Cartoon by CagleCartoonist, Dave Whamond from Canada
May 12, 2020
Congressman Salud Carbajal
District Office
Santa Barbara, CA
Dear Congressman Carbajal,
… I run a constituent small business in Montecito, Cagle Cartoons, Inc., that syndicates editorial cartoons and columnists. About half of America’s daily, paid-circulation newspapers subscribe to our service that you can see at CagleCartoons.com.
Journalism has been in decline for years, but the newspaper industry now faces sudden extinction with the pandemic as newspaper advertising revenue has crashed. A large percentage of our subscribing newspapers have simply stopped paying their bills; a good example is our local Santa Barbara News-Press that has run our cartoons and columns on their editorial page on most days for over 14 years – they are now seven months behind in their payments.
Industry experts predict that as many as two thirds of newspapers may not survive the pandemic. We saw the stock price of Gannett, the largest newspaper chain, drop from over $10/share to under a dollar in a matter of months (USA Today runs our cartoons). The loss of newspapers would also sink the editorial cartooning profession and our small business along with it.
Cartoon by CagleCartoonist, Bill Day
Our Web site, Cagle.com, is the face of the editorial cartooning profession to the world and we suffer for that as press freedoms around the world are in decline. Humorless despots hate seeing themselves in our cartoons and our sites are targets of sophisticated hacker attacks that clearly come from state actors. Although America benefits by demonstrating our values around the world through journalism and editorial cartoons, the US government does little or nothing to support editorial cartoonists and other journalists who suffer from foreign attacks.
We received an SBA PPP loan in the amount of $10,600.00; we applied for a very much larger loan based on our expenses which mainly consist of royalties to our artists and our tech expenses that are bloated by defenses against foreign hacker attacks. Our small business is unusual in that we have only two employees, our income from newspapers is broadly distributed to our contributors and the loan amount was not based on our actual expenses, it was based only on the salaries of our two employees, me and my bookkeeper. We have over 75 great cartoonists and columnists, who depend on us, who were ignored in the process because their income is reported on 1099s. The PPP program was not designed for us.
By CagleCartoonist Michael Kountouris from Greece
For many years I traveled around the world giving lectures through the US State Department Speaker Program. In nations without press freedoms, audiences were shocked to see how American cartoonists were free to criticize their government. Well more than half of the world’s population lives in countries where cartoonists are not allowed to draw their nation’s leader. The Speaker Program was effective in spreading our values and promoting press freedom. American editorial cartoonists are seen as stars around the world where we are well respected, like American astronauts, basketball players and jazz musicians. These effective State Department lecture programs have stopped featuring American editorial cartoonists during the Trump administration.
The impending collapse of journalism is a national tragedy that threatens our democracy. The newspaper industry has been lobbying in Washington seeking government support that is unlikely to happen during the Trump administration which has shown hostility to press criticism – criticism that is strongest and most visible among editorial cartoonists. If Democrats win the White House, I fear that any support for journalism may not include small syndicates and press services because our businesses are unusual. We are likely to be overlooked, as we were with the PPP program.
When legislators think of journalists they don’t think of editorial cartoonists. Editorial cartoonists are journalists. We are important. Don’t forget us.
Our reader supported site, Cagle.com, still needs you! Journalism is threatened with the pandemic that has shuttered newspaper advertisers. Some pundits predict that a large percentage of newspapers won’t survive the pandemic economic slump, and as newspapers sink, so do editorial cartoonists who depend on newspapers, and along with them, our Cagle.com site, that our small, sinking syndicate largely supports, along with our fans.
Please forward this email to your friends – tell them our Cagle.com email newsletters are FREE and FUN! They can join the newsletter list at Cagle.com/subscribe.
Two sweeping new laws in California have been a heavy burden for us to bear here at Cagle Cartoons, Inc. I wrote about Assembly Bill 5 (AB 5) that limits California freelance cartoonists and columnists to 35 contributions to a publisher each year. Because of this limit, we will no longer consider submissions from California creators and we have dropped a number of California contributors from our Cagle.com site and our PoliticalCartoons.com store. Other California freelance contributors that stayed with us are no longer paid, because of AB 5.
Cartoon by the brilliant Dario Castillejos from Mexico.
The California legislature dropped a second bomb on us with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). This poorly written, overly broad law is intended to affect only very large companies and protect consumer information that should be kept private, but in their sweeping ignorance, the legislature has swept up Cagle.com along with the Silicon Valley giants.
