Mike Thompson has had a tumultuous 2023. A year after he was unceremoniously sacked from his long-time gig at USA Today by new owners Gatehouse— er, that is, Gannett — Thompson was the winner of a nationwide search to follow up the stellar Steve Sack at the storied Minneapolis Star Tribune.
https://www.dailycartoonist.com/index.php/2023/03/24/mike-thompson-joins-star-tribune-staff/
This was a celebrated move by the daily newspaper, and a homecoming for Mike, who grew up in Minnesota. Thompson wrote, “I’m happy to announce that I will be joining my hometown newspaper as the staff editorial cartoonist. To say that I’m excited and honored would be an understatement. For those of you outside the newspaper industry, the Star Tribune is an outlier—it hasn’t slashed staff and remains committed to quality journalism. As a result, it’s one of the most successful metro dailies in the country. I’ll be producing editorial cartoons, animation, illustrations, and illustrated reporting pieces. I’m truly honored and will start in the middle of [April].”
The honeymoon was short-lived, however, after Thompson’s first cartoon as a Star-Tribune staffer caused such a row that his new publisher publicly apologized in a column.
While many saw the controversy as a misconstruing — deliberate or otherwise — of the cartoon’s point, it was definitely, as The Daily Cartoonist noted, a rocky start. For a time there was real concern that the paper would immediately drop Thompson (who had uprooted his family and moved across the country for the new job), but by summer he was still at the Star-Trib.
