt they had a chance at The Big One have still become finalists, which — if spun right — can be almost as worthwhile as actually winning (”Hey, Mr. Editor, may I remind you that I nearly won the Pulitzer? That means I’m this close to winning it next time! So how about a raise or a bigger space for my cartoons?”).

Anyhow, my odds of winning the Pulitzer are extremely minimal. Yet, I go through the time-consuming hassle of assembling 20 cartoons in a nice binder and trying to write a summary of the entry (how the hell do you summarize an editorial cartoon?) every year. Why? Well, because it’s the Pulitzers. Lightning could theoretically strike… which is the same argument I use to buy Lotto tickets.

Beyond that contest are scads of others: the National Headliners Contest, the Herblock Prize, the Overseas Press Club’s Thomas Nast Prize, the Scripps Howard Foundation National Journalism Awards, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards, the Fischetti Competition, the Sigma Delta Chi Award and many others, as well as regional competitions such as the Best of the West (for the western states). Some award cash prizes (as high as $10,000 but usually far less), while some competitions offer nothing more than plaques or certificates.

Nearly all of them require entry fees. Except for the richly endowed Herblock Prize (which dropped its fees as a courtesy to the strains that cartoonists have been facing), they all demand fees with each entry, usually around $50 each, but some are more. The RFK contest is now $75, the Sigma Delta Chi costs most people $100, and the Overseas Press Club/Nast contest demands a staggering $175 per entry. Some of the sponsoring organizations makes no secret of the fact that they use these contests to raise money for their groups.

In better days, maybe ten or more years ago, daily newspapers would pick up the costs of the fees for their staffers’ works being entered. But every year, it seems, newspapers pay fewer and fewer of these fees, which can easily add up to thousands of dollars. On the various papers on which I worked, they would generally pay for about half the contests, leaving me to pick up the costs for anything else I wished to enter.

But then came 2008 and 2009. Dozens of editorial cartoonists saw their jobs whacked, leaving them nobody to sponsor their entries. Those that were still able to hold onto their staff jobs saw budgets for contest-entering cut. And many of us who scrambled to find new outlets for our cartoons found them in places other than daily newspapers — publication in which had long been a requirement of many of the competitions.

So I am forced to tally up costs and estimate odds, and forced to pick and choose. Is it worth it for me to cough up $75 for the National Headliners Contest when I have very little chance of winning? The Pulitzers are cheaper, even if my odds are no better. The OPC/Nast contest (at $175) is clearly beyond my budget, even though the odds are theoretically better because so few cartoonists would be in a position to enter it. The Best of the West contest is cheap to enter, but even pulling from just half the country still has a large field of entrants, while the L.A. Press Club awards (covering all of Southern California) has a far smaller field but a far larger entry fee (something like $80 or $85). And do I spring for a nice professional-grade binder, which I’ll never see again, to present the work more attractively? Or do the judges become turned off by that and simply want to see the cartoons even if they’re in a cheap file folder?

And, no matter what I choose to enter, there comes the hassle of selecting and printing out cartoons, assembling the cartoons in the binders, reading all the various rules and filling out the various forms. It takes many, many hours to do all this.

The payoff, of course, is in the hope of winning. Back in the old days, one would covet contest victories to leverage pay raises or perhaps to get into the staff editorial cartoonist position on a larger or more prestigious newspaper.

Nowadays, the payoff would be vindication: the idea that I’m good enough to win major contests despite having been laid off. A couple of my colleagues who saw their jobs partly whacked won major contests in 2009 (Lee Judge in Kansas City won the Fischetti, while Robert Ariail won the United Nations-affiliated Lurie Award); they also won thousands of dollars in prize money, which they sadly needed mostly just to live on.

Anyhow, I’ve got to wrap up this blog entry. I have many contest entries to work on. And maybe some lottery tickets to buy too.

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Be sure to see the huge archive of my work (organized by topic area) on my web site at http://www.greenberg-art.com

A well-written article last month in the alternative-weekly newspaper, the Pasadena Weekly, demonstrated that the woes afflicting cartoonists in print are not just limited to daily papers.

Editor Kevin Uhrich probably runs more cartoons in his publication than almost any other alt-weekly editor; the Pasadena Weekly is the only newspaper — alternative or otherwise — in Southern California to carry the editorial cartoons of Ted Rall, “This Modern World,” by Tom Tomorrow and “Life in Hell” (retitled “Life is Swell” in 2007) by Matt Groening, creator of “The Simpsons.” They also run many other local “altie” comic strips, comic panels, illustrations and editorial cartoons… including occasionally my work, drawn for the PW’s sister paper, the VCReporter in Ventura County. Uhrich quoted me extensively for his article.

