With Jeff Darcy’s retirement, we evolve again to meet the moment: Letter from the Editor

Our longtime political cartoonist Jeff Darcy retired Sunday after a decades-long career in which he produced thousands of biting and funny cartoons, and I tell you that no one on this staff was more of a lightning rod for reader comments.

We can publish as many pointed editorials and columns as we want, but we’ll never spark the fervor Jeff did. My email regularly filled up with thoughts about him, and you won’t be surprised to hear many were unkind. He had a knack for getting under people’s skin with his keen insights.

I was a fan of Jeff’s from the moment I stepped in the door here almost 30 years ago, and a top highlight of my career was being featured in a Darcy toon. I was covering City Hall in 2000, when then-Mayor Michael R. White appointed a young and inexperienced cabinet member to be his fourth airport director. Darcy portrayed White as Napoleon, the new airport director as a little boy playing with a paper airplane and me in my tweed jacket interviewing the mayor. Talk about hitting the big time.

Alas, Jeff’s retirement is the end of an era. We will no longer have a political cartoonist in the newsroom. I’m converting his position to something I’m not yet ready to discuss but which is more focused on our evolving needs.

So much has changed in our business over the past 20 years. Our staffs have shrunk as advertising revenue fell, but new platforms and formats have expanded our reach. The result is a leaner newsroom that produces far more than its predecessors ever imagined.

That guy in the tweed coat interviewing the mayor in Darcy’s cartoon? He had the luxury of working at a much slower pace than those who populate newsrooms today.

Jeff’s retirement, while bittersweet, underscores a larger truth: our newsroom is evolving. Part of my job as editor is to continuously reimagine our staff structure, to meet the ever-changing demands of our audience. As I’ve mentioned a few times this year, artificial intelligence is proving to be a tremendous tool for us to do even more, but it will, inevitably, result in a newsroom restructuring.

This is not new. We have fewer photographers than we used to, as reporters are taking many of the photos we need to illustrate stories. Our photographers step in when we need their skills to get the special shots, as in sports. We have flattened our management structure, reducing the number of editors so that we could devote the highest percentage of our staff possible to reporting. Information is our stock-in-trade. We need to get as much as we can.

We suspect that AI will allow us to devote even more of our resources to reporting. We’ll be experimenting this year and next to determine our best path. One need that already has become clear: skilled AI prompt writers. How you ask AI chatbots to do something matters. The better the prompts, the better the responses. We suspect prompt writing will become a newsroom specialty.

With all we are doing and hope to do – to remain a thriving and successful newsroom — we constantly re-assess our priorities. A political cartoonist in a newsroom the size of ours no longer makes the priority list, as much as that distresses some readers – and cartoonists. I know from previous cartoon decisions that cartoonists are a vocal lot, so I expect this column will bring heavy criticism from them on social media.

We will continue to carry political cartoons from our wire service subscriptions, which covers national issues. What we lose is cartoons about local issues, which gave our platforms a dimension that is increasingly rare in U.S. regional news outlets.

Ultimately, we must stay focused on our mission: producing high-quality, sustainable journalism. Reassessing every position has made us profitable. Continuing to do so will, we hope, help us grow.