If you were a member of the Tiger Woods Fan Club, did you drop your membership? If you had a “John Edwards for President 2008″ bumper sticker, did you scrape it off after his scandal? Well, what do you do if you’re an editorial cartoonist who drives (and has loved) Toyota cars?

After driving Ford vehicles in my younger days, I bought my first new Toyota (a Camry) in 1988 and stuck with the brand.

When the second-generation Prius came out, I got on a waiting list, and went to considerable efforts and distances within California to obtain one, becoming one of the first in my city to get one. it became Motor Trend’s “Car of the Year” and there were waiting lists nationally for the cars, with many dealers charging premiums of thousands of dollars above sticker price for those eager to buy the cars (I paid list price only, having learned via Yahoo user groups to go through the Internet sales departments of dealerships rather than walk onto a car lot).

I recently hit 100,000 miles on my Prius, and it’s been a wonderful car and very problem-free. I don’t often hit the 50 miles-per-gallon per tank I frequently did when I drove long distances each day to work, but I tend to be in the 47 mpg range. I am irritated if I fill up and the previous tank got only 45 mpg.

It’s a well designed, well thought-out car. It was über-cool to drive when I first got it, and I enjoyed answering the questions of passers-by who stared at the then-new hybrid model in amazement (”No, you don’t have to plug it in. No, the engine didn’t stall out, it just seems to shut off at red lights but picks up right away when I touch the gas pedal. Yes, it can run entirely in electric mode, at certain speeds for short periods. Yes, I do have to put gas in it, just not quite as often.”).

So now, like other Toyota owners, I’m finding myself alarmed at each new accusation against the company and its lethargic response to a growing mountain of safety complaints. I’ve had an excellent experience with my car. And yet… there’s now a nagging little bit of unease. Could this car suddenly accelerate out of control?

I don’t really believe sticky gas pedals are at fault. And I never bought into the idea that floor mats were an issue except perhaps in very isolated instances.

But what do I do as an editorial cartoonist? My fellow cartoonists have had a field day blasting Toyota on a weekly basis. I’ve had mixed feelings, but can’t ignore a major news story either.

I drew the first cartoon shown here in early February, wanting to express my suspicion that the electronics of the cars might be at fault — a view held by many, and the subject of Congressional probes, but vehemently denied by Toyota. The electronic systems are very difficult to diagnose, very expensive to fix, and Toyota claims it can’t replicate the acceleration problem in its lab tests and is certain it’s not the cause of the problem.

The second cartoon, a parody of Edvard Munch’s famous painting “The Scream,” was drawn weeks later.

Will I keep drawing cartoons critical of Toyota? Certainly, as news events dictate. Do I feel a bit odd slamming the company even though my personal experience has been good? Maybe, but the company has played it too coy and seems to dig itself into an ever-deeper hole, and that’s fair game for cartooning.

Would I buy a Toyota car again? Well, like other consumers, I’ll need to feel reassured that these problems really do get corrected and I won’t have to worry about my car being safe. Had I won the lottery six months ago I probably would’ve bought a third-generation 2010 Prius.

But at the moment I have more confidence in the cartoons than in the Toyota leadership.

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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

I was shocked — well, somewhat anyhow — and saddened to read that Marianne Ratcliff, the Opinion Page Editor for the Ventura County Star, has taken a buyout offer and resigned. She was the best and most supportive editor an editorial cartoonist could hope for.

During my six and a half years there, she was unfailingly supportive, encouraging, cheerful and kind. She held onto optimistic viewpoints, whether it was about world events, national politics or the future of the Star itself, and she believes local newspapers will survive because people will always require “information without spin.”

Marianne spent the past 15 years at the Star, arriving as the Assistant Opinion Page Editor in 1994 and becoming Opinion Page Editor in 2001, the year before I arrived at the Star. Earlier on, she was with the (now defunct) Oxnard Press-Courier and the Santa Paula Daily Chronicle, in the town where she’s long resided.

She was always respectful of opposing views and tried hard to keep the Star fair. Conservative readers might dispute that — after all, the paper ran my liberal cartoons, the very liberal columns of Richard Larsen (who left the Star in the same wave that claimed my job), and the staff editorials generally tended to lean a bit toward the liberal side; old readers called it the “Red Star” in the 1970s and earlier. But the paper endorsed Republicans quite often, including George W. Bush (twice) and his congressional cheerleader Rep. Elton Gallegly, runs very conservative Terry Paulson columns and Bill O’Reilly columns (he blew kisses at the Star for wanting to use the term “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays”) and runs many conservative editorial cartoons; those by Michael Ramirez of Investor’s Business Daily increased dramatically after I left.

Marianne was always very supportive of my cartoons. She rarely vetoed a proposed cartoon, and the ones she didn’t go for were usually rejected because she just didn’t “get it” (which is difficult to argue against), or it “didn’t read as intended” to her, or there was some issue of over-the-line taste — not because of political disagreement. Actually, I can’t recall a cartoon sketch being shot down over its political view.