Groening’s strip used to run in the much bigger LA Weekly. But that was before the cartoons were axed by its parent company. Writes Uhrich, “Rall, Perkins and Groening were once the darlings of the alternative newspaper world, but no longer, apparently. Not since February, when Village Voice Media, owners of New York’s Village Voice, the LA Weekly and a dozen other weeklies in the industry’s top markets imposed a suspension on all cartoons.”

Think of it: the man who created “The Simpsons,” the longest-running, most successful animated series in the history of television, can’t get printed at home in Los Angeles, where the TV show originates. Why? Because page space is precious, budgets are tight and profits are down… and just like in the dailies, the weeklies are finding it easy to slash the cartoonists.

“It used to be that editors would lie and claim that they didn’t have room in their newspaper. That was kind of the standard rejection. Now it’s true,” says longtime nationally syndicated cartoonist and author Ted Rall.

The number of papers carrying the politically left-leaning Rall’s work over the years — as many as 140 at one point nearly a decade ago — has dropped to just 72. “But they don’t have a lot of pages, because they don’t have enough advertising to support the pages. That’s what’s really going on,” Rall explains.

And newspapers find it not only saves money and space to cut cartoons with strong views, but also eliminates controversy, which is more tolerated in the alt-press than the daily press.

As Uhrich quoted from me: “The grand field of editorial (or ‘political’) cartooning has been disappearing faster than a polar ice cap, with newspapers eliminating positions at a rate of more than one a month across the country in the last year. There were well over 200 staff cartoonists in the 1980s, and perhaps just 80 now; exact counts are tricky, but the numbers are clearly plunging. In 2008 alone, at least 16 newspaper positions disappeared.”

In the world of dailies, which have always had editorial illustrators and cartoonists on staff, one factor contributing to all this carnage has been the increasing use of inexpensive syndicated cartoons. “For a small fraction of a cartoonist’s salary, editors can get piles of cartoons each week,” I wrote earlier this year. Another problem is politics, with the inexperience of the freelancers melding well with management’s desire not to offend anyone. “True, syndicate offerings might not be local, but that’s seen as a plus: Light topical gags fill the space, anything the least bit inflammatory goes in the trash bin, and there are no worries about offending a local councilman or advertiser who might be the publisher’s golfing buddy,” I wrote.

David Wallis, founder of the FeatureWell.com news syndicate and author of “Killed Cartoons: Casualties from the War on Free Expression,” told PW Contributing Editor Joe Piasecki in 2007 that editors and publishers of both alternative and daily papers scrap great work over fear of someone taking offense.

“Cartoonists are arguably the most incendiary journalists,” Wallis told Piasecki. “They’re the ones who hit us in a primitive place. … Part of their job brief is to offend, and that makes editors increasingly uncomfortable.”

That was nearly three years ago. Today, “At a time when news publications are in a desperate bid to attract younger readers, they are squandering an opportunity to reach those very readers by either firing [cartoonists] or minimizing the number of editorial cartoons they publish,” says Wallis.

Ted Rall attributes losing many of his customers to politics, specifically the climate of fear to offend that developed following Sept. 11.

The Twin Towers tragedy “created a very conservative atmosphere … it kind of made any liberal or left-wing or anti-government commentary seem out of touch with the political atmosphere at the time. Also, at that exact time the big dotcom advertising meltdown hit newspapers. So that fed in …and daily newspapers in particular started getting rid of their editorial cartoons,” Rall recalls.

Now, eight years later, editors seem to think that editorial cartoons don’t work because no one cares about them. “But the truth is no one cares about the editorial cartoons that they use. It would kind of be like putting a really old, fat woman on the cover of Maxim, and when that doesn’t work well, the editor saying people aren’t into women. No, they are into women, just not that woman.”

Print media in general is in big trouble, with many papers such as the Los Angeles Times issuing wave after wave after wave of layoffs. Things are better in the alternative weekly category, but not by that much.

As Megan Tady of Extra!, the magazine of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, notes, no one is immune from the ravages of these financial hard times. “Newspapers across the country are in crisis, and alt weeklies are no exception. With the rise of online content, a faltering economy that has gutted ad revenue, and decades of rampant media consolidation that have left companies debt-laden, print publications are shedding content [and quality] to try to save their sinking ships,” she writes.

Within the framework of that business paradigm, Matt Groening says cartoonists are “at the bottom of the food chain.”

“We’re hoping that weekly newspapers don’t go the way of dime novels. It may be that the time has come and passed, but I don’t know. I hope not,” says Groening.

“I don’t want anyone to think this is anything other than a dismal picture,” says Rall. “Really, the (cartooning) work has never been better; never been as smart or relevant,” Rall says. “But what we have is an economic problem and the work is not going to stay great if no one can figure out a way to get paid. All the good people are going to go and do other things.”
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This blog item is excerpted from “Cartoon Crisis” from the Pasadena Weekly, Nov. 25, 2009. To see the full article, click here.