The CCPA imposes a huge $7,500.00 per violation fine for failing to properly disclose information about an individual and delete a user’s data upon request; the colossal fine is intended to threaten Web behemoths like Google and Facebook, who make billions of dollars reselling consumer data. The law applies to companies with over $25 million of revenue, or companies that earn over half of their annual gross income from reselling consumer information, or who maintain data on 50,000 or more people –it is the 50,000 threshold that snares our tiny, little business along with many other unintended small business victims.
We have about 85,000 fans who have opted to subscribe to Cagle.com’s free, cartoon-a-day, email newsletter. We use the mailing list to maintain the community of fans on Cagle.com. The emails include links to my blog posts and new topical sections on Cagle.com; most of the traffic to Cagle.com is sustained by churning, with emails enticing the same fans to come back again and again to look at our new content. (Sign up for our Free Daily Newsletter here.)
50,000 sounds like a lot, but it is a small drop in the ocean of the internet.
Here’s how it works: if one of our emails has an enticing subject line we’ll get about 20% of the recipients to open the email; then, if the cartoon and link look interesting enough, another 20% of that number will click on the link to go to our site; so, perhaps 4% of the list, or around 3,400 fans, end up visiting Cagle.com from a typical email link. Since we have no outside site feeding traffic to us (as we used to have with msnbc.com), the newsletter keeps an active, but small community of political cartoon fans engaged with our cartoons and columns.
We’ve spent thousands of dollars in legal fees to comply with AB 5 and CCPA. The fines for failing to comply with AB 5 are steep, but a handful of $7,500.00 CCPA compliance fines are worse and could put our small business out of business.
Cartoon by the talented Michael Kountouris, from Greece.
Here’s some background to illustrate our risk …
Cagle.com is a target for hackers who we believe come from third world regimes with humorless dictators who don’t like how they are depicted in our cartoons; there are clues that lead us to this conclusion, including the content on our site at the times of the worst attacks and the distribution of the servers delivering the attacks. The hacks we suffer from are often unusually large, complex and sophisticated; they are designed to bring our business and Cagle.com down –unlike the common attacks that normal Web sites see, that are only looking to steal credit card information or to hijack servers for Bitcoin mining. A good example is a sophisticated attack about five years ago on our email server that we used for our Free Daily Newsletter.
Five years ago we had about 150,000 opt-in email addresses on our list. Hackers broke into our email server and, over the course of about eight months, slowly, daily, methodically, added small batches of valid email addresses to our list, which grew over the months of the hack to nearly 800,000 email addresses. We didn’t notice the added addresses. Unlike a more typical attack that would try to delete the data on our servers and bring Cagle.com down, the daily email list continued to be delivered everyday without an apparent problem; we received the newsletters in our own accounts, as did all of our subscribers. We got few complaints from the hundreds of thousands of people who were added to the list by the hackers. We didn’t realize there was a problem over the months as determined hackers were bloating our email list.
Another great cartoon by Michael Kountouris, from Greece.
People who didn’t sign up for our newsletter didn’t complain to us –but some of them complained to their own email providers who placed Cagle.com on blacklists as a spammer. We ended up on all of the major email blacklists. Our newsletters, and our other business emails, were blocked and the newsletter stopped churning our traffic. It took some time for us to figure out what happened. We replaced the newsletter list with a backup we had from a year earlier and set out on a quest to get off of the blacklists, a difficult process that took a couple of years. We moved our email newsletter to MailChimp, which is more expensive but which has better security than we could manage on our own.
The experts who looked at the history of this hack told us that the attack was very unusual, and that the hackers were surprisingly sophisticated, motivated and patient, spending countless hours over the months, manually adding valid email addresses to our list. The experts hadn’t seen anything like it before. Instead of simply taking down our server such that we could put the server back up from a backup copy, this hack poisoned the well for us, with blacklisting that crippled our newsletter and our traffic for years to come. One comment the experts made was memorable, “Those guys must really, really hate you.”
With continuing attacks, we can’t really be sure of what data is on our servers, we react and make fixes as we go along. We don’t keep sensitive data on our servers (like credit card numbers that can be stolen). We don’t run advertising on our sites. We never have and never will sell our data to anyone else.
