> Firstly, I don’t think our sort of nonsense is going to die out. There will always be a place for it.

Second, to your worry (concern) – “So, are we going to see people like me directly employed by political factions again in the future?”. The answer is that we all already are. However much cartoonists may think they are independent, outraged voices bellowing at a comatose public to wake up and see what only they can see, they are not. We work for politically slanted employers, and we follow their line. I can think of no exception

I do it for the love of publicity and the realisation that my work is reaching the people that matter. I am not a Conservative, in eighteen years I’ve voted Labour, Liberal and Ken depending on the constituency I’ve lived in at the time. I do have a particular beef with Blair (Iraq) and Brown (competency) but that’s very different.

Also Brown is infinitely more caricaturable than Cameron.

I tend to agree with John Jensen, when he says “There will always be political satire, as long as there are politicians. Where political cartoons appear will depend on what media is available at any given time.”

To your question: “So, are we going to see people like me directly employed by political factions again in the future?” I agree with Christian Adams’ brutal but essentially true reply “We already are.(…) We work for politically slanted employers, and we follow their line. I can think of no exception. ”

I think the concern of most cartoonists, is not to have an mass media outlet which is ideologically independent, but one that corresponds with your own ideas – and more importably lets you have a certain degree of editorial freedom. An even more honest answer would probably be that our primary concern is to have a mass media outlet at all.

If complete ideological independence is the sole aim, there has arguably never been a better time to be a cartoonist, given that the ways of bypassing every major media institution and doing it yourself online, have never been more accessible.
For the first time in history cartoonists can now reach a world wide audience with truly independent work.
And if it’s good enough, people will pay for it.

Very few people have ever a handsome living from political cartooning. The number of people who did so in the past was very small. The number of high earning cartoonists today, is also very small. And the likelihood is that the number of high earning cartoonists in the future will be small too. But they will be there.

Of course things are changing at the moment, but whether they’re changing for the better or worse, comes down to the attitude of the individual cartoonist. Those who embrace it might succeed, and those who don’t will most certainly fail.

At present we are in something of a crisis where the structural decline of print and to some extent television too, in the face of rapidly growing web-based media, has been rapidly accelerated by the recession. Whether or not print makes much of a comeback when the current crisis is over, the people who used to fund it through paper sales and print ads are moving online – and often expect to get the same service free of charge.

I don’t think patronage is going to be much of a way forward for “content producers” (whether cartoonists, photographers or writers), unless they happen to like producing spam. Paid employment remains an option in online publishing/content – though probably on a smaller scale than in the print world. But the new way forward may be to cut out the middle man and go direct to end users. I think it was called disintermediation before the last bubble burst back in 2001.

Do you get enough traffic to your site to make it worthwhile adding advertising? If not, should you SEO it with a mass market in mind and then do so? Should you put the digital cartoons into a format that can go on YouTube and monetise with AdSense? I know from my own experience that the sums involved are usually peanuts, but if you can come up with something that goes viral and has a revenue stream attached it would be well worth the effort.

Philosophically opposed to putting adverts round your own content? Why so? It’s only what everyone you sell it to does. It’s not much, but it sort of makes a contribution to the bills until a better funding model that none of us has yet thought of comes along.

I suspect people said similar things about radio when TV was introduced. TV forced radio broadcasters to change – most notably, I suspect, from radio being a gregarious pursuit to being a solitary one. But life went on, and even if the new medium displaced and changed the old one, it didn’t destroy it.

Even if print *is* dead though, proper news sources online aren’t. ConHome, Guido, etc, aren’t really competing with normal news outlets and they can’t replace them. They’re more like old fashioned pamphlets and broadsides, a different kettle of fish. There will always be a place on proper news websites for satire.