On Tuesday, July 11, McClatchy unceremoniously fired their three most prominent staff editorial cartoonists with no warning. Kevin Siers, of The Charlotte Observer, Joel Pett of the Lexington Herald-Leader, and Jack Ohman of The Sacramento Bee — all three Pulitzer Prizing-winning cartoonists — we’re the only three employees targeted in the latest round of layoffs by The McClatchy Company as it emerged from bankruptcy after being purchased by hedge fund Chatham Asset Management.
McClatchy management, citing “continuing evolution” for the cuts, said “its newspapers would no longer publish daily opinion cartoons.” The reaction from the media and readers across the country was swift and incredulous.
https://www.dailycartoonist.com/index.php/2023/07/12/csotd-bankruptcy-of-another-kind/
Jack Ohman — who is also the current president of the AAEC — told The Washington Post‘s Michael Cavna that he “cannot recall another day like it, even amid decades of brutal cuts in the field of newspaper political cartooning.”
Ohman said he was “stunningly blindsided” when informed of his firing. “I felt like I had been T-boned at an intersection,” he said of his Tuesday morning firing over Google Meet. “Devastated.”
In an email to Cavna, Kevin Siers wrote, “There seems to be a rethinking among corporate management over the years as to how a newspaper’s opinion pages should engage with readers. They’ve convinced themselves and the industry that readers no longer appreciate good editorial cartoons, when I feel that it’s the boardroom itself that is uncomfortable with our satire.”
Pett told The Post that the firing ends his four-decade career there as a newspaper cartoonist. “It is not the readers but the industry gatekeepers who have given up on political cartoons, for a variety of reasons,” Pett said. “They don’t see how [political cartoons] make any money and they alienate people, and they can be a pain in the neck. So why bother, just because they are historically powerful and popular, and a longtime mainstay of the Fourth Estate? The democracy is doing great, right?”
In response to the backlash, McClatchy released a statement that said, in part, “We made this decision based on changing reader habits and our relentless focus on providing the communities we serve with local news and information they can’t get elsewhere.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/comics/2023/07/12/mcclatchy-cartoonists-layoffs/
No one bought the explanation.
As the news spread, the anger from readers and those in the industry grew. Fans of Joel Pett in Kentucky unloaded on the Lexington Herald-Leader in a stream of letters to the editor. The News Guild, the union for journalists at The Charlotte Observer, slammed the decision to can Siers. California cartoonist, and long-time Sacramento Bee subscriber, RL Crabb put the bone-headed move into historical context. And The Washington Examiner, the conservative newspaper in Washington, DC, (who are also one of the last daily newspapers with a staff cartoonist, Alexander Hunter), rushed to cover the news of the firings.
https://www.kentucky.com/opinion/letters-to-the-editor/article277493073.html
https://charlotteledger.substack.com/p/observer-cuts-job-of-pulitzer-prize?r=12tih
https://www.rlcrabb.com/cartoonist-under-fire/an-empty-hive/
The Herb Block Foundation quickly released a statement blasting the move. “The Herb Block Foundation is shaken to see the continued disappearance of the staff positions of editorial cartoonists at newspapers and the lack of regard for their importance. An editorial cartoon gives readers a quick and informative point of view on current events that provokes its audience.”
“As Herblock said …. ‘If the prime role of a free press is to serve as critic of the government, cartooning is often the cutting edge of that criticism.’”
https://www.herbblockfoundation.org/statement-herb-block-foundation
Even the vaunted Associated Press didn’t pull any punches, stating “Editorial Cartoonists’ Firings Illustrate Decline of Newspaper Opinion Pages.”
“The firings of the cartoonists employed by the McClatchy newspaper chain last week were a stark reminder of how an influential art form is dying, part of a general trend away from opinion content in the struggling print industry,” wrote David Bauder.
“This isn’t a crisis of cartooning particularly,” said Mike Peterson, a blogger at The Daily Cartoonist. “This is a crisis of newspapers failing to connect with their community.”
Joel Pett summed it up with his usual pithiness: “I could have looked at the guy who fired me and said, ‘I’ll do it for free,’ and they would have said no.”
—Compiled by JP Trostle
Sources: The Daily Cartoonist, The Washington Post, Charlotte Ledger, AP
