"The cutback in cartoons has less to do with the budget than it does with page counts going down," Kevin Allman tells "Idiot Box" cartoonist Matt Bors. "What you see as $25 for a cartoon, the publishers see as potential ad space that could sell for 10x that amount." Allman says that in New Orleans, they ended up sticking with local cartoonists rather than nationally syndicated ones. "Their drawings are the equivalent of local news stories," he says. "And I try to treat them with as much respect as I do the columnists, but they have to suffer too with the smaller page layouts."
Matt Bors and Tom Tomorrow both report that they have lost several papers in the last few months.
