For Jeff Koterba Losing His Staff Job Was “A Blessing in Disguise”

Comments ³

1. Alex

   Without having to watch the video, lemme guess: He became a caricature artist 🙂

   1. Mike Peterson  (admin)

      He’s been doing some really nice plein air out in my old stomping grounds. Makes me homesick for the place.

2. Paul Duginski

   I was hired right out of college by the Sacramento Union in 1979 as a cartoonist and one-man art department. In 1980, my cartoons, all of which had been approved by editor Don Hoenshell, had pissed off the uber-rich, right-wing owner, Richard Mellon Scaife, and I was canned. It was a firing disguised as a layoff for financial reasons. I think I was the only one laid off in the entire newsroom. I was a low-paid 23-year-old, so the cost savings had to be negligible. The Union’s newsroom staff rallied and even offered to kick in enough money to save my job, but management said nothing doing. That proved that cost-cutting was not management’s goal. I was a little bit of a cause celebre in Northern California, written up several times in feed/back, the journalism review published at San Francisco State. I also was cited in the cover article, “Citizen Scaife,” by Karen Rothmyer, in the July/August 1981 issue of CJR. I was out of work during the Reagan recession of the early 80s, so I starved for two or three years, doing odds and ends, including menus and signs for a local bar, before landing at the Sacramento Bee. There, after I started out as part-time on-call, I eventually rose to art director, and they — and other McClatchy papers — used my cartoons on a freelance basis. (I had a family to feed by then, and there just weren’t any jobs for cartoonists.) I focused on state issues in California, and my work was used all over the state, including in the L.A. Times for 15 years when Bob Berger was the op-ed editor. Eventually, after I joined the L.A. Times as a graphic journalist in 1996, the newspaper forbid me to publish cartoons on the side. It had established a firewall between the news and opinion sides. Now, after leaving the Times, I’m free to cartoon again. I’ve outlasted the Sacramento Union — that newspaper is long gone and even its building on Capitol Mall in Sacramento has been bulldozed. So I’m drawing for Cagle.com now.