The Sunday edition of the Daily News of Los Angeles had an odd little time warp in it: seems there was a Steve Greenberg editorial cartoon there… for the first time in 25 years.

On the Op-Ed page (not the main Editorial Page), was a column about L.A. trying to rein in its medical marijuana clinics, now numbering well over 100, if not 200. They came into existence with unclear regulations in place, and now the L.A. City Council is trying to impose some order, long after the fact of all these clinics getting up and open for business.

Running as an illustration to the column was my newest cartoon; a color version done for LAObserved.com is shown here. It was one of three cartoons on two facing opinion pages, and no doubt most readers glanced at my cartoon and moved on. But there were two significant things represented by it.

First, it was my first cartoon in the Daily News in 25 years. Yikes.

I joined the newspaper in May 1978 as their first staff editorial cartoonist, drawing the cartoons as my full-time job. The paper was then called the Valley News, based in the community of Van Nuys, but long-time readers knew it as the Valley News and Green Sheet. It was owned at the time by the Tribune Company in Chicago. The then- six-day paper added a seventh day and changed its name to the Daily News a couple years later.

It was basically a shopper with lots of local classified ads and local news tailored to its base in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley. They threw a quarter of a million papers onto people’s driveways and hoped they might be inclined to pay for it, sending kids door-to-door in hopes of collecting.

Around 1978, shortly after Tribune bought the paper and installed a new editor, Bruce Winters, they decided to make it into a “real” newspaper. They added reporters and critics — and an editorial cartoonist — and tried to make it decent enough for people to be willing to pay to receive it. They managed to get a paid circulation of around 95,000 and tapered off the freebies. Over the years it would about double that paid number.

I was a young (just months out of college) fellow when I was hired, and quickly realized I was a mildly liberal Democrat on a staunch conservative Republican ship. I survived six-plus years before a new editor squeezed me out in October 1984, after some 1,500 cartoons there.

The editorial cartoonist position would remain vacant for nearly 16 years, and the paper changed ownership twice and moved ten miles west to Woodland Hills. Finally they hired Patrick O’Connor (view his cartoons here), another young fellow just months out of college (in Ohio), in June 2000. He grew in the job, gained increased local recognition, and survived a couple of rounds of layoffs as the Daily News, like other newspapers, went into turmoil in 2008. Finally in January of this year, the position was axed and Patrick was gone. The paper shrank in width, sections and personnel.

So the second significant thing about my cartoon reprint was, it was (to my knowledge) the first local cartoon back in that newspaper in nearly a year. Like most newspapers that have cut their cartooning positions, they’ve simply gone without that local material.

Those who have followed this blog know that my cartoons for LAObserved.com began as attempts to sell that local material to the Los Angeles Times after being laid off from my daily newspaper. An irony of the situation is that Patrick O’Connor, after being laid off from his daily newspaper, has gone on to become an occasional contributor (mostly of caricatures) to… the Los Angeles Times.

Anyhow, I wonder if any Daily News readers bothered to read the signature on my pot-bunnies cartoon, and if so, if anybody did a double-take (”Greenberg??!? Didn’t that guy used to be the cartoonist here decades ago?!?”).

I don’t expect anything much to come of this reprint, except maybe to open the door to future reprints and bring in a little side money. But for one day, at least, it was amusing to find myself doing the time-warp back to my first daily newspaper.

Oh, one other bit of irony: the paper’s circulation (like everyone else’s) has shrunk lately, and the latest figure was a paid circulation of around 95,000… just about where it was when I was there.

The more things change, the more they…

Sure, it was just a trade publication, but it was an important read for those in the newspaper business, and especially for those trying to move around within it. It was important to me in particular.

And now it’s been killed.

Reflecting the woes of the industry it covered, the magazine suffered along with daily and weekly newspapers as advertising fell, circulation dropped and more people went online to read the content for free. Its final owner, Neilsen Business Media (which own Adweek, The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard and other “trades”) announced a sale of its properties to a new conglomerate. But Editor & Publisher magazine was to be shut down, not sold, by the end of the year.

E&P called itself “The Fourth Estate,” a term for the press that dates back to the reign of France’s King Louis XVI. During the reign of the magazine, which began in 1901 (with a precursor dating back to 1884), it was the weekly trade journal for the newspaper field, covering circulation, printing, reporting, syndication and other issues. It spent time tracking the growth of newspapers in the Sun Belt, nit-pickingly discussed flexographic printing techniques and followed columnists such as Ann Landers and Dear Abby as they competed and changed syndicates.

Its classified ad section was crucial to anyone looking for a job. Just-graduated college students could find jobs, and unhappy small-paper employees could seek out better ones. Deputy Managing Editors could locate places where they could become Executive Editors. And even editorial cartoonists could — on rare occasion — find listed vacancies. E&P also published annual directories the size of small phone books, with EVERY paper nationwide and nearly every staff position listed, and I know I wasn’t the only one (back in the late 1970s) poring over those listings, trying to find who had — and didn’t have — an editorial cartoonist.

