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