Political cartoonist Daryl Cagle raises some interesting questions about the future of journalism as it moves online. Most importantly he doubts whether the move to the internet makes business sense. Money is flowing to the search engines (mostly to Google) but, he writes, ads accompanying original content on the web still pay poorly.
Cagle says: "I run some popular websites that get millions of page views per month, but the ad revenue only covers the cost of my servers and bandwidth. Newspapers share this problem as they pour resources into building their websites and get very little revenue in return... papers continue to pin their hopes on their websites in the belief that their brands carry goodwill into a new medium, when in fact, newspaper brands have little value on the web."
He then turns his attention to the "thinning" of his own trade. His own work appears on MSNBC.com but he believes the web produces little chance of future income for cartoonists. He writes: "Cartoonists who still have jobs are often asked to do more work online, such as starting blogs and animating their cartoons for the web." But they face a problem: "there is no market for animated political cartoons when websites don't want to pay for content."
Cagle concludes: "The aimless charge to the internet extends to the Pulitzer prizes... The winner and nominees this year were all employees of print newspapers who submitted portfolios of animated web cartoons that could not be printed in their newspapers... The editorial cartoonist community is in a tizzy. Cartoonists want to win prizes and keep their jobs, and according to the Pulitzer jury, the way to do that is to jump on an internet bandwagon that no one is steering."
Adam Hodgkin is sympathtic to Cagle's plight and argues: "If I were a cartoonist I would do all that I could to make my cartoons findable, if necessary and, in the absence of citeable digital editions from the publisher, by republishing them myself."
Then he offers some practical advice: "Cartoons which appear in print and in a digital edition format become potentially a 'sponsorship' opportunity. Cartoon slots used to carry sponsorship in some British newspapers. Content-sponsorship certainly has new possibilities with digital editions."
I don't recall the newspaper sponsorship claim, but the idea sounds a good one.
