Thursday, August 20, 2009
Media / Visual Art / Politics / News Bites / Clout City The Tribune finally plugs its cartoonist hole with Scott Stantis
Posted by Michael Miner on 08.20.09 at 01:54 PM
Scott Stantis isn’t actually replacing Jeff MacNelly (nine years after MacNelly died). He’ll be the sort of cartoonist for the Chicago Tribune that MacNelly never was, someone living in Chicago (MacNelly lived in Virginia) and commenting on state and local issues.
The first time I talked to Stantis he made it clear to me how much he wanted the Tribune job. This was in November 2001, when the hole MacNelly had left in the Tribune editorial page had sat there about 15 months, and cartoonists understood that the editor of the page, Bruce Dold, was finally close to filling it. A short list of three names was understood to exist, and Stantis was honked that although he and Dold had talked, he wasn’t on it. The president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists at the time, Stantis described himself as that rarity, a conservative cartoonist, and therefore a perfect fit at the Tribune. “Like most people in the business I have a humongous ego,” he told me, “and I’d love to be the one considered.”
He wasn’t. But on the other hand, Dold didn’t hire anyone else either.
Every so often I’d write a column hammering the Tribune for not hiring a new cartoonist. “Nothing asserts a paper’s street cred like a cartoonist who kicks local butt, but the Tribune surrenders that ground to the Sun-Times’s Jack Higgins,” I wrote in June of 2002. The Tribune seemed to fear allowing that sort of ruffian on the premises — it couldn’t see dishing out a handsome salary to a loose cannon. The problem didn't seem to be Dold; it was the cautious managers and bean counters above him.
The dwindling number of American editorial cartoonists regarded the empty Tribune post as a stick in the eye. Stantis, who as president of the AAEC spoke for the profession, told me, “The Tribune needs a cartoonist real bad. There’s no way in my view George Ryan should still be governor. What he did killed people. What do you have to do in Illinois to get impeached?” Stantis, who then as now drew for the Birmingham News, offered to send Dold the occasional Chicago-based cartoon on spec. “He said thanks but no thanks.”
But when Ryan was indicted in late 2003, Dold asked Stantis to draw him a cartoon commenting on this. Dold frequently picked up cartoons Stantis had drawn for the News, and he began asking for more Chicago-oriented cartoons. Stantis became, in a sense, the last man standing. But so what? He was knocking on the door of an empty house. The only way he could get into the Tribune on a regular basis was by launching a comic strip, Prickly City, in 2004. The Tribune carried it from the get-go, but eventually dropped it in 2007.
In November of 2007 I wrote about the Tribune’s vacant cartoonist job for the last time. To talk about it as vacant felt silly by then — the job simply didn’t exist any longer and would never exist again.
I wrote:
“Various cartoonists have thought they were within an inch of getting the job, and all were wrong. Oddly, Stantis isn't one of them — even though he'd like the job and would happily come to Chicago for it, he's done a lot of cartoons for the Tribune already, and he believes that he and the Tribune are on the same wavelength politically. I told him it sounded as if he and the Tribune are in one of those office sitcom relationships where everyone but themselves can see it's a match. Except in this case, he said, one of us can see that too.
"Ideally, he said, when something big happens in Chicago the story won't be complete until the city finds out in the morning what Stantis had to say about it. MacNelly didn't play that role — he lived in Virginia and stuck to national issues. And in fact nobody's played that role in Chicago media since Mike Royko, and it could be that nobody will ever play it again. That show might be over."
But the Chicago Tribune has changed dramatically in the past 21 months. It is less of a paper in some big ways, but what's left of it is much more focused. It's offering itself to Chicago now as the city’s crusading conscience, and editor Gerould Kern, to his credit, saw that an editorial cartoonist could make a big contribution to that pose. Kern told media writer Phil Rosenthal, “It’s important for us to lead, to stand out and point the way, and an editorial cartoon is an incredibly powerful and important way of doing that.”
Is Stantis, who imagined himself a perfect fit with the old Tribune, to the right of the new Tribune? “The priority here wasn’t someone who was going to be right or left,” Dold tells me. “It was someone who’d comment on right and wrong. So much of what the paper is doing now has to do with corruption in government. Scott will be brilliant. That’s not ideological — it’s speaking truth to power.”
Stantis begins September 1. I’m very happy for him, though not as happy as other cartoonists are. There were 110 to 120 staff cartoonists working for American papers when I first talked to Stantis in 2001. The number’s now around 40. “Obviously the [newspaper] industry will crush this,” Stantis tells me, “but for a couple of days people felt a good thing had happened. As one kind of a grizzled guy said, ‘We’re giddy.’ Its huge.”
I asked him if he’s to the right of the new Tribune. “Those labels ebb and flow,” he says. “I don’t know that I’ve read an editorial of theirs I disagree with. They’re still pretty solidly for small taxes, small government, and a strong defense.” Besides, he says, “I’ve had my conservative card revoked many times in the past few years,” losing it because he hammered George W. Bush — “in the paper and in the comic strip” — over things like torture and domestic spying.
