Bob Englehart of the Hartford Courant (Connecticut) inadvertently supplied the endangered editorial cartooning species with a new tune to whistle as it strolls past the increasing number of tombstones in the graveyard of evaporated staff positions at daily newspapers. "Live like you won the Pulitzer," he advised and was roundly cheered by his colleagues.

In the past, the profession has tended to turn ostrich rather than acknowledge the presence in the room of the 800-pound gorilla -- namely, the steady erosion of full-time political cartooning billets in American newspapers, a trend that, should it continue, will render the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning altogether moot. But the tune changed June 8-11 this year when the AAEC met in Sacramento, California, mustering about 150 of its membership for the occasion. Half of the program presentations confronted the looming threat.

A panel of four cartoonists told how they'd survived as cartoonists when their editooning jobs were budgeted out of existence at their newspapers. In the next session, one of the four explained how he'd exploited the Internet's capacity for sound and motion to create a new career for himself with political cartoons that sing and dance. And then a representative of Pixar described how an animated feature is created. Other sessions delved into a more traditional bag of topics when a panel of editors spoke about the value of editorial cartoons to their editorial pages, and, at another presentation, a panel of cartoonists told of reader reaction to their cartoons in political environments hostile to the editoonist's point of view.

Finally, at the session that prompted Englehart's genial outburst, a panel of people who had judged the cartoon contests supplied hints about what to do and what not to do when entering the annual Pulitzer competition.

The program also included appearances by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Oakland mayor (and former California governor) Jerry Brown and Michael Newdow, the physician/lawyer who protested the phrase "under God" in the pledge of allegiance all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Editooner Milt Priggee, who has been freelancing for several years after losing his berth at the Spokane Spokesman-Review, maintains a website at www.miltpriggee.com, where he posts the names of newspapers that haven't filled staff editoonist vacancies in recent years. The vacancies appear as a parade of coffins (click on Cartoons, then Animation, then Paul Revere). To date, Priggee's posted nearly four dozen of these zombies -- nearly four dozen fewer political cartooning jobs today than ten years ago. Among them, most conspicuously, the Chicago Tribune, where Jeff MacNelly's slot has been empty since his death in June 2000 despite the paper's claim that it is still looking for the perfect successor.

In one of the grander ironies of the age, in January 2004, the Tribune mounted a "permanent exhibit" of MacNelly's work on the 24th floor of the Tribune Tower as "a reflection of the esteem in which Jeff was held here." To which Mike Ritter, then AAEC president, responded: "Putting up a cartoon show as a permanent exhibit but not hiring a new cartoonist comes off as a tombstone more than anything else." (A month ago, Ritter's paper, the East Valley Tribune near Phoenix, AZ, laid him off, and he hasn't been seen or heard from since.)

"What's going on," said Ted Rall, "is death by a thousand cuts."

Today's newspapers are owned by chains of corporate entities whose only purpose is to generate profit for their stockholders. Newspapers traditionally run up profits of 15-20%, better by at least 10% than most other businesses. But that's not enough profit. Think about it: If you've invested money in stocks, you want to realize a steadily increasing return on your investment. If you own stock in Gannett or Knight-Ridder (which you probably think of as "corporations" not as newspaper publishers), you want your income to increase over the years. The spur, in today's newspaper business, is to generate profit, not power; to make money for investors not to disseminate "news"; to satisfy stockholders not readers.

In none of those purposes does editorial cartooning stand very high. In fact, to the average stockholder, paying a salary to a staff cartoonist is a needless extravagance because a newspaper can obtain a much greater variety of political cartoons by subscribing to syndicate services. And syndicated editorial cartoons never attend to local issues so no advertisers will be offended. These circumstances doom staff editorial cartoonist positions.

Pondering solutions to the problem, Rall recently outlined on the AAEC listserv three possibilities for editoonists, all, essentially, freelance options: 1) animate political cartoons and sell the service on the Internet, 2) self-syndicate via the Internet, and 3) get syndicated (like Rall, Oliphant, and Telnaes).

At the Sacramento meeting, Rall moderated a panel discussion that explored aspects of these possibilities. The charge to the panelists was to show their colleagues "how to land on their feet if they lose their jobs" at newspapers.

Wiley Miller, who presently produces the syndicated daily comic strip Non Sequitur, started as a staff editoonist, and when his paper eliminated the position, he concocted a comic strip, Fenton, which he was successful in selling to a syndicate. Syndication saved him. Later, he found another political cartooning position and discontinued his strip. (Wiley, as a matter of principle, doesn't think a cartoonist should do two cartooning jobs because that eliminates a position for someone else; what's more, no one, no matter how brilliant, can do his "best" work in either of two ostensibly full-time enterprises.) Still later, he realized that his new staff job was going to evaporate, so he quit and started Non Sequitur.