The editorial page or opinion editor on a newspaper can make or break an editorial cartoonist. Besides playing a role in the actual hiring, they can use a variety of means to try to control — or deny — which cartoons make their pages. At my previous newspaper in Marin County, I saw about half of all my proposed cartoons get shot down. During my brief stint at the San Francisco Examiner, an even lower percentage made it through. At the Star, probably 90 percent of the proposals sailed through on the initial try — others, often with a bit of tweaking.

During a particularly trying time for me in early 2004, when an editor tried to increase my graphics output at the expense of my editorial cartooning and the cartoons dropped to just a couple a month, she tried to work on restoring them and kept telling me to hold on, keep the faith and that the situation will improve. And eventually, it did and the cartooning resumed to twice weekly.

Actually, I had a “scouting report” on her before I ever came to the Star. John Sherffius, who preceded me as another graphic artist/cartoonist at the Star and had gone on to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (he’s now in Boulder, Colorado), told me she was the nicest and most supportive editor he’d ever had, and that I would be lucky to work with her. And he was right.

Marianne is a serious, thoughtful journalist. She always considered other people’s opinions and gave much thought before she wrote anything, and always took her job, and journalism overall, seriously. She was never afraid to tackle controversial topics in print or take unpopular stands. At the same time, she was always kind of perky and enthusiastic, a fair-complexioned, wide-eyed Midwest-born woman who might remind one a bit of the “Emma Pillsbury” character on the TV series “Glee.”

Marianne is still fairly young, with two kids (ages 6 and 9), and her immediate focus will be to spend more time with them and with her husband Kevin, who’s had to take on more of the child-rearing duties given his wife’s unrelenting deadlines. Some suspect she left the Star over dismay at all the cuts in personnel, features, budgets and overall quality, but she declares she just needed a breather and more family time. She states, “I have no idea what I will do next” but expects to be connected with journalism in some way.

The Star will remain in good hands, with the thoughtful veteran staffer Mike Craft moving up from Deputy Opinion Page Editor and Mike Comeaux, another great guy, becoming the new deputy editor.

But the newspaper has been hit hard by waves of layoffs and buyouts the past few years, along with the pending wipeout of all copy desk and page-design personnel as those functions transfer to Corpus Christi, Texas. A lot of good journalists, and good people, are gone.

And now Marianne Ratcliff, the “conscience of the newsroom” and its most optimistic editor, has left, making for one of the newspaper’s biggest losses.

Best wishes to you, Marianne, and I hope to read your future writings somewhere soon.

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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

When you’re in the opinion business, it’s pretty much a “given” that you don’t comment on your current employer. After all, it’s considered bad form to bite the hand that feeds you. But what about a former employer?

I’ve avoided any cartoons about the Ventura County Star since my position was cut in Nov. 2008. They made a series of job eliminations then at the command of their parent company, the E.W. Scripps Co., and while I disagreed with the specific layoffs — especially mine — I understood the reasoning even if I disliked it. But I tried to leave under civil terms, have many friends still there and in fact was wrestling with the notion of freelancing my editorial cartoons back to them; their Opinion Page editor was always very supportive, and freelancing cartoons there was permissible under the terms of my departure.

Ultimately I decided I was not comfortable doing so, and wound up talking with their alternative-weekly competitor, the Ventura County Reporter, where I now draw my cartoons.

Recently there was a bombshell at the Star, again ordered by the parent company, E.W. Scripps: all copy editor and designer positions (affecting at least 15 people) would be eliminated, and those functions would be transferred to a desk in Corpus Christi, Texas. In my last blog entry, I ranted about what a sad and probably misguided move that was. The Star, in its pages, failed to mention this story at the time.

Last week, the Star made even more layoffs — nine, including some longtime editors and writers. Again, no mention right away. Finally on Feb. 19th they ran a “staff reports” story mentioning the new layoffs and added these words: “…and reassigned 15 other workers to new positions as part of a corporate restructuring.”

“Reassigned” is a word that suggests all these people will still have jobs — just other duties. As I understand it, those 15 people (and their counterparts in Redding, Calif. and Bremerton, Wash.) MIGHT be offered jobs in Corpus Christi… and even if they were, it would require them to uproot from the West and move to Texas. Few of these people would be likely to accept the move, if it was offered.

This is outsourcing, not reassignment.

Anyhow, at the VCReporter I alternate between local cartoons and non-local ones, and was trying to come up with a Ventura County-specific topic I was motivated enough to draw a cartoon about. The Star job cuts was the most compelling local topic on my mind.

So I asked the publisher and managing editor: Is commenting on the Star fair game?

The VCReporter, unlike many alt-weeklies in other cities, tends NOT to blast its daily competitor, and in fact has a high degree of respect for them. Plus, I did not want to come off as a “disgruntled former employee” taking potshots just to get back at the old company.

But the VCReporter did write about the copy desk outsourcing, and the publisher and managing editor both agreed that a cartoon that examined the Star’s moves without being unduly nasty was in fact a valid cartoon topic… and to go ahead if I felt like it.

