The National Society of Newspaper Columnists has announced the winners of their 2023 Columnist Contest for work published in 2022.
They named Sage Stossel, of The Boston Globe, as the winner in the Editorial Cartooning category.
Submissions consisted of five cartoons, below is the one the NSNC highlighted on their presentation video:
Honorable Mention went to Dan McConnell and Paul Lander of Humor Outcasts.
“Abandon Ship,” below, is the cartoon the NSNC featured with the video announcement.
The NSNC video presentation is on their YouTube channel. In a nod to us cartoon fans the Editorial Cartoon category is announced in the first four minutes, right after the introductory/explanatory comments.
So only liberal cartoonists have a chance I guess.
Not being privy to all the cartoonist who sent in submissions I’m not positive about the liberal bias.
I will acknowledge that since the editorial cartooning category began in 2021 the winners have been left-leaning (Jen Sorenson, 2021 and Sage Stossel 2022, 2023).
https://www.columnists.com/awards/column-contest-winners/
A cursory check of other category winners seems to show some conservatives garnering awards.
To Brendan’s snark, I’d respond that Stossel’s cartoons demonstrate insight and original thought, something that has been sadly lacking in most of the right-wing cartoons I see these days. (I’ll leave any discussion of the rats-fleeing-a-sinking-ship cliché to Mr. Peterson, however.)
I suspect that the Newspaper Columnists behind this particular award may have been drawn to Stossel’s lengthy commentary in her work as being more closely aligned with their professional focus on the written word.
Right, let’s just nip this self-fulfilling prophecy in the bud — I stopped counting the number of times over the last 20+ years a conservative cartoonist complained about how they can never win awards (not counting all the prizes Mike Ramirez has racked up), and when I asked them “well did you enter?” they always replied no. Thing is, I heard the same “why bother” argument from a number of alties.
To quote the lottery, “Can’t win if you don’t play.”
That said, it’s your money — except for the Herblock and Babin awards, which are still free to enter — and if you think you’d be wasting it on what is essentially a marketing contest, or feel that the excessive fees are some form of shakedown (looking at you OPCA), you are not required to engage. Just don’t whine about it after.