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Blog Newsletter Syndicate

Most POPULAR Cartoons of the Week

Here are the 15 most popular and most reprinted CagleCartoons for the week of March 1st through 7th. We’ve started posting the cartoons that are most popular with editors in a special section on our newspaper subscribers download site. These are the cartoons that editors download the most, in high resolution, to be published in their newspapers. Since we started drawing more attention to the most popular cartoons, we’ve found that editors’ downloads on our site have doubled.

20% of our cartoons get 80% of the reprints. Editors tend to like the same cartoons –and these are the cartoon the editors liked most and published most this week. Enjoy!


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by Dave Granlund


By Steve Sack

Most popular cartoons of the week March 1 through 7, 2020
by John Cole

By Ed Wexler


by Bruce Plante


By David Fitzsimmons


by John Darkow


By RJ Matson


By Rick McKee


By RJ Matson


By Chris Weyant


By Adam Zyglis

By Bruce Plante

by John Cole

By Dave Granlund

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Blog Newsletter Syndicate

CagleCartoons.com Changes

We’ve made some changes to the front page of our syndicate site, CagleCartoons.com that will affect our contributing artists. Here is my latest Bloomberg cartoon that I will use an an example below.

I’ll use my recent Bloomberg cartoon as an example of the changes on CagleCartoons.com
This is the revised front page of CagleCartoons.com, our syndicate download site for editors, as it appear today.

The CagleCartoons.com site is the core of our little business. This is where our subscription customers get their cartoons and columns; these are mostly daily, paid-circulation newspapers in the USA who put our content on their editorial pages. (If you only read our blog and Cagle.com you may want to read no further, as this doesn’t affect you. This may be a bit wonky for most readers.)

–The Issues and the Changes

We’re the only syndicate that has their client download site (CagleCartoons.com) available for everyone to see. We’ve been addressing some nagging issues with how we deliver the cartoons on the site. Most editors only look for what is new on the front page of the site and don’t consider older cartoons in our vast database. Often (such as every Thursday) we had too many new cartoons for the front page and cartoons that were loaded early in the day were gone later in the day, pushed out by the newest contributions. Unless an editor visited twice a day, she wouldn’t see all of the new cartoons –and most editors don’t visit every day.

In general, 20% of the cartoons get 80% of the reprints. In other words, editors don’t like 80% of the cartoons, and with all of the cartoons rushing to leave the front page, too many editors complained that they were not seeing enough cartoons they liked.

We encourage our cartoonists to submit black and white versions of their cartoons, because cartoons designed for black and white look better than color cartoons converted to grayscale where some colors come out too dark and cartoons often flatten to a dull gray. The many black and white duplicate versions of the cartoons were taking up front page space that now goes to displaying more color versions of cartoons. The black and white images are now available on the “preview” download pages of the color “parent” cartoon.

We encourage cartoonists to upload their cartoons in a higher resolution than the cartoonists prefer, and we encourage cartoonists to save their work in tiff format, which is not “lossy” like jpg and png formats.  (Editors prefer jpg).

Cartoons should be archived in tiff format, so there is no loss to the original. We see our archive as a library and we want to treat the original cartoon files like historical documents that deserve to be preserved without loss –as high resolution tiff files.

We also encourage artists to save their work in CMYK format so their black lines are crispy and the cartoons don’t suffer from bad printing with poor registration. Editors prefer RGB. Until now editors have had to suffer from cartoons in different formats as the unruly herd of cartoonist/cats saved their work in different formats, now editors can download the tiff files as jpg files.

Trump-Friendly, Popular, and the World …

Some time ago, in response to complaints from Trump-supporting editors, we added a section near the top of the page called TRUMP FRIENDLY CARTOONS. This went a long way to dealing with the complaints from red state editors. We recently added a new section called POPULAR CARTOONS that pushed the WORLD CARTOONS section down the page below the fold; the purpose of the new section is to keep the most popular cartoons on the front page longer so editors don’t miss what they want most. The TRUMP FRIENDLY CARTOONS are often among the most popular cartoons with editors. We won’t put the same cartoons in both sections so they won’t be shown twice (or three times) on the front page, so if a TRUMP FRIENDLY cartoon is also a POPULAR CARTOON, it will appear only in the TRUMP FRIENDLY section.