Which brings me back to CCPA. Our modest, Free Daily Newsletter, that allows our community of fans to function, and which subjects us to a potential $7,500.00 per-violation fine if we’re found to have data on our servers that we didn’t report to any inquiring user. This opens us up to a potential hacker attack that would threaten us with potential CCPA fines for non-compliance in disclosing or deleting data that we never knew had been placed on our servers. It wouldn’t take much of an effort for hackers to subject us to a handful of $7,500.00 fines that could take down our small business.
Companies in California are expected to spend an initial $55 billion simply complying with CCPA, according to The Los Angeles Times, with a “gold rush” of start-ups and consultants looking to take advantage of the anxiety that CCPA is causing countless small businesses in California, like ours.
Beyond the risk, the cost of legal compliance, the programming changes and the fact that we’re not the intended target of this poorly written law, some of the hoops we’re required to jump through are ridiculous; the misleading statements that we’re required to make in our online Privacy Policy are a great example.
As a companion to to Cagle.com, we run a small newspaper syndicate that licenses editorial cartoons and columns to newspaper editorial page editors. We maintain a database of editors at papers that subscribe, for delivery and billing; we also maintain a list of editors who don’t subscribe, who we pitch, trying to get them to subscribe. The newspaper editors list includes the names of editors, publication titles, addresses, and the standard field, “Mr./Ms.” which under CCPA, means that we are collecting and storing sexual identification data on individuals. Because of the “Mr./Ms.” field in our editor database, this is the wording CCPA requires us to post in our required Privacy Policy: … In particular, we have collected the following categories of personal information from its consumers within the last twelve (12) months: C. Protected classification characteristics under California or federal law. Age (40 years or older), race, color, ancestry, national origin, citizenship, religion or creed, marital status, medical condition, physical or mental disability, sex (including gender, gender identity, gender expression, pregnancy or childbirth and related medical conditions), sexual orientation, veteran or military status, genetic information (including familial genetic information).
Cartoon by the stupendous Angel Boligan from Mexico.
Since we store street addresses for these editors, we must post this: … In particular, we have collected the following categories of personal information from its consumers within the last twelve (12) months: G. Geolocation data. Physical location or movements.
Since we keep notes on our contacts with the editors, we must post this: … In particular, we have collected the following categories of personal information from its consumers within the last twelve (12) months: K. Inferences drawn from other personal information. Profile reflecting a person’s preferences, characteristics, psychological trends, predispositions, behavior, attitudes, intelligence, abilities, and aptitudes.
Since we store names and email addresses, we must post this: … In particular, we have collected the following categories of personal information from its consumers within the last twelve (12) months: A. Identifiers. A real name, alias, postal address, unique personal identifier, online identifier, Internet Protocol address, email address, account name, Social Security number, driver’s license number, passport number, or other similar identifiers. B. Personal information categories listed in the California Customer Records statute (Cal. Civ. Code § 1798.80(e)). A name, signature, Social Security number, physical characteristics or description, address, telephone number, passport number, driver’s license or state identification card number, insurance policy number, education, employment, employment history, bank account number, credit card number, debit card number, or any other financial information, medical information, or health insurance information. Some personal information included in this category may overlap with other categories.
The required Privacy Policy could give pertinent information about what data Web sites really gather and store about users, but the crazy, hyperbolic wording that CCPA requires gives the impression that every site is spying and keeping intrusive data on everyone.
Since we acknowledge that we haven’t sold our data, we’re excused from some of the requirements of CCPA, for example, we’re not required to maintain a toll-free telephone number, posting our regular phone number is sufficient. But we’re not allowed to broadly state that we have not sold our data in the past and we won’t sell it in the future, we have to use this wording: In the preceding twelve (12) months, the Company has not sold personal information.
Another cartoon by the brilliant Mexican cartoonist, Dario Castillejos from Oaxaca.
The first advice my attorney gave me, before embarking on our expensive compliance journey under CCPA and AB 5, was, “You should move out of California.”
I’ve lived most of my life in California and I don’t want to move away from family and friends, so Cagle Cartoons, Inc. is suffering through the muck of risky, expensive, bone-headed, bad legislation. Since our business is small, it is fragile. Since we speak truth to power, we have many enemies around the world who would seek to take us down and it is ironic that the worst threats to us, and to the press in California, come from our Democrat controlled legislature in California.
We need your support for Cagle.com (and DarylCagle.com)! Notice that we run no advertising! We depend entirely upon the generosity of our readers to sustain Cagle.com. Please visit Cagle.com/heroes and make a contribution. You are much appreciated!