E&P had two special places in the world of cartooning. First, it ran regular weekly features about syndication, which meant it reported on all the comic strips, from “Peanuts” to “Cathy” to “Calvin and Hobbes” to “Zippy the Pinhead,” and gave its readers the inside scoop about new releases and important trends. It also covered editorial cartooning hires, awards and controversies.

Syndication writer David Astor was highly regarded within the cartooning world, attending many gatherings and annual conventions and interviewing artists from all walks of the industry; his column was a must-read for cartoonists. David and I got to be friends, and it was sometimes mentioned that we looked like tall and short versions of one another.

Even though E&P went through numerous ownership and personnel upheavals, he managed to somehow survive year after year… until October 2008, when he was laid off a month before I was. The entire cartooning world was stunned… where would it get its news? E&P’s web site attempted to continue the coverage, but it was never quite the same, and cartoonists turned to other sources such as Alan Gardner’s blog, The Daily Cartoonist.

The other big deal about E&P to cartoonists was that it actually USED them. As in, paying people to produce them for the magazine. When I began reading E&P in college, it ran regular weekly editorial cartoons about newspapering, drawn by Vic Cantone and later Doug Borgstedt.

Whenever I drew a media-related cartoon, either from my college newspapers or my later daily ones, I sent them to E&P, which sometimes reprinted them (beginning in 1976, when I was still at Long Beach State).

In 1995 they were ready for a new look, and then-editor John Consoli asked me to become the new weekly cartoonist, based on that familiarity and David Astor’s recommendation. Those cartoons would run prominently, within the first few pages of most issues.

It was a challenge for me to focus on a single industry and find worthy cartooning material each week. Plus, it became my first national audience, seen by my journalism colleagues and my cartooning ones, and made me a far-better-known name withing the industry.

Three years later, a new editor phoned me as I was finishing up the week’s cartoon and informed me that they had just redesigned the magazine and they had… um, “forgotten” to include a place for the cartoons. And just like that, the cartooning came to an end.

Years later, the then-limping magazine would run a “Cartoon of the Month,” but these usually were generalized things that often had nothing to do with the news media. In January of this year my fellow blog writer here, Rob Tornoe, began doing news-media cartoons for E&P online, but they were very hard to find, buried deeply within the site.

America is all-too-quickly heading toward an era quite possibly without daily print newspapers. but it’s very sad to see that its leading industry journal — the watchdog’s watchdog — is about to be put to sleep.
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Be sure to see the huge archive of my work (organized by topic area) on my web site at http://www.greenberg-art.com

Today marks a milestone my friends never expected, but which I inwardly worried might come. One year ago, I joined the ranks of the laid-off, and began a journey of uneasy new directions.

Actually, there have been quite a number of interesting new directions since then — plus some major setbacks — all out of the blue.

Two days after the historic election of Barack Obama, the E.W. Scripps Company mandated across-the-board cuts for all its newspaper properties, and my employer, the Ventura County Star, complied by axing 44 jobs, 17 of those in the newsroom. As the sole remaining editorial artist (as well as cartoonist), I thought my position was safe, especially since I’d just received a glowing performance evaluation. But since their pages and sections were shrinking, as were their revenues, they decided an artist was no longer necessary. I was given until the end of the month.

2008, until that point, had been going pretty well. I had been doing some of my best editorial cartooning (some of which went “viral” online and got wide exposure), self-published my first book collection, came in as runner-up in the Fischetti Editorial Cartoon Competition (behind one Pulitzer-winner and tied with another), and felt secure enough for my wife and me to buy our first house.

Suddenly, it was as if I’d been on a long journey on a bus, and then that bus abruptly pulled over to the side of the road, forced me out and drove away… leaving me in the middle of nowhere.

My wife took me to dinner that evening and made sure I had something alcoholic to drink. And then I granted myself a few weeks off to let the dust settle, catch my breath, and try to figure out my next step.

I officially became a freelancer; I already had a weekly freelance gig going for the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, so that would continue. As fellow editorial cartoonist after editorial cartoonist got similarly axed across the country, the ranks of “freelancers” grew. But with newspapers everywhere hurting and laying off staff, where could we all sell cartoons to?

The local alt-weekly newspaper, the Ventura County Reporter, hadn’t mentioned the Star’s layoffs and perhaps wasn’t fully aware of the situation, so I began some casual email conversations letting them know I was out, and asked about doing some freelance illustration work for them. They invited me to come in for a visit, gushed about how much they liked my work (I was highly visible in this market, of course), but expressed regret that they lacked the funds to make much use of me. Sigh.

