Bob Staake: Future of Newspapers Belongs to Visual Artists

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Watch out, all you ink-stained wretches who went to journalism school!

Your day for calling the editorial shots will soon be at an end. Your day of bossing cartoonists and graphic artists around is waning. The future in news is for the visually enabled, not for those who think in column inches of black, mind-numbing type.

So proclaims St. Louis artist and newspaper cartoonist Bob Staake, who is riding happily down the information age to greater and greater visual glory.

Staake insists that as the Internet becomes more powerful, and the electronic newspaper finds its way onto American TV screens, it's going to become apparent that images really matter. They may come to matter - dare we say it - more than words.

"The ink-stained wretches are going to have to realize that print is not the future," says Staake. "It's already obvious as we look at the newspapers on the Internet. You can't just put a bunch of words up on the screen. There has to be plenty of illustrations, graphics and pictures.

"What's going to happen is more and more artists are going to be brought into the electronic news process," declares Staake. "Artists are going to be pad of the decision process. And, we are not going to have to answer to editors who tell us to change our images because it doesn't quite work with their copy."

Staake says he already senses a new respect for his work, and his role as an information artist, from such clients as The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post.

According to Staake, these big city dailies will give him some copy and details by e-mail for an editorial cartoon assignment and then let him "have at it." He says there are few hassles over his finished product and he can turn such assignments around in as …