An uncle who hadn’t seen Scott Nychay for a while asked him at a family party a few weeks ago how things were going at work. The Northwest Herald laid me off last October, Nychay replied. Then why, a puzzled cousin asked, is the Herald bragging about you on TV?
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In his eight years at the Herald Nychay won ten first-place state awards from the AP and the Illinois Press Association, along with several other honors. When the tsunami hit Asia in 2004 and again when Katrina hit the gulf coast in 2005, he launched a “drawing support” campaign, selling signed prints of his cartoons. (He says he raised a total of $50,000 for the Red Cross Relief Fund.) But at strapped newspapers, talent and public-spiritedness aren’t job guarantees, least of all for editorial cartoonists, an endangered species.
Monday I got Nychay’s old boss on the phone and asked him to explain the ad. The explanation, in a word, was Whoops! Chris Krug, group editor of the Herald, the Kane County Chronicle, and other regional papers in the Shaw Newspapers chain, says the ad was created in 2005; an updated version began running last July (a few months before Nychay lost his job) between 5 and 6:30 in the morning–a classic out-of-sight, out-of-mind time slot. “I’m grateful you brought it to our attention,” Krug told me. “We’re the smallest newspaper group in metropolitan Chicago and we’re battling it out with the Sun-Times and the Tribune and the Daily Herald with extremely limited resources. This was clearly an oversight on our part and not an attempt to gain ground through the work of a former employee.
Joe Skeel, editor of Quill, the journal of the Society of Professional Journalists, told Nychay the situation fell outside the scope of SPJ’s code of ethics. That said, “I personally think it’s a slimy thing to do. They think you are good enough to advertise, but not employ?”
I doubt there’s a cartoonist working in America who believes that. Mauldins don’t come cheap, and the decision to hire one wouldn’t be Dold’s alone. After MacNelly died I got to know Nick Anderson, one of a handful of first-rank cartoonists who thought they were in line for the Tribune job but eventually gave up on it. Anderson won a Pulitzer in 2005 at Louisville’s Courier-Journal and was a finalist this year at the Houston Chronicle. It was Anderson, president-elect of the AAEC, who gave me the heads-up about Scott Nychay. “It strikes me as profoundly unethical,” Anderson e-mailed me. “They are bragging about the achievements of an employee they unceremoniously sacked.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Scott Nychay’s award-winning cartoon “Intelligent Design”.