In Des Moines, Iowa, longtime editorial cartoonist Brian Duffy got laid off, and the local alt-weekly there offered him a regular space to keep cartooning. I mentioned this to the VCReporter (hint, hint) and we ultimately figured out a way for them to use me, contracting me to do local cartoons for one price and paying me another price to do national cartoons on alternate weeks, which I could place elsewhere as I chose.

In that same month of December, out of the blue, CartoonStock Ltd. in the United Kingdom contacted me, looking to expand the number of artists they represented. They happened to see my work online somewhere and liked it. They basically offered to sell reprints of any copyright-free work I had, splitting the take with me. It wouldn’t be much money, but it would bring in something for little extra effort.

My friend Daryl Cagle, who hosts this blog, offered me a similar setup on one of his affiliated sites, again bringing in some extra revenue for not much extra work.

Job hunting was getting nowhere. My skills had become finely tuned for the production of newspaper graphics and illustrations, landing me jobs on one newspaper after another. But with the entire newspaper industry in semi-collapse — or at least not hiring — those skills became a mismatch for anything out there. Specifically, nearly every art-related job out there was for one of three areas, none of which I was qualified for: apparel design (mostly T-shirts), packaging (and collateral graphic design) and video games. And employers could be very picky in this ultra-competitive job market, so a marginally-related artist wasn’t going to get anywhere.

My cartoon career with the VCReporter began with a bang: a big cover story written by me about the state of editorial cartooning (and myself). I’d considered freelancing back to the Star, but decided that, since they found me expendable as a staff artist, it didn’t feel right to give them back my cartooning piecemeal at a cut-rate price. Plus, the alt-weekly offered a fresh start and a whole new area of publishing.

Also, by not being in the Star, I was free to approach their biggest rival, the Los Angeles Times. The Times, which had cut its cartoonist years earlier, ran no local cartoons, and I made that my mission. I drew cartoon after cartoon and sent them off, then called to push the concept. They told me they liked the idea — in principle — but asked me to submit proposals instead of emailing finished cartoons. Fine. I hit them up three or four times a week, to no avail. Finally in late March, they bought one, a state one on Arnold Schwarzenegger and the budget deficit crisis.

I’d arrived! I was in the L.A. Times! But as it turned out, for only that one time, despite scores of attempts.

With piles of unused local cartoons, and the Daily News not biting either, I offered them to a prominent local news blog, LAObserved.com, which was delighted to have local cartoons. Overnight I became the most visible person doing cartoons about L.A. and surroundings. Movers and shakers and media people all seemed to see LAObserved. It wasn’t bringing in money, but the visibility could open the door to other freelance work, which has happened, albeit to a small degree. Those cartoons even got on TV a couple times.

Another thing came out of the blue. A startup web site out of The Netherlands was being created with international editorial cartooning and short documentary videos as its focus. The Video Journalism Movement, like CartoonStock, just happened to see my work online and liked it. They pay in Euros, but what the hell, it’s still money. I was the first American cartoonist to join in.

Not everything has been a triumph. Nobody would hire me, even part-time. Almost nobody would interview me or for that matter, even acknowledge my applications. My main source of income was state unemployment benefits, and combined with all my freelancing I was, at best, bringing in half my former income. “Multiple small revenue streams” is the new business model, and living more modestly is the new day-to-day operation.

Then in mid-September, WHAM. A retinal detachment temporarily blinded me in one eye. The vision is very slowly improving since surgery, but is distorted and non-binocular. I am still drawing, and well, but slowly and requiring a lot of Photoshop work, and the state EDD checks have been replaced by state disability checks.

So here I am, a year out of work. On the one hand, I’m pretty much a full-time editorial cartoonist again (other than whatever illustration and graphics assignments I scrape up), something I hadn’t been since the mid-1980s, and draw nearly every day. The quality is good. And I am pretty much my own editor. There are editors on all the publications and web sites I contribute to, but it’s not like the old days of trying to run sketches by editors in person; I’m very self-directed now. I’ve become an online cartoonist, a niche cartoonist and an alt-weekly cartoonist. In some ways, my visibility has never been greater. I can set my own hours, can run errands anytime and have time to visit my parents (both 87, and needing much more assistance from me).

On the other hand, here in my mid-50s I’ve never worked so hard for so little money. I’m home alone working most of the time, which the dog and cat do appreciate. There are days of battling boredom and depression. The market for outside jobs (when I’m able to look again) is wretched. And when you’re a freelancer, as my friend Scott Shaw wrote on Facebook, you’re essentially always on deadline.

I’m very blessed to have my wife, Roberta. She has a good job and is extremely understanding… not all that long ago our situations were reversed, and she was on a job roller-coaster and relying on my healthcare benefits. And I have my family members, friends, professional colleagues and people in my religious circles offering support. I really don’t know how I would’ve gotten through this past year alone, especially when the eye problems hit. I really don’t know how so many of my fellow citizens get by in these tough economic times.