The cartoon posted here, transforming the Scripps “lighthouse” logo, is intended to shed a bit more light — literally — on the layoffs and outsourcing the Star was willing to acknowledge only obliquely and a week or more after the fact. It was drawn more in sadness than anger.

These are rocky times for newspapers — daily, weekly and specialty — and too many good people, and their jobs, are being swept away by waves of layoffs.

But if we’re in the communication industry, it seems only proper that we should communicate what’s really going on at our own companies as much as we communicate what’s going on at other companies.

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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

Hungry for its profit margins of a decade ago, the daily newspaper industry has turned into a ravenous beast that eats its own internal organs.

The copy editors are the kidneys of the paper, filtering out the waste products and toxins of errors, inconsistencies and misspellings. They question reporters’ statements, correct the grammar and write the headlines that prompt readers to look at the stories they edit. And they are rapidly being eliminated.

The E.W. Scripps Company, publisher of my former employer, the Ventura County Star, has decided to “consolidate” the desk functions — including the page designers — of its three West Coast properties (the Star, the Redding Record Searchlight and the Kitsap Sun in Washington) into one department in… Corpus Christi, TX. Yup, Texas.

At least 15 copy editors and page designers (some people do both jobs) dealing with news, features, business and sports will see their positions eliminated, along with the news wire editor. Supposedly they can apply for jobs in Corpus Christi… but then, that means living in Corpus Christi.

In my last blog post I mentioned how the MediaNews Group, run by William Dean Singleton, pioneered “clustering” — buying groups of papers in a geographic region like the Bay Area — and then using the “synergy” of sharing resources, like combining pro sports reporting beats. Newspapers in Fremont, San Mateo and Oakland could have certain functions dictated from their headquarters in Pleasanton. It tended to somewhat emasculate the individual properties, but at least the shot-callers were within driving distance.

Scripps is changing the game, making proofreading, layout and some news decisions for California and Washington take place a thousand-something miles (and a couple of time zones) away in Texas. Other companies are likely to follow, if they haven’t already done this.

What does this mean to the newspapers? It means there won’t be local people to catch local place names, history or other regional idiosyncrasies that good local copy editors can catch, nor any real “institutional memory” of local people and institutions.

For example, the city of Ojai (pronounced OH-high) in Ventura County has a now-closed burger shack, the O-Hi Frostie. An out-of-town copy editor likely wouldn’t accept the deviant spelling of the latter to see print even though it would’ve been correct. Would they know that “Mandalay Bay” and “RiverPark” are part of Oxnard? Would they think the name “Oxnard” is too weird and maybe it should be “Oxford” instead?

Or maybe they would run non-local, unedited copy like the piece the Star ran a few years ago that referred to Oxnard as a place known for its growing of lima beans. That may have been true in the early 20th century, but that outdated Chamber of Commerce description irritated local readers, who know the main contemporary yields to be strawberries, lemons and big-box chain stores.

Or up in Bremerton in Kitsap County, WA, will they be able to sort out all those odd Native American names? Will they know you don’t board a Vashon Island ferry to Tacoma but rather to “Point Defiance,” or that Vashon Island and Maury Island are actually solidly connected?

With no local editor for “wire” copy (stories from news services), will local news briefs carry the “Calif.” tag (e.g., “Santa Barbara, Calif.”) even if they’re just up the freeway?

And with no local page designers, how could they work with the local staff illustrators to integrate text around an oddly-shaped piece of art? Oh, that’s right, they got rid of the remaining art department (i.e., myself) at the Star in Nov. 2008. Problem solved.

What do these layoffs mean to the individuals involved? It means getting thrown out of work in a truly terrible economy, with too many other axed copy desk people from other newspapers fighting for the same few diminishing jobs.

And what do these layoffs mean to the readers? No doubt, the corporate honchos felt that readers wouldn’t notice nor care — just make sure they have the high school sports scores, supermarket coupons and “Dilbert” — and many readers in fact won’t notice nor care. But many readers DO notice the increasing errors and typos, the stories that “jump” to the wrong page or into nothingness, the misplaced geography and lack of maps. Many do notice if their local paper gets thinner and drops features. They certainly notice if their kid’s football score, name or test score results aren’t correct.

And they vote with their feet. Or at least with their subscriptions. Credibility is crucial to newspapers, and careless errors on a daily basis erode that credibility. I’ve even seen, heaven help me, papers that misspell their own name or city… how much faith can you place in a paper that can’t even get THAT right? One of my past employers, the Marin (Muh-RIN) Independent Journal, had a home-delivery telephone salesman who asked readers to subscribe to the MARE-in Independent Journal… how many subscriptions do you think he sold?

Newspapers have been raising their home-delivery prices to help defray costs, but readers are being asked to pay more to receive a paper that is thinner, produced by fewer staffers with less say over the final product, has less content and feels less local. And more and more readers are saying the hell with it. The strategy is counter-productive.

Oops, a copy editor would’ve eliminated that last hyphen.

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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

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.