Newspaper Space for Political Cartoonists Is Shrinking

The decision not to renew Fiona Katauskas’ contract with Guardian Australia has brought an old concern back into focus. As newspapers shrink and newsrooms change, staff political cartoonists are slowly disappearing with them.

Katauskas’ departure is about more than one cartoonist parting ways with one publication. Writing in The Conversation on August 3, 2026, Australian historian and political cartoon scholar Richard Scully placed it within a much broader change in journalism. Political cartoons are not disappearing, he argues, but the era of the permanent staff cartoonist may be nearing its end.

Katauskas makes the case particularly striking. One of Australia’s leading political cartoonists, she has built a distinctive style that often looks cheerful at first glance while delivering sharp and sometimes biting satire. Named Political Cartoonist of the Year by the Museum of Australian Democracy in 2023, she has continued to respond to everything from Australian politics and climate change to artificial intelligence and international affairs.

This is not, then, a story about a cartoonist losing relevance. It is a story about newspapers changing the way they work.

For much of the last century, political cartoonists were part of a newspaper’s identity. Readers knew the cartoonist just as they knew its columnists and commentators. A cartoon was not simply something placed between blocks of text to make a page more attractive. It was another editorial voice, with its own way of interpreting the news.

That model has been under pressure for years.

Print circulation has fallen, advertising money has moved elsewhere and newsrooms have become smaller. Faced with cutting costs, publishers have increasingly questioned positions that were once considered a natural part of a newspaper. Staff cartoonists have not escaped those decisions.

That does not mean newspapers have stopped publishing cartoons. They can still commission freelancers or use work produced outside their own newsrooms. What is disappearing is something more specific: the cartoonist who works regularly for one publication, develops a relationship with its readers and becomes part of its editorial character.

Katauskas is not an isolated case.

In New Zealand, Emma Cook lost her position at Stuff after eight years. In Australia, Colin Wicking was not replaced at the NT News when he retired in 2022. Similar changes have taken place in the United States, where a number of newspapers have eliminated staff editorial cartooning positions or shifted towards freelance arrangements.

As Scully puts it, this is hardly a stampede out of the newsroom. But the traffic is moving in one direction.

For cartoonists, the consequences are easy to see. Artists who might once have made a living working regularly for a newspaper are increasingly expected to piece together an income from freelance commissions, syndication, subscriptions, social media, books and other work.

Political cartooning survives. Making a decent living from it is becoming much harder.

And money is not the only issue.

The shrinking place of cartoonists inside newspapers also raises questions about editorial independence. One of the most prominent recent examples came in January 2025, when Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes resigned from The Washington Post after the newspaper declined to publish a cartoon depicting its owner, Jeff Bezos, alongside other wealthy media and technology figures bowing before Donald Trump.

Telnaes said she had previously experienced editorial disagreements and rejected ideas, which are part of the normal relationship between a cartoonist and an editor. This case, she argued, was different because of who the cartoon targeted.

Her resignation raised an uncomfortable question. A newspaper may continue to publish cartoons, but if the cartoonist becomes less secure and less independent within the institution, can political cartooning continue to perform the same role?

There is now another change hovering over this discussion: artificial intelligence.

Generative AI allows publishers to produce visual material quickly and cheaply. But treating a political cartoon as simply another piece of “visual content” misses what political cartoonists actually do.

The real raw material of a good political cartoon is not the drawing. It is the idea.

A cartoonist has to follow events, understand political context, recognise cultural references and collective memories, spot contradictions and then turn all of that into an unexpected visual thought. Sometimes a handful of lines and a few words can make an argument more effectively than hundreds of words of commentary.

That is also where Scully’s criticism of AI becomes relevant. AI systems can produce polished and impressive images. Political cartoons, however, do not become memorable because they are polished. They work because they make an unexpected connection, expose an absurdity or approach a familiar event from an angle the reader did not anticipate.

Political cartooning is also deeply rooted in place.

Australian politics needs artists who understand Australian politics, its personalities, arguments and cultural references. The same is true in Türkiye, France, Brazil, the United States or anywhere else. A technically accomplished image produced without that context is not necessarily a political cartoon in the journalistic sense.

That makes the retreat from political cartooning particularly strange at this moment.

Readers are confronted with more information than ever: headlines, videos, posts, commentary and breaking news arriving continuously throughout the day. In that environment, the ability of a strong cartoon to reduce a complicated political argument to one memorable image should arguably make it more useful, not less.

And a political cartoonist’s job has never simply been to make readers laugh. Cartoonists ridicule power, expose the distance between what politicians say and what they do, and sometimes notice the absurd detail in an event that everyone else has overlooked.

The space newspapers give them may be shrinking. The number of permanent staff cartoonists may continue to fall.

That does not mean the need for political cartooning has disappeared.

Cartoonists will almost certainly keep drawing. Politicians will certainly keep giving them material.

What is less certain is whether newspapers will remain part of that relationship.

Sources & Further Reading

• Richard Scully — The Conversation: “Newspaper space for political cartoons is shrinking – but we need these artists as much as ever” — August 3, 2026. The article that prompted this story and examines Fiona Katauskas’ departure within the wider decline of permanent staff cartoonists.
• Museum of Australian Democracy — Fiona Katauskas — Artist profile and archive covering Katauskas’ career and political cartooning. MoAD named her Political Cartoonist of the Year in 2023.  
• The Guardian — Ann Telnaes and The Washington Post controversy — Background on Telnaes’ January 2025 resignation after the newspaper declined to publish her cartoon targeting Jeff Bezos and other media and technology executives.  
• Northern Territory Government — Iconic cartoon collection donated to Library & Archives NT — Official background on longtime NT News editorial cartoonist Colin Wicking and the preservation of more than 10,000 of his cartoons.