Overall, my spirits are OK. The cartooning is as good as ever, the eyesight is slowly improving and I have all these new, mostly unexpected ventures. And I have absolutely no idea what next year will look like for me.

But I guess we’ll all find out together, dear blog readers. Stay tuned. Or make that ‘tooned.

My alma mater is marking its 60th year, as is its student newspaper. Long Beach State, or more properly California State University Long Beach, was born in 1949 and was saddled with the school nickname of the Forty-Niners (the lame football mascot was a big-chinned character holding a gold-mining pan… yeah, real scary to opposing teams) and the campus paper became the Daily Forty-Niner.

Unfortunately, due to my still-recovering vision being too “iffy’ for a 128-mile round-trip drive, I had to skip the paper’s 60th anniversary commemoration and was unable to see some of my old friends and fellow campus newspaper staffers.

I arrived at CSULB in Fall 1974, or 25 years into the 60, a community college transfer student. And while I’m shocked to think of the passage of so much time, I have some vivid, and fond, memories of those student days.

At the community college I got quite interested in editorial cartooning — it was during the Watergate era, when there was great, powerful cartooning being done — and I tried my hand at it, but only for sketchbooks for my art classes. The campus paper told me I couldn’t get published unless I was on their staff, so I meekly gave up and waited for my transfer to Long Beach. I didn’t really quite know what I wanted to do in art… except maybe get some cartoons into the school newspaper.

I nervously approached the Daily Forty-Niner newsroom and showed my cartoons to the editor, the late Bob Judge, who passed me off to the Opinion editor, Jim Tortolano, who said he’d consider them. My first submission (on the just-resigned Richard Nixon) didn’t get in. But my second, a mediocre one on the new president, Gerald Ford, did get published. And suddenly, oh my gawd, I was a published editorial cartoonist!

Not wanting to give them a chance to forget me again (or run somebody else), I drew another cartoon for the next edition with an opinion page, two days later. And then I drew another cartoon for the next edition with an opinion page. And so on, for what became pretty much an unbroken series of cartoon with the editorials over the next three years.

On my first cartoons my signature was a hard-to-read little scribble. Starting out, I didn’t know if editorial cartoonists routinely got punched in the face or got death threats or such. As my confidence grew, so did my signature (a bit too much so at one point).

My early work was not terribly strong in either art or ideas — just somewhat better than average student work — but I thought I was doing pretty well. My initial cockiness was shattered when an older student mentioned that there had been “a couple of pretty good cartoonists” from just a couple years prior, and then I discovered the professional-caliber work that preceded me.

Dick Wright (there circa 1971-72) drew like Mad magazine’s Mort Drucker, and went on to work for dailies in San Diego, Columbus, Nashville and most notably Providence (R.I.). He left cartooning for ministry work a couple years ago. And Bill Schorr (there circa 1972-73), drew like the great Ron Cobb of the L.A. Free Press, and went on to work for the Kansas City Star, the defunct L.A. Herald Examiner and the New York Daily News.

Humbled, I realized I had to get a LOT better, and soon. I analyzed each cartoon I drew for mistakes and poor drawings (”Hmm, I can draw feet better than that.”), thought harder about my ideas, and saw my work improve dramatically from semester to semester. By 1976 I was feeling pretty good and won national and state student cartooning awards.

More importantly, I was gaining respect for the first time in my life. I was short, wore thick eyeglasses and was as nerdy as they came. Nobody cared what I said or thought all my life. My moment of revelation was one day during some discussion in the Forty-Niner newsroom when someone said, “I’d like to hear what Steve thinks.” That was when I realized my editorial cartooning was capable of transforming me, with my artistic efforts making me into more of a person than I’d previously been.

I got more involved in the newspaper than I was with my Art Department classes — the cartooning was more fun and less pressure - and to this day I keep up with far more Journalism alumni than Art Department ones. Some Forty-Niner grads went on to prominent newspapers (Cathleen Decker and Joel Sappell to the L.A. Times, Sara Terry to the Christian Science Monitor, Chris Woodyard to USA Today), some went into public relations, some bounced around. Within six months of graduating I landed a full-time job as the first staff cartoonist for the Valley News, later known as the Daily News of Los Angeles.

I seldom look at my college work (or my early professional work) as it makes me cringe at the relatively poor artwork and the ideas that could’ve been focused better.

But the days with my campus newspapers — yes, plural; I was one of a group of Forty-Niner rebels who started up a second, more freewheeling campus paper in 1977 — were among the most fun of my life. I hung out in the newsroom, slumped in soft chairs in side rooms in the student union to draw the cartoons, got involved a bit with the physical production. I eagerly picked up the daily newspapers, utterly amazed to see my work actually IN PRINT. And abandoned myself to fantasies about my career-to-be on real, big-time daily newspapers as a staff editorial cartoonist.

I’ve certainly had my ups and downs on that front, but I’ve achieved a lot that I never would have had it not been for the Daily Forty-Niner (or as it’s now called, the Daily 49er).