He does five strips a day for the News and another for USA Today, and three of the six are syndicated, which means they need to be on national topics. Stantis hopes he can continue to draw for USA Today while he draws for the Tribune, because if he doesn’t, three of the five cartoons the Tribune expects each week will have to be done with the syndicate in mind. He knows the Tribune expects a lot of locally focused work from him and he’ll be happy to oblige. “It’s my local cartoons that I think are way stronger,” he says. “They’re more direct. They have more passion.”
Comments (10)
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I liken the Tribune to the Titanic and Stantis as the ship's new band leader. Welcome aboard--for now.
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The fact that so many newspapers have elimanated their editorial cartoonists really shows how much the management of these companies lack any type of business sense. More than anything I can think of, the editorial cartoon is something that cannot be replicated online very easilly. It is just common sense that the greatest opperatunity for newspapers to retain readership is to provide things that are not nearly as attractive online. Yet this apparently never entered the heads of newspaper executives. They almost seemed to act randomely when deciding where to make cuts rather than attempt to think rationally about what would most hurt the business. And I am someone who has never been particularly interested in editorial cartoons. So this is coming from an objective perspective on the business, not from a nostalgia for something that I once enjoyed.
I imagine most people who read this blog will disagree with me but I think the hiring of Stantis really shows how much the current Tribune management knows what they are doing. They seem to be very different from the management at most other newspapers of the past several decades. They have made neccessary cuts but are not afraid to hire new people when they believe it will draw readers. While they have dramatically reduced the staff, they have actually increased the amount of journalists covering local news. As far as I know, no other newspaper chain in the country has done this. If Sam Zell is forced out I think it is very important that the new ownership retain Randy Michaels and the top leadership at the company.
The Tribune did well to hire Stantis, and it was particularly encouraging to hear that they plan to occasionally use his work on the front page. Anything would be an improvement over giant, page-wide photos of peaches and fireworks and the like.
However, (and I apologize pre-emptively for getting yet again on an old hobbyhorse) I sharply part from the idea that concentrating on local coverage is a good idea. Any newspaper--and I mean ANY newspaper--worth its salt has a duty to provide a voice on national and broader issues and stories of the day. Certainly the Tribune, as the premier Midwestern paper (which isn't saying much these days), has that duty.
Look at the Midwest, the Rust Belt. Chicago's doing a little better than a lot of Midwestern cities, but look across the region. It's pretty well bombed out economically. How and why did this happen? Was it necessary? Or was it (as I believe and the evidence indicates) a result of peculiar and deliberate policies imposed from Washington and New York? I won't wade into the details, but consider for a moment the hopelessly humongous and utterly irreversible U.S. trade deficit and compare it with the positive trade balance of the world's largest exporter--no, not China, but Germany, which is more developed and with labor costs comparable to those in the U.S. If Germany and other highly developed nations can thrive in the world economy, why are we sinking?
The Tribune was (and is) perfectly positioned to take the bull by the horns and tell the story of this imposed-from-outside devastation. In fact, it has a duty to do so. Any paper in the region does. Instead, the Tribune goes hyperlocal--which is fine, but it's like reporting about rats fighting over scraps in a pile of rubble. The pertinent question, rather, is how we were reduced to rubble in the first place and how can we build again.
That's a national, or even a global, issue. Unfortunately, no Midwestern (or Southern or Western) newspaper that I'm aware of ever developed an independent voice on these matters. Instead, to the extent that they maintained and nurtured national and foreign correspondents, they merely echoed the narrowly focused, self-interested reportage of the less than a handful of East Coast papers that, regrettably, have been allowed to set a rather uninformative standard for journalism of global scope. This is, perhaps, because they are very much a part of the globalizing Wall Street power structure that owns Washington.
Newspapers in the Midwest, however, needn't be so compromised. And they must not be. They should re-engage on the national stage, but with a radically Midwestern perspective enlivened by a realistic assessment of decades of deep betrayal and abandonment. The wreckage is all around us; the lead story every day should address this--how it happened, why, and how can we reverse it.
I doubt that Stantis, a confessed conservative/libertarian, will begin to address this. Nor should he, necessarily. This is the business of an enlightened news staff that is aware and engaged on national and global issues. (Or, heck, manages to gin up even a mild curiosity about the world around us. This would be pitiable, but, alas, an improvement on the current Zell-driven product.)
The Tribune once had the staff, though not the voice. Still, shame on them for surrendering and leaving Chicago--as well as the Midwest--a silent corpse on the national stage.