The POPULAR CARTOONS aren’t really “trending” in the internet sense, because readers tend to like different cartoons than editors. In general, editors prefer funny cartoons that don’t express a strong point of view, while readers on the Web respond most to cartoons that pull no punches and reinforce their existing points of view. We still have all kinds of cartoons, strong and soft, left and right, but we’re making it easier for editors to see cartoons they prefer on our site. After all, this site is designed for ease of use by editors. (Cagle.com is designed for readers.)

We love the world cartoonists, but American editors don’t, and these are the least downloaded cartoons by our newspaper subscribers –so we’ve pushed the WORLD CARTOONS down the page they are still there, and there are just as many of them displayed.

The black and white versions of cartoons are no longer taking up spots on the front page, they are displayed on the preview pages of their accompanying “parent” color versions that editors see when they choose to download cartoons after logging in. Cartoons that exist only as black and white will still appear on the front page.

This is an example of an image preview or download page on CagleCartoons.com today, this is our syndicate download site for editors, as it appear today. This is what editors see after they log in, giving them options to download the high resolution version of the cartoon in different formats.

Preview Page Changes

Clicking on any thumbnail image on the site brings up a “preview page” that looks different for editors who have logged in. An example of what editors see is at the right.

Editors have many options for downloading cartoons, they can download the high resolution images to their device, or email the cartoon to themselves, or to another email address. They can also choose to receive different versions of the cartoons. I upload my cartoons in CMYK tiff format, which is “non-lossy” and best for some kinds of printing. Editors prefer RGB jpg format which is what they are used to getting from photo services like AP. Now editors can download in tiff, jpg and png formats, as CMYK or as RGB if the cartoonist saved her cartoon in CMYK format, as we recommend and as few cartoonists do.

When cartoonists prepare a separate black and white version of a color cartoon, it now appears as a “related variation” only on the preview page for editors to download, rather than with the thumbnails on the front page and in searches. In general, when a black and white version of a cartoon is available, one third of the downloads for the cartoon are for the black and white version.

In the future we may make other variations available to editors on the preview pages, such as foreign language versions or different dimensions that cartoonists may want to do, or such as a taller version or wider version.

Newspaper editors hate when cartoonists use dirty words, but many cartoonists love dirty words which are commonplace on the Web. We’re considering allowing cartoonists to do “dirty word versions” of their cartoons that would be available as variations since there is so much demand for that among the cartoonists. We haven’t quite convinced ourselves do that yet, since most of our subscribers are traditional newspapers. Maybe we will.

We’re also considering adding a feature that will allow editors to select the resolution of the cartoon they download. For now, the resolution of the cartoon is displayed on the preview page. Sometimes we get complaints about cartoons that artists uploaded in low resolution (this is more often a problem with the world cartoonists who have a harder time accepting higher resolution). Unfortunately, it does no good to try to increase the resolution of a low resolution original; this option is only good for resizing cartoons to lower resolutions or dimensions, which would be helpful for Web clients.

Editors can see the resolution on the preview page so they won’t be surprised after downloading the cartoon. There is more demand for higher resolution cartoons now as new devices have higher resolution displays and as better printing processes demand more from cartoon files that are blown up as illustrations.

That’s it for now. More changes will be coming soon!


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 the site. Please visit Cagle.com/heroes and make a contribution. You are much appreciated!


 

Categories
Blog Newsletter Syndicate

Rare Cartoon and Big Dark Cloud

Here is my cartoon as it appeared today in the Los Angeles Daily News.  It is rare for me to see my cartoon in the local newspapers in the vast editorial cartoon desert that is Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles Times, a newspaper with a rich history of editorial cartooning, doesn’t run editorial cartoons and has no staff cartoonist anymore (occasionally they will run a commissioned illustration from a freelancer with a political theme). The larger daily newspapers surrounding The LA Times are part of the Southern California News Group (SCNG) which includes my local Los Angeles Daily News, The Pasadena Star-News, The Riverside Press-Enterprise and The Long Beach Press-Telegram among others; these papers sell advertising more effectively as a group and prepare their editorial pages centrally from The Orange County Registera practice that is becoming more common. The same is true with the Bay Area News Group (BANG) up North, with their central editorial page staff at The San Jose Mercury News.

The SCNG group subscribes to our Cagle Cartoons package but only prints one traditional editorial cartoon per week, on Sundays; they dropped daily editorial cartoons to run the comic strip Mallard Filmore. The strip takes half the space of an editorial cartoon and is reliably conservative compared to liberal-leaning editorial cartoons, making Mallard a more attractive alternative from the newspapers’ point of view. SCNG also dropped their editorial pages entirely on Mondays and Saturdays; sadly, this is also common. (Fortunately, SCNG runs many more editorial cartoons on their Web sites.) Since only one cartoon per week can make it into print, it is rare for me to see my own cartoon in the local newspaper – of-course, one spot per week is much better than The Los Angeles Times with no spots per week and no editorial cartoons on their Web site.