Happy Anniversary, folks.

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Be sure to see the huge archive of my work (organized by topic area) on my web site at http://www.greenberg-art.com

A new global forum for ideas as brought forth by editorial cartoonists and video journalists has made its debut, and I am delighted to be a part of it.

The Video Journalism Movement, at www.vjmovement.com, comes out of The Netherlands and like many good ideas, began in a bar.

Thomas Loudon was a Dutch video journalist covering the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq who realized that journalists were often hamstrung by the newsroom agendas of their employers from doing the stories they really wanted to do. Comparing notes with other foreign journalists, he learned that they felt the same constraints. He also realized that the different journalists tended to come up with utterly different stories despite being in the same place doing the same work, and began to formulate the concept of using a multitude of viewpoints online to shape a more complete picture of events.

Loudon contacted his web-savvy college buddy Arend Jan van den Beld, who shared his enthusiasm for the concept, and over drinks the VJ Movement was born. They decided to use two high-impact forms of visual communication, videos and editorial cartoons, as the means to distill the various points of view to the online audience, and compile collections from around the world to allow for a broad variety of opinions and viewpoints.

They recruited Tjeerd Royaards, a Dutch cartoonist in Amsterdam, to dig up cartoonists to become part of the project. Royaards happened upon my web site, liked my work, and asked me back in March to participate; I was the first American cartoonist to become involved.

There are about three dozen editorial cartoonists from around the world at the moment, all with very different styles; other American contributors include Karl Wimer in Denver, Douglas Potter in Austin and Tom Kerr in Omaha. There are about 80 video journalists at the moment, all professional freelancers, including Israelis and Palestinians, Indians and Pakistanis.

“There is more than one truth” is VJM’s slogan, and they consider themselves an alternative news model. All content is produced exclusively for the site; there are no repostings of syndicated cartoons here. The content is directed into eight broad “themes” such as Conflict, Superpowers, Human Interaction and Natural Resources, although those themes allow for quite a bit of latitude.

Another unique feature is that all content is chosen by the votes of fellow contributors and members of the public who register and join (for free). The initial content to start the site up was chosen by the VJM team, but once the site went beta the voting mode went into place.

Prospective cartoons are posted in the “Newsroom” and require a certain amount of votes (five, at least as of last month) to be approved. The tricky part for contributors is whether to spend the effort to produce a finished or near-finished cartoon that might well get shelved, or to post a rough sketch that won’t appeal as much to those voting; there’s also the concern of wordlessness versus captions, given the multi-cultural voters. Videos are proposed by summaries of the intended footage and may take the form of interviews, stories or explanations. Comments on all proposals are encouraged.

And unlike many an internet startup (or many established sites, Miss Huffington), they pay contributors (in Euros, but what the hell) and have thus far managed to secure funding from a mix of media foundations, government programs and miscellaneous contributions.

It’s an interesting experiment. It’s a a new global meeting place for news and views.

And for editorial cartooning, it’s a new forum. And our field can certainly use a little Movement in that direction.

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Be sure to see the huge archive of my work (organized by topic area) on my web site at http://www.greenberg-art.com

The past week has seen one big win for editorial cartooning jobs, and one big loss.

The big win was Drew Litton, who is the rarest of breeds, a sports editorial cartoonist. His job abruptly came to a halt when his newspaper, Denver’s Rocky Mountain News, shut down, throwing him (and his coworker Ed Stein) out of work after 26 years there.

But the Chicago Tribune has just hired him to do a weekly, large color editorial cartoon on area sports teams. The feature, called “The Main Event,” debuted on Oct. 31st and featured the Cubs. You can see his first effort at http://www.drewlitton.com/ (just scroll down a bit and look for the large word “Smack” on the Tribune page).

Just months ago, the Tribune had been the object of anger in the editorial cartooning world for having left their staff editorial cartoonist position vacant for nearly a decade following the death of Jeff MacNelly. But they hired Scott Stantis away from Birmingham — the best editorial cartooning news in a largely bad year — and now with taking on Litton’s work the Tribune has suddenly become the stellar example of support for the field of editorial cartooning… which is something they used to be, employing as many as three staff editoonists at a time.

In a great sports town, Litton should have plenty of material to work from… perhaps enough to convince the Trib to increase their use of him beyond one day a week.

But the week’s bad news: Dwane Powell is calling it quits at the News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina, after 35 years there.

Sure, he’s 65, but this was not a standard retirement scenario. Powell had been coldly and abruptly demoted to part-time status at the N&O last year despite his enormous local popularity and impact. His folksy, yet wild-and-crazy cartoons and drawing style were a hit with Raleigh readers and with his professional colleagues, who considered him a cartoonists’ cartoonist.

