June 4, 2002
So where are they going to store Tom Toles's chair?
by Bruce Jackson
So where are they going to store Tom Toles's chair?
by Bruce Jackson
Bad times
The Buffalo News has no plans to seek a successor to Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Tom Toles when he replaces the legendary Herbert Block at the Washington Post next month. Instead, the News will get its cartoons from syndication services. Toles would be one of several syndicated cartoonists whose work the News would probably use.
According to Dave Astor, senior editor of Editor and Publisher Online, Buffalo News editorial page editor Gerald Goldberg said "the paper is trying to save money on staff salaries, and the only hires allowed in the near future will be two reporters. 'I'm disappointed that I'm not going to have a staff cartoonist, but in bad times you have to make tough choices.'"
Open options
Margaret Sullivan, editor of the Buffalo News, was less gloomy, but not much more specific. "We don't have immediate plans to hire a cartoonist but our options are all open," she told me. "We may hire a cartoonist in the future. We may recruit one of our staff artists to start doing editorial cartoons. We just haven't made a decision."
The News, she said, has had a hiring freeze in recent months, but "we're actually easing that hiring freeze to hire a couple of reporters because I see that as our most pressing need. Reporters are the lifeblood of what we do. We've had a couple of people retire. So we're easing the hiring freeze to hire these reporters. And as far as hiring another editorial cartoonist goes, all options are open. I don't have immediate plans to hire somebody."
Sullivan noted that the Washington Post wasn't able to replace Herblock very quickly. "Not that I would completely compare us to the Washington Post, but Herblock died in the fall of last year. They've hired Tom, but he's still working here and he will be working here next month too. So it's not like they didn't have a gap between when their editorial cartoonist died in that case and when they brought on a new person."
She didn't suggest that when Herblock died the Washington Post considered for a moment not replacing him. We both knew perfectly well that the Post began searching immediately, and that they would have been perfectly happy to have had Tom Toles move to Washington and begin drawing there when the deal was cut more than two months ago. Both the Buffalo News and the Washington Post lost great cartoonists. There the parallel ends: the Post initiated a search that got them Tom Toles; the News isn't looking at all.
So is the Buffalo News ever going to hire a senior editorial cartoonists like Toles (there isn't anybody like Toles, but there are movable editorial cartoonists who do good work), or a recently unemployed editorial cartoonist as Toles was when the News hired him after News owner Warren Buffett drove Toles's previous employer, the Buffalo Courier-Express, into the ground in 1982?
"There has been no decision made. I would say it's not the case that we're not going to hire an editorial cartoonist. That's not the case."
I asked where Buffalo News publisher Stanford Lipsey stood on this issue. She said, "He too would say that we're keeping all our options open now."
Editorial pages
I think it unlikely that this inactivity is Margaret Sullivan's choice or desire. Every competent newspaper editor knows that a good editorial cartoonist can make the most banal editorial page acceptable, and a great editorial cartoonist can make the most bland newspaper worth picking up.
When was the last time you opened the Buffalo News and rushed to see the day's letters to the editor or editorials? When was the last time you opened it to see how Tom Toles portrayed the latest political idiocy, venality, or general abomination? How often did you say to anyone, "Did you see that great editorial in the News today?" How often did you say to someone, "Did you see what Tom did today?"
That's just the way Washington Post readers were with Herblock. Back in the Watergate days, the Post was a paper with a lot of depth and guts, but in recent years it has had a real falling away. It has less energy for pursuing difficult stories, it functions with a smaller staff. That's why they knew they needed someone of the stature of Tom Toles.
Tom Toles
Tom Toles has consistently been one of the few superb performers in a paper that, in recent years, has seen many key staff members leave or retire without being replaced and has often been forced to cover major stories in far less depth than its editors knew those stories needed, or with reporters far more callow than the editors knew the stories required. I can't believe, for example, that the News's coverage of the Peace Bridge affair would have been so epidermal had it been able to assign to that story reporters capable of looking beyond what they were told or handed by members of the Buffalo and Fort Erie Public Bridge Authority, Andrew Rudnick of the Buffalo Niagara Partnership (the former Chamber of Commerce), and Canadian officials. By the time the News got the Peace Bridge story right, the story was all over. That shouldn't happen to a big-city newspaper.
