A picture is worth a thousand words? Meet the nonprofit newsrooms hiring editorial cartoonists
The San Diego-based nonprofit newsroom inewsource has published in-depth accountability reporting since 2009. The vision? “Betrayals of the public trust are revealed and rectified, wrongdoing is deterred, and inequities are illuminated thanks to inewsource’s deep, dogged, fact-based reporting,” according to the site. Recent series have looked at the toll of Border Patrol chases, prisoner deaths during the height of Covid-19, and wage theft throughout San Diego County. Over the years, reporting from inewsource has prompted statewide legislation, new policies to reign in governmental graft, and other change.
But there’s an issue, says inewsource founder, editor, and CEO Lorie Hearn, “Not enough people see our work and we need to change that.”
“Because our mission for 14 years has been investigative and accountability work, we don’t publish every day. And our stories tend to be long and in-depth,” Hearn said. “We also haven’t had the bandwidth to develop and implement specific strategies around building and engaging audiences, until now.”
The newsroom announced it’d hired the prize-winning cartoonist Steve Breen earlier this month.
“People want to ‘see’ more in the news, as is evidenced by the growing audiences on social media sites like Instagram,” Hearn wrote when announcing Breen’s new role. “The allure — and mandate — of visuals inspired us to hire Steve, a super-talented cartoonist whose observations and interpretations of what matters has been recognized by two Pulitzer Prizes.”
Hearn said the inewsource audience team had been pushing the outlet to evolve and become “more intentional in our interactive storytelling.” Hiring Breen is part of a larger audience push that’s included following the advice of its first-ever director of growth and partnerships, investigating topics that’ve come up during community listening, and launching a citizen-powered Documenters program.
“Our emphasis is meeting people where they are, in the way they want to be reached, on their terms,” Hearn said. “We are trying to flip the narrative and listen to communities and interact with them, rather than just reporting news reporters and editors feel they should know.”
Breen, in his new role at inewsource, will work with the news team “to tell their often complex stories through graphic novel-style illustration, animation, and sometimes video that reaches younger audiences on the platforms they engage with most.”
For inewsource, Breen will publish local editorial cartoons and contribute to investigative stories selected in collaboration with his editors. “By our own admission, the site has been ‘text heavy’ (these are investigative pieces, after all),” Breen wrote in an email. He said he’ll be drawing with an eye toward making inewsource’s work more appealing and the local issues raised more accessible, in particular, to younger readers.
Both Breen and Hearn pointed to the ability of illustrations and cartoons to transcend some language, cultural, and political barriers. (Darth Vader does, too, apparently.)