Out with the News...

I started taking photographs of each year's newspaper headlines way back at the end of 1973 as a way of making bookmarks in my photo albums. Lately, with fewer newspapers being published, and some of the remaining ones reserving the front page for local stories, I've had to resort to pasting together screen grabs — which at least makes available those world headlines that U.S. papers relegate to page 6B.

That said, here's my collage for 2025:

Wishing you all better news in 2026,

―Paul

2024: Demokratiedämmerung

Lest auld republic be forgot, let's bring it back to mind: 

For lack of a slide-show feature in this here blog, I present here a column of some of my cartoons from 2024. I might have added the cartoon I drew Sunday, I suppose, even though it's not being published until 2025. Perhaps if I remember it a year from now, it will be part of my 2025 retrospective.

So here, at least to jog my own memory, is what the hell we have been drawing about this year:

2023 in Headlines

Another year has come and just about gone, so here is my annual photo of major headlines during anno domini 2023:

By the way, Mike Peterson accepted the challenge of finding some worthwhile year's end cartoons from 1923. You can find Part One here.

2022 in Review

My Saturday History Tour and year-end retrospective collide today (often a risk you take when looking behind you). So here's a collage of a few of my favorite cartoons from 2022:

(I would have liked to include this week's cartoon, too. But I felt I needed to limit myself to six cartoons.)

Here also is my annual snapshot of the year's biggest headlines.

I've been taking these front-page headline photos for 50 years now, and I don't know how much longer this habit will be possible. Many newspapers have surrendered blaring headlines about national and international news to the immediacy of the internet. The local newspaper here is still likely to give prominent placement to news of the end of U.S. involvement in a long war, or a vice presidential resignation; but for the most part, front page coverage is reserved for local features.

Even the regional papers (e.g.: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Chicago Tribune) tend to highlight features of local and state interest over, say, a congressional hearing, or a coup in South America. National papers such as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal reserve huge bold headlines for singularly monumental events — but on the other hand, I have a much better camera now. No way would you have been able to read the Boris Johnson headline if I were still taking pictures with my Kodak Instamatic.

__________

P.S.: Had I waited until tomorrow to post this, I might have been able to add a newspaper headline about Pope Benedict's death this morning. Well, perhaps. Tomorrow's local newspapers had probably been put to bed Friday night.

2021 in Review

It's de rigeur for us cartoonists to ring out the year by bringing out our dead cartoons of the past twelve months. So, here, instead of my usual Saturday fare of ancient history (besides, it's been done), is a collage to remember 2021 by.

So here, with the usual caveats about what makes headlines any more, is my traditional collection of the year in headlines.

With my wishes for a healthier, safer, saner, happier new year,

Sincerely yours,

Paul

1989 in Review

Hey, since I devoted several posts last year to cartoons from 1989, here's the photo I took at that year's end of 1989's newspaper headlines.

Careful readers may notice a magazine headline that was repeated in my 2019 photo.

✍

P.S.: I've commented several times about how it is getting more and more difficult to assemble newspapers for these photographs. Today provides a sterling example.

On the morning after the Trump administration intentionally assassinated the top military official of a foreign, sovereign state against whom we have not declared war, while he was in a neighboring country in which we have troops stationed (and what about the Kurds?), without consulting anyone in Congress or any one of our NATO allies, here is the choice of my locally available newspaper front pages:

Only the Chicago Tribune managed to squeeze the story onto Page One.

2019 in Review

Many newspapers have given up trying to keep up-to-date with the internet and have gone hyper-local these days — which is a good thing, if corporate bean-counters in far-off headquarters have allowed them to keep a staff able to investigate city hall, the state assembly representatives, and area corporations. If, however, the newspaper can't afford to do more than chase ambulances and fire trucks and to serve as a stenographer for the powers that be, its value is greatly diminished.

But what I'm getting at is that my annual photo is forced to overlook world events that don't get banner headlines. The citizen protests in Hong Kong are one example this year; China's repression of its Uighurs is another. My local papers have covered the devastating fires in Australia, but on inside pages. The same with Israel's interminable elections, but at least I have a magazine cover for that.

And as far as those magazine covers are concerned, I apologize to anyone angry that I've overlooked Tom Steyer, Julián Castro, Tulsi Gabbard, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Marianne Williamson, Deval Patrick, John Delaney, or Michael Bennet. These are the candidates who made the magazine covers in my house.