Toles was consistently smart, adroit, and funny. He was the guy who time and again saved the paper from epidermal reporting and analysis. And he was educational. You'd read the bombinations and smoke from the politicians and developers and crooks and carnies, the guys who were trying to convince us that voting for them or lining their pockets with our money was good for the community, and then you'd look at one of Toles's cartoons and the bombinations would go quiet, the smoke would clear, the veil would lift, the emperor would be seen in all his perfect nakedness. Tom's genius isn't at all parochial, which is why the Post hired him. It's not just Buffalo sillies and scoundrels he's brought into fine focus: who can forget his portly Bill Clinton trying to explain his way out of Monica or his pointy-eared George Bush trying to explain anything?
Herblock died at 91. He'd been a working cartoonist for 71 years and he'd been with the Post for 55 of them. He coined the term "McCarthyism." He'd danced on the foolishness of every American president since Herbert Hoover. He had 3 Pulitzers. He was a shy guy who had a great sense of the absurd, one more regard in which he and Tom Toles are not unalike. When Toles won his Pulitzer, someone said, he rode around the Buffalo News newsroom on a unicycle; when Herblock went to Gridiron dinners, to which one must wear tails, he was known to appear in sneakers.
Warren Buffett
Margaret Sullivan is the editor of the News and Stan Lipsey is the publisher, and neither of them talks about whether or how often Warren Buffett meddles in the day-to-day operations of the paper. But publisher Lipsey sits on the paper's editorial board and he is an old friend of owner Buffett. Buffett has huge blocks of the Washington Post and Gannett and other media enterprises, but the only newspaper he owns entirely is the Buffalo News.
Barbara Ireland, predecessor to Gerry Goldberg, told John Henry of the Columbia Journalism Review that Buffett interviewed her for 2 ½ hours before the paper was permitted to hire her. That's not hands-off ownership. Sullivan, Goldberg and Lipsey have never gone on record about what Buffett said to them before they were hired or since, but Ireland's report makes it hard to imagine that they were greeted and maintained only by benign silence.
I would bet that we're experiencing another one of those moments when Warren Buffett has reached from the heart of the heartland in Omaha to Buffalo to snip a little more out of the quality of life of Buffalo, like coupons on a corporate bond.
Buffett bought the News from the Butler family in 1977 for about $90 million in current dollars. For much of the time he's owned it, the paper has mailed him about $1 million per week in profits. The first few years were difficult because he was spending heavily to kill the Courier-Express. The Courier gave up the ghost in 1982, and since then the News has done very well for Buffett. In the past few years circulation has been down, and lately advertising inches have also been down, but the News is a monopoly paper and has usually been able to up its rates and cut back on its staff to keep profits immune from declining circulation and ad inches. The Buffalo News continues to be one of the most profitable newspapers in the country, even though its staff and coverage and readership have all declined.
Animal life
Animator Chuck Jones (Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig), who died in March, once said Herblock was "a tiger posing as a possum," a line that could apply equally well to our good Tom. The Washington Post acted wisely in picking Tom Toles as the great Herblock's successor.
And now that Tom is packing his pencils and pads, will Warren Buffett's Buffalo News act at all? Is Omaha so comfortable about its Buffalo monopoly that it will feel comfortable in letting Tom's chair go into deep storage?
If the past is any indication of the future, the answer is yes. We probably won't see a Tom Toles cartoon about that, and a good thing it is. His departure is sad news indeed, and the failure of the Buffalo News even to try to fill the vacancy he leaves is further evidence of a larger and sadder passage.
Dave Astor's Editor and Publisher article on the News's decision not to replace Tom Toles.
http://editorandpublisher.com/editorandpublisher/headlines/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1508528
The Washington Post's April 10 article on Toles' appointment. http://pc99.detnews.com/aaec/story/details.hbs?myrec=138
John Henry's article, "Buffett in Buffalo: His Paper Prints Money, What Else Does it Print?" in Columbia Journalism Review, November-December 1998. http://www.cjr.org/year/98/6/Buffett.asp