Borgman Quits Enquirer · 4 September 2008
Jim Borgman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist who has been with The Enquirer for 32 years, has applied for, and was granted, severance under the company’s voluntary severance program.
The Enquirer has accepted 60 applications for a voluntary severance program that included up to a year’s pay for employees with longtime service.
Newspapers across Gannett’s U.S. Community Publishing division have reduced staffing by about 3 percent in recent weeks.
Although Borgman’s daily cartoons will end later this month, he will create a new cartoon feature later this year that will appear in his familiar space on the cover of the Sunday Community Forum section.
“I’ve enjoyed doing two of the best jobs I can imagine – drawing editorial cartoons and my comic strip ‘Zits’ – and I have loved it all, although it is exhausting,” Borgman said.
“Continuing ‘Zits’ while doing a new weekly feature sounds like a great balance.”
Enquirer Publisher Margaret Buchanan said the reductions were necessary because of economic conditions.
“Newspapers nationwide are under pressure, and the economic outlook in the near term is expected to be a challenge,” Buchanan said.
“The reductions will be consistent with the company’s strategic direction, including the need to protect our content creation and sales capacity.”
The publisher said, “It is important to remember in all of this that our business is in transition. Our audience strategy is solid, and our reach is very strong. Core newspaper readers are stable, and our digital audience is growing, but overall advertising dollars are shrinking.”
The employees – from all divisions of the operation – who were approved for the severance packages represent about 6 percent of the newspaper’s work force. Separation dates will vary based on operational issues.
Fifteen of the positions came from the news division.
“We will redistribute assignments and restructure some editing and design operations to adjust,” editor Tom Callinan said. “Our goal will be to protect our ability to cover local news, serve the public interest and encourage civic engagement.”
Jim won the Pulitzer Prize in 1991 and the National Cartoonist Society’s editorial cartoon division award five times. – - – -
It’s very disheartening to see Jim go. I can understand his reasons, but I’m devastated that he won’t be a part of my daily intake of editorial cartoons any more. Borgman was, to my mind, the best editorial cartoonist working in America at this time, (next to Mike Lester a close second.) It’s a real shame to see him pack up his desk at the Cinci Enquirer.
Jim, incidentally, is the special guest at the Australian Cartoonists’ Association Stanley Awards this year in Coffs harbour on the weekend of November 22nd.
For info on coming along to meet Jim, or attending the Stanleys, click here.
—FROM BORGMAN’S BLOG—
I’ve said my piece, as Grandma Borgman would have said.
One week after graduating from Kenyon College 32 years ago I started drawing editorial cartoons for the Cincinnati Enquirer, awestruck to be working for the only newspaper that had ever been spread across my Price Hill family’s kitchen table. I’ve barely looked up since. Some employee! Not a single promotion in three decades. My buddy says I’m “still stuck in the same dead-end job” I got right out of college.
But what a job. And what a remarkable landscape of nonsense and characters I’ve gotten to chronicle in the years since. Hidden behind each day’s cartoon has been a sweatfest aimed at amusing and engaging you in the topics of our times, all done in the belief that when we are fully immersed in lively debate we make wiser decisions about our world. I’ve poured my blood and bones into a job which, if done well, looks effortless and whimsical. I’ve had fun and you’ve told me you have, too.
It’s been important to me that my work be of this place, midwestern, blue collar, with a voice from the heartland. My characters are mostly doughy, big-hearted Cincinnatians, wrestling with the news and the way it trickles down into their hard-working lives. I’ve studied you at Lookout Joe’s over lattes, Skyline over three-ways, and at Delhi Frisch’s over breakfast with my mom. You are beautiful, kind and generous people and it has been an honor to share these years with you. There is no place I would have rather invested my life.
When I created Zits twelve years ago with my partner Jerry Scott, my hours behind the drawing board doubled and the weekends turned into weekdays. A body can only do double duty for so long, and mine has gotten soft in the middle. It’s telling me to get the bike down from the garage ceiling and breathe some fresh air again.
I don’t know if I’ll miss this precious real estate I’ve enjoyed and the chance to talk about anything on my mind. I do look forward to reading a newspaper without a highlighter in my hand. Sometimes lately when I watch the news I feel like a butcher looking at a field full of cows. I don’t see the animals anymore, just the hamburger. That’s a good sign that it’s time to shake yourself off and do something else.
The thing I treasure most from these years is the relationship you and I have built, meeting over coffee every morning. When my editor suggested that it was a shame to let that lapse, I agreed and came up with an idea.
Over the years I’ve played at creating a weekly comic strip devoted to just us and this curious place we live. Outsiders won’t get it.
All I can tell you so far is that it will be about a little flying pig who lives in the back booth of a chili parlor in a quirky town called Porkopolis. Watch this space in January.
Meanwhile, thank you for humoring me. What a pleasure it has been!