Speaking of overlooking the obvious, it wasn't my intent, but the cartoons I selected for my year in review include the President of the United States by name only.

...except for that photograph of him from gut to knees.

2018 in Headlines

I've been taking photos of the year in newspaper front pages and magazine covers every December 31 for some 45 years now. These days, it's harder to get a comprehensive sampling, now that the local papers have ceded national news to the internet and hardly any newspapers play up international events.

So I have no banner headlines reporting the deadly tsunami in Indonesia, fascist victories in Brazil and elsewhere, the cock-up of Brexit, or the Saudi-Iranian proxy war in Yemen. There were devastating hurricanes, typhoons, and fires; was any one of them more important than the others?

Instead, this year's photo is dominated by the mercurial president of the United States and those "I hire the best people" in his cabinet discovering that he can't hear their advice over the rumblings of his gut.

Here, too, is a collage of my favorites of the cartoons I drew this year. I don't pretend for them to be a comprehensive review of the year, either. They're just the ones I happen to like right now. And since I didn't put them in a slide show, embiggenation is necessitatified.

2017 in Headlines

I've been taking photos of the year in newspaper front pages and magazine covers at the end of every year since I was a kid; here's the 2017 effort.

As noted many times before, many very important stories get overlooked this way. They happen gradually, or too late for early Sunday deadlines, or, frankly, they happen too far away and editors prefer to focus on more local events.

Or, in the interest of brevity, daily headlines have no staying power. If you're reading this post years down the road, you may think it was awfully considerate of Harvey to drive so many to shelters, whoever he was. The Journal Sentinel headline offers no clue why Fear Gripped Vegas.

Or there were so many natural disasters that it was impossible to display them all; the hurricane that left Puerto Rico in ruins was Maria. The same goes for terrorist attacks. And I don't have any headline to represent any of this year's devastating earthquakes (e.g., Mexico, Iran, Italy).

Here, too, is a collage of my favorites of the cartoons I drew this year. I don't pretend for them to be a comprehensive review of the year. They're just the ones I happen to like right now.

2016 in Headlines

Since ’16back Saturday coincides with New Year's Eve this year, I'm going to post my annual photo of newspaper and magazine front pages here.

I offer my usual caveats: with only newspapers from the midwestern United States to choose from, I can't include many big international stories, such as the impeachment of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. The slow crushing of the rebellion in Syria lends itself more to photojournalism than a banner headline. And I might have included the death of Fidel Castro if he hadn't already turned the reins of power over to his brother years ago.

Meanwhile, I don't have a home paper publishing my stuff that would put together a 2016 in cartoons spread, so here are my own favorites from this crappy year:

2015 in Review, Part 2

Here's my annual shot of headlines from the year just past:

You probably will need to click on the photo to embiggenificate enough to read most of the headlines; the Wall Street Journal and New York Times almost never print huge banner headlines, but their headlines more thoroughly explained events better than the other newspapers in my area.

What's with the WSJ printing election results so close to the fold, anyway?

As always, I have to exercise a lot of editorial judgment in putting this collage together. With so many gun-propelled mass murders in the U.S., I could have chosen San Bernardino over Charleston, or perhaps Waco or Roseburg, or the constant violence in Chicago; none is necessarily more representative than the others.

I ended up not including the magazine covers of Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders or Ben Carson in favor of a cover that featured eight other presidential candidates, two three of whom have already dropped out of the race. If  Time magazine had used Steve Brodner's caricature of Trump as a hot-air balloon on its cover, maybe I'd have used that instead.

2014 in Review

It's time for my annual snapshot of the Year In Front Pages, which is embiggenable if enclickulated:

Newspaper front pages don't necessarily reflect the same news as the 24-hour news channels; a single headline seldom adequately encapsulates events that unfold over an extended period of time, such as this year's protests against police tactics, or the unsuccessful search for a missing plane.

Also, the ones I have access to tend to be Yankee-centric --hence "U.S. Ramps Up Fight on Ebola" and the lack of banner headlines about elections in India or the gunman who attacked the Canadian Parliament.

Thank you to everyone who has stopped by to read my little drawings this year. Best wishes, and we'll see you bright and early in 2015!