The News & Observer had tried to keep the cut quiet, hoping readers wouldn’t notice a big drop-off in the cartoons, but word leaked out and a “shit storm” ensued, according to Powell. The paper realized it had likely made a mistake, but Powell decided, at age 64, to accept the three-times-a-week situation (and 40 percent pay cut) as a means of easing toward retirement with full benefits.

The editorial page editor of the N&O has said there were no immediate plans to replace Powell (who may or may not contribute occasionally back to the paper), so this most likely means another staff position is permanently lost. Since Drew Litton’s new situation is a weekly freelance gig, that’s one more net loss for the severely shrinking world of newspaper editorial cartooning staff jobs.

In 1981 there were eight editorial cartoonists working in North Carolina. With Powell gone that leaves just one, Kevin Siers at the Charlotte Observer.

North Carolina, with crazy characters to work with such as Jesse Helms, had been a cartooning playground. Now the lampooning is down to one cartoonist; Powell is considering remaining with Creators Syndicate, but that would preclude his doing local cartoons.

Drew and Dwane are friends of mine and great talents that took some tough hits over the past year. My best wishes to them both as their new paths take shape.

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Be sure to see the huge archive of my work (organized by topic area) on my web site at http://www.greenberg-art.com

The cartooning world, like most fields, has its own awards, and it just handed out one in L.A. to a man who wasn’t even in the room. Or was he?

On Saturday night at its annual banquet, the Los Angeles-based Comic Art Professional Society (CAPS) honored an ailing legend in the comic book industry, Gene Colan, and did a nifty handing of the award to him 3,000 miles away.

Gene was one of the big names in comic book illustration, mentioned along with such names as Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko for dynamism and innovation, although Gene could outdraw either of those two.

His style was influenced by motion pictures and involved masterful use of light and shadow, dramatic angles and unorthodox arrangements of comic book panels, breaking away from standard grids. He often employed photo-realism and was noted for his expressive faces and detailed backgrounds.

He started with Marvel Comics’ predecessor, Timely Comics, back in 1946, walking into their New York offices with his portfolio and being offered a job on the spot by the legendary editor, Stan Lee (who was also honored by CAPS a few years earlier).

Gene went on to work for National Comics, predecessor to DC Comics, and went on to work for Warren, Eclipse, DC and other publishers, but primarily for Marvel. Originally drawing war-stories books, he graduated into superheroes including Captain America, the Sub-Mariner, Dr. Strange and most notably, Daredevil. He also drew for Batman, Wonder Woman, The Tomb of Dracula and Howard the Duck, and recently took on a Simpsons comic book, rendering Bart, Homer and the gang in three-dimensional shadowed semi-realism.

But now, at age 83, he is in ill health, including hospitalization for liver problems. Colan has been the recipient of assistance from groups such as the Hero Initiative, organized to help comic book creators in their “golden age” years, and CAPS. He managed to travel to San Diego for this year’s ComicCon, but the trip there and back to Brooklyn exhausted him, and he was told by his doctor not to travel anymore.

This posed a problem for CAPS, which had already decided to award its annual trophy, the “Sergio” — named after Sergio Aragonés, a co-founder of CAPS and probably its best-known member — to Colan. Replacement recipients were briefly considered, as was canceling the banquet, but it was finally decided to go ahead and honor the man they wanted to honor, and see if it was possible to arrange some kind of video hook-up.

Thanks to the magic of Skype (allowing computer-to-computer “phone” calls), the built-in cameras in Mac laptops and a newly-purchased projector, a live video hook-up was arranged. As the tributes to Gene began around 8 pm PDT, he and his wife Adrienne were able to follow the entire presentation in Brooklyn (at three hours later time) and share their reactions.

The best moment of the evening came as CAPS President Pat McGreal held up the “Sergio” award, looked toward the laptop facing him and said, “Gene, I’d now like to hand you this trophy” as he thrust his hand, holding a duplicate statue, toward the laptop. At that moment in Brooklyn, Adrienne unveiled the real statue - previously shipped and hidden in the room — and continued the handoff to Gene.

He was visibly delighted, stunned and moved, reading the inscription and expressing his amazement and gratitude. And as the scheduled portion of the event in L.A. wrapped up, he stayed by the laptop, chatting one-on-one with anybody in the room who wanted to talk, including many comic book artists whom he’d inspired. As my wife and I left the banquet room, Gene was still animatedly chatting away, despite it being around 2 pm, New York time.

It felt nice to honor a major figure in comic books, which is the background of most CAPS members, to stick with our original choice for the honoree and using technology to make everything work together in real time despite a 3,000-mile distance.

I haven’t really followed the comic-book world through my adulthood, but am grateful to have been there to honor a man whose work livened up my teenage comic-book-fanatic years.

Here’s to you, Gene. And thanks to you too, Skype.

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Be sure to see the huge archive of my work (organized by topic area) on my web site at http://www.greenberg-art.com