Editorial cartoonists are rock stars. Readers *do* appreciate what we do. If publishers of newspapers and magazines don’t understand that, it’s their loss–in terms of reduced circulation and lost income.

A final thought on this: on several occasions over the last decade, Cullum Rogers and I attempted to do an exact tally of our profession, but every time we would come up with a total, the terrain would shift. On the heels of Attack of the Political Cartoonists (2004) I wrote the article for Nieman Reports and said “94″ for sure … ok, maybe. Then Cullum found a few I had overlooked and said 101 for sure, and immediately after about 6 or 7 guys got canned so we were back to the mid-90s. Again, full-time staff cartoonists who do nothing else.

Later, when I working on the Attitude books with Ted, I tried to figure out the upper limit, i.e., how many people in the U.S. are there who get paid (even if it’s just beer money) to do the occasional editorial cartoon for a publication (even if it’s only weekly or semi-regularly). While I joked it was “233 1/3″, the total I came up with was indeed somewhere between 225 and 250.

Considering this is about the number of staff newspaper cartoonists cited at our modern high water mark circa 1980, the conclusion seems pretty clear: the number of cartoonists drawing political cartoons has remained fairly consistent over time; it is our patrons and support structure that has evaporated.

The AAEC keeps that baseline because that’s all their used to be. It is certainly no longer the norm, or even the majority, and some of us have been talking about leaving it behind with all the other 20th century memes

They have no desire to fill Nick’s position. I contacted them last year while I was freelancing for the Press of Atlantic City, and even back then before Gannett’s job cuts, they said the weren’t going to fill it.

Hopefully…