2013 in review

At the close of every year for the last four decades, I've taken a picture of newspaper headlines from the year gone by. These pictures originally served as a sort of bookmark in my photo albums, back when using rolls of film limited the number of pictures I'd take, and I'd put every photo into an album.

I don't do that with my thousands of digital photos, but I've kept up the habit of taking these headline photos. Here's to 2013:

You can click on the photo to embiggenify it; even then, that New York Times headline about the Supreme Court gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1964 is pretty tiny.

In closing, if your 2013 has been in any way less than you had hoped, I wish you a happier and brighter new year.

Benedict Who?

I went out this morning (and yesterday morning) in search of a newspaper with a good headline about Pope Benedict's abdication for my annual Year In Headlines photo, and  I didn't find one. (Oh, to have access to the Philadelphia, Tampa or Yankton, S.D. newspapers, alas.) The announcement came too late for yesterday morning's newspapers, and way too early for today's.

The local newspaper, the Racine Journal Times, chose to lead with a local story about a candidate for Superintendent of Schools. Since the abdication itself was yesterday's news, other area papers ran follow-up headlines. The Kenosha News, which can be counted on to run an old-fashioned bold, large, sans serif banner headline every day, had something along the lines of BENEDICT LED CHURCH IN CHANGING TIMES, which, while true of Benedict XVI, could also be said of every Pope since Leo X.

USA Today and the Milwaukee and Chicago papers lead with headlines looking beyond the resignation itself to speculation about what comes next. Again, true enough, but eleven months from now, you're not going to remember where you were when you found out that a new pope would lead the church at a crossroads.

Which left me with the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, whose headlines state the fact of the abdication plainly and succinctly, if not in a point size that will be legible at the upper left corner of the year-end photograph.

It's just too bad that I can't get the New York tabloids around here.

2012 in Headlines

Newsmagazines have made further inroads into this year's edition of my annual photograph of newspaper headlines.

While I've always had a row of magazines along the top, and have occasionally filled in the sides of the photo with magazines as well, there were some stories this year that just didn't make big headlines in my neck of the woods: easing of military dictatorship in Myanmar, for example, or election of a new leader in China.

And my hometown newspaper doesn't appear at all; the Racine Journal Times increasingly highlights local stories atop page one. And while they did scoop the Kenosha News by a day on Mitt Romney's selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate, the JT had to cram the story in as a two-column story on the edge of the page -- hardly legible in photos such as this one.

It's hard enough to read the Financial Times banner headline about François Hollande's election in France. That story didn't get as prominent play in the other newspapers available in my area, however. I remember buying this particular paper at the local Barnes & Noble; the cashier remarked that it was the first copy of the Financial Times she had ever seen anyone buy there.

2011 in Headlines

For 40 years now, I've been marking the end of each year by taking a picture of newspaper front pages and magazine covers from the previous year. Originally they served as a sort of bookmark in my photo albums; nowadays, the only photos I print out for putting in albums are the best ones from vacations, but I've kept up the habit anyway.

The choice of reviewing a year this way tends to skew what stories are included. The Greek default crisis, for example, didn't make banner headlines in the newspapers in my corner of America. Silvio Berlusconi's resignation wasn't the top story of November 8 as far as midwestern editors were concerned, either. The independence of South Sudan was below the fold, if not on a back page.

Stock market plunges and rises in unemployment make headlines; economic recovery (or stagnation) rarely does. The end of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"? Almost a non-event once it finally happened. Marriage equality in New York? I don't get any New York newspapers here. Well, I can find the New York Times, but their headlines are seldom legible in these photographs.

Disasters usually make headlines, unless they happen on a Saturday night after the Sunday paper has gone to print. Monday's headline may be something tangential, such as "President Promises Aid Package." Even if the disaster is fresh, my local newspaper figures everyone has already heard about it on cable news and Facebook, so its headline is either the number of dead (in spite of the fact that the number is bound to have changed between press time and finding the paper on your doorstep) or some pull quote like "It Was Terrible!"

Other stories unfold over the course of several months. As significant as were Wisconsin's protests against Governor Walker and his Republican putsch -- and similar protests in Ohio -- and the Occupy protests -- it seems unfair to give them the same weight as the protests in Egypt, Libya, and Syria. (To say nothing of the protests in Bahrain, Yemen, and those in Tunisia that sparked them all... and these headlines indeed say nothing about them.) Time's "Person of the Year" cover will have to suffice.