The cartoonist Jack Ohman and his home for several years, the Portland Oregonian, have announced the award-winner's imminent departure in several places. Ohman has been on staff there since 1983. An announcement as to future plans is expected tomorrow. A Minnesota native and briefly at the Columbus Dispatch and the Detroit Free Press, he's syndicated by Tribune Media Services. He was this year's Scripps Howard Journalism Award winner and was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize.
It's hard for me to imagine a working cartoonist right in that sweet spot of his career -- Ohman's in his early 50s -- that is both really good and really ensconced at a paper and community like Ohman, so I look on this story with wide eyes and a slight bit of concern in terms of how it affects the changing vocational profile for editorial cartoonists. I do think he's one of those guys that could go it purely based on syndication -- his work consistently appears in top publications not his own. I'd hate to lose his local cartooning element, though, as I'm particularly fond of that as a function of editorial cartooning. It's also worth noting that Ohman's a fairly versatile cartoonist in terms of different kinds of cartoons, which I think suggests he'd have a lot of options in terms of foundational gigs if a change there is in the cards.