Newspapers are shutting down editorial page staffs faster than they are dropping editorial pages and this sometimes works to our advantage. When SCNG and BANG consolidated all of their newspapers’ editorial page staffs, we picked up newspapers in the groups that we hadn’t been able to sell to before, so that all the papers in the groups could run the same content. A similar thing happened recently with McClatchy in North Carolina and we picked up two new papers, The Richmond News-Leader and The Durham Herald-Sun so that they can run a common weekly round-up of cartoons, prepared centrally by our brilliant cartoonist Kevin Siers at McClatchy’s The Charlotte Observer.

I’m often asked what the trends are with editorial cartooning, and my rare cartoon in my local newspaper led to this long-winded answer. We will continue to see newspapers dropping their editorial pages, sometimes dropping only two pages per week, and sometimes dropping the editorial pages entirely. I’m told that editorial pages make readers angry, and papers don’t sell advertising on the editorial page, so editorial pages can be viewed as a costly hassle. Editorial cartoons will continue to lose their newspaper homes.

Newspapers will also continue to consolidate and we’ll see editorial page staffs continue to be cut, with regional groups consolidating their editorial staffs from multiple local papers into central locations; ironically, this is good for Cagle Cartoons as our content is so much better than competing syndicate packages that we continue to pick up more papers than we lose to the consolidation trend –which is a little silver lining on a big dark cloud.

Categories
Blog Syndicate

TRUE! Marriage!

Here’s a batch of cartoons about marriage from my 1995 syndicate comic strip, TRUE!

These are all depicting real, honest-to-goodness facts. I have a lot of these and I’m entering the evergreens into our huge cartoon database at PoliticalCartoons.com. More to come.

 

 

Categories
Blog

Welcome Cristina Sampaio!

We just added a new cartoonist to our CagleCartoons.com newspaper syndicate and our Cagle.com site! Cristina Sampaio, the charming and brilliant cartoonist from Portugal. Here are a few samples of her work. Just another great reason for newspaper to subscribe to our syndicate! Read more about Cagle.com here.

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Blog

Welcome Bill Day

I’m very pleased to announce that we’ve added the brilliant cartoonist Bill Day to our stable of award-winning syndicated cartoonists at Cagle Cartoons.

Bill will draw three cartoons a week for us, along with a local cartoon each week about Tennessee, which we will syndicate to nearly 900 newspapers world wide.

Bill is a two-time winner of the RFK Journalism Award in Cartooning, and a five-time winner of the Green Eyeshade Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. He has also been honored with the National Headliner Award, the John Fischetti Award, First Amendment Award, New York Newspaper Guild’s Page One Award, National Cartoonists Society’s Division Award for Best Editorial Cartoons and James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism..

The defense of the oppressed and their condition is a deep and eloquent theme in his work. “I have great fun drawing and using humor in my cartoons,” says Day. “But when a terrible injustice occurs, I’ll use the most powerful images possible to address it.”

Here are some recent cartoons by Day:

Categories
Cartoons

The Evolution of Apple Computer

The Evolution of Apple Computer Color © Daryl Cagle,MSNBC.com,Justin Long,PC vs Mac,commercial,Gizmodo.com,iPhone,police,evolution,Darwin,monkey,apes,stolen property,journalism,search warrant

Categories
Cartoons

Arizona Speedy Gonzales

Arizona Speedy Gonzales Color © Daryl Cagle,MSNBC.com,Speedy Gonzales, Warner Brothers, Looney Tunes, mouse, Mexico, immigration reform, illegal immigrants, Speedy Gonzales, Sylvester, cat, mouse, border, mexico, national guard, immigration, illegal, undocumented, immigrant, Loony Toons, border patrol

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Cartoons

Goldman Sachs Blackjack

Goldman Sachs Blackjack Color © Daryl Cagle,MSNBC.com,Goldman Sachs,business,economy,financial crisis,sub-prime,subprime,mortgages,fraud,securities,derivatives,casino,21,blackjack,gambling

Categories
Cartoons

Euro Toilet

Euro-Toilet © Daryl Cagle,MSNBC.com,economy,finance,economy,European Union,Greece,Portugal,Spain,Euro,Europe