I don't want to get too off-topic. But I will just remind Pelham that there are factories on the east coast and Wall Street firms and banks in the midwest. Bear Stearn and Lehman Brothers had corporate offices in Chicago. You might notice that downtown has a rather large financial district. Numerous hedge funds, privaty equity groups and other financial firms are located there. There are, of course, real estate firms and banks all over the place in the city and just about every suburb. Financial firms are also major parts of other parts of the midwest. The midwest does have a bigger industrial base and has therefore been hurt more than other parts of the country. But the difference is not nearly as large as Pelham believes. Regions of the country are much more similar economically than they are different. It doesn't make sense to act as if everything is seperate and that there is a huge difference between a midwest perspective and a national perspective on national and world events. If there was there would have been a "midwestern voice" that would have sprung up by now.
The places that were hit particular hard, such as Detroit, largely have themselves to blame. Over several decades, the local city leaders never made a significant effort to diversify their economy. They could have used incentives to attract other industries so that the city was not dependant on the fortunes of one narrow sector of the economy. And the management of these companies as well as the labor unions established a cost structure that was unsustainable. And they failed to properly innovate and competete with foreign automakers. These are all local issues. I have no idea how well the Detroit newspapers covered them. But it would be far more productive to do this well than for them to send their own reporters to Washington or foreign places and find some sort of unique perspective to national events (though that might sometimes serve a purpose). Yes, going hyperlocal is the best way to cover the important issues facing local areas. And there is (and always has been) a greater scarcity in local news than anything else. Does anybody have a really in-depth picture, for example, of how the Chicago Public Schools are being run? It really baffles me when people argue that there should be less local news.
As long as they don't bring back Prickly City ... that comic was just horrendous.
I don't know what you mean by "the new IAC". I have been posting here for months. And I have stated around a half dozen times that I do not work for the Tribune and never have. I have no connection with the company. As far as I know, I have barely ever even met anyone who works or has worked there. If you look at the archives of this blog (since this was cross-posted elsewhere on the website, I'll mention that would be "News Bites") you will see that I have critisized the Tribune's management several times. It is somewhat strange that there seems to be a belief that someone must be connected with the company if they don't believe that the Tribune's executives are evil, that the cutbacks were not neccessary, and that everything should be the way it was. A few months ago, someone on this blog came very close to explictly stating that someone who doesn't tow that line must be a top Tribune executive.
Does the Trib wanna maximize the impact of Stantis? Do what the Des Moines Register once did and put the editorial cartoon on page one, above the fold. I'm not kidding. I was an undergrad at the University of Iowa in the 80s when that was still their practice and it was incredibly effective. Truly made the paper stand out on the newsstand. I know, not likely, but still....
@ IAC
You're absolutely right about the finance industry's presence in Chicago, and, for that matter, other locales. All I was driving at was the notion, which you acknowledge, that the Midwest in general has been hit harder by the loss of manufacturing than have some other parts of the country. But certainly that's not universally true. Have you traveled through upstate New York lately? The devastation there is probably greater than anywhere else in the country, and this is certainly an Eastern state.
So to the extent that a news organization should have a Midwestern point of view, I only mean that in general, broadly speaking, the damage here has been worse than elsewhere, and the damage is great enough throughout the country to warrant a consistent voice and focus somewhere in the mainstream media.
Where I part sharply from you is in your notion that if there were a need for a uniquely Midwestern (or, let's say, industrial-manufacturing-base voice) then, surely, one would have sprung up by now. That's putting way, way too much faith, in my estimation, in the marketplace and the notion that corporate-owned mainstream media are out there aggressively promoting the free flow of ideas. I'd need to launch into a doctoral dissertation to defend this, so let's just agree for now that this is a crucial point on which we differ.
As for Detroit and your point that the city largely has only itself to blame for not diversifying its economy, I'd ask, diversify into what? What large scale category of enterprise could possibly provide the kinds of high-paying jobs needed to support a large population of workers? We keep being told that education is the golden path to the future, and for some that's true. But for the most part, for most people, it simply isn't. Way too many high-tech jobs are outsourceable and will be--inevitably under our current warped notions of free trade and globalization--outsourced. There are service industry jobs that can't go overseas, but way too many of those are economically feasible only at very low rates of pay. Health care is cited as one outstanding service industry example, but what do we mean by that? We're bankrupting ourselves with our inadequate health system as it is, and doctors are expensive. We need nurses and lower-level medical personnel, sure. But to paraphrase Mark Twain, you probably can't build much of an economy by employing everyone emptying everyone else's bedpans.
I'm not absolving Detroit or any other city or section of the country from all blame for what others have called the "40-year crisis" and the now well-developed "hourglass economy." But primarily their struggles are caused by forces well outside their orbit. And while local coverage of rats fighting over scraps amid the rubble are worth doing, I remain convinced that the bigger story lies in the machinations of the Washington-Wall Street axis and the cult of globalization that has left the broad interior of the United States and its working people uniquely damaged and abandoned.
One of the reasons the old old Tribune in McCormick's day was not fully credible as a news source is that it put editorial cartoons on the front page, among other practices that blurred the line between editorial and news reporting. I guess I am old fashioned in that regard. Keep Stantis on the editorial page, but like some other posts he should not focus on local, but on national and international as well.