Paul Fell of Lincoln, Nebraska, simply went freelance when his position at the Lincoln Journal disappeared. He cultivated his connections throughout the state, selling editoons on state issues to newspapers, and he did ordinary artwork chores for magazines and businesses and taught cartooning. He is now self-syndicated, offering a package to other papers: $25/week for five cartoons, "buy the package and print what you want." In another aspect of the same service, Fell offers an exclusive-one cartoon a week on a local (city) topic for $100.

And Mark Fiore, who started as a freelancer then found a job at the San Jose Mercury News, went back to freelancing when the job turned sour. The publisher who hired him resigned to protest Knight-Ridder cost cutting, and his replacement told Fiore to "go easy on Bush." Fiore left. He'd been selling his cartoons on the Web, and he soon started animating them for his old client list. He much prefers his new situation.

"With a staff job," he said, "one person controls your destiny-your editor; when you have multiple clients, you can lose one and still have the others."

Using Flash software, Fiore produces only a couple political animations a week -- no small achievement. He writes song lyrics to suit the music he downloads to accompany the animation at www.markfiore.com, but he sells them to the Web editions of the Village Voice and various California newspapers, charging each client enough to generate a decent living for himself.

All three panelists stressed the self-discipline needed in being your own boss, and Fell and Fiore told how they'd engineered medical insurance by exchanging their cartooning services for group coverage with a client.

In the next session at the convention, Fiore showed samples of his animated political cartoons and explained how he produces them, downloading public domain tunes from the Web and sometimes employing friends for different voices. "There's going to be fewer and fewer print jobs and more animation," he said, "but there will still be some print."

Sound and motion add a new dimension to political cartooning, he said-sometimes softening and making more acceptable hard-hitting messages as David Astor explained in his Editor & Publisher report: "Fiore showed an anti-death penalty animation he did featuring a syringe character executing various people, but upbeat music on the soundtrack added a lighter touch to the serious message. 'I love doing that contrast,' Fiore said; 'it makes it more palatable and draws people in.' Another way Fiore makes his work friendlier to viewers is by using more dialogue and less text than before. 'The same message, but less reading,' he explained."

Despite these upbeat messages, the prospects for editooning are bleak. "The ship is sinking," Rall said, "it's just happening too slowly for anyone to notice."

Summing up on a listserv note, Rall said that none of the options he sees offers much long-term hope. He realizes that more editoonists will follow in Fiore's footsteps, "but even assuming that there were another 20 or 50 or 100 editorial cartoonists with the chops to make that transition -- a highly doubtful proposition -- you don't need to talk to Fiore about the business model he has pioneered to realize that the market for animated editoons will never, ever multiply in dollar volume to accommodate all of the editorial cartoonists losing their positions." And selling cartoons via the Internet only works with "cartoonists who are well established with national brand recognition-and even those artists haven't figured out how to do it."

As for syndication, he continued, "The same problem-there isn't enough of a market to accommodate another 50 or 75 or 100 artists, each of whom need at least 50 clients to earn a half-decent living. This only works for a few, and even I have to do other things-write books, newspaper columns, radio talk shows-to survive."

Concluding, Rall said: "We can't stop bleeding daily newspaper staff jobs and we haven't figured out a different way to earn a living. That leaves one last gambit: creating a new marketplace somewhere else. What we need, I think, is something like the alternative newsweekly revolution of the '80s and '90s -- a new form of media that provides a forum for cartoons and is willing and able to pay for them in vast quantities. We don't have anything like that on the horizon now, but we need to be able to recognize it if and when such a creature pops up.

A special fund-raiser dinner was sponsored by AAEC in support of the Cartoonist Rights Network (CRN), an unofficial not-for-profit agency that lobbies on behalf of persecuted cartoonists around the world. As recently as 1999, two editorial cartoonists were murdered for expressing their views; in 2000, three were jailed, and in 2001, many were under judicial prosecution or personal threat because their cartoons offended the wrong people.

This year's guest at the dinner was Musa Kart, a Turkish cartoonist, who was found guilty a month or so ago of "publicly humiliating" the prime minister by depicting him as a cat entangled in string, a visual allusion to the legislative snare that the prime minister, Recep Tayip Erdogan, has created: He called for an easing of tension while supporting measures that would have the effect of increasing the role of Islam in public affairs, thereby creating religious tension in a nation that has been secular since Kemal Ataturk founded the republic in 1923. Ironically, Erdogan has portrayed himself as a champion of free speech: He was jailed in 1999 for reciting a poem that "incited hatred."

Next year's AAEC convention will be in Denver.

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