Scott Bateman is covering the Republican National Convention for Salon.com, producing a style of commentary more "Daily Show" than op-ed page.
Bateman has been interviewing
delegates,
protesters and others this week in St. Paul and using those recordings as the soundtracks for
short animations annotated by his own occasional wisecracks. Wednesday, he produced an animation
based on an interview with a Ron Paul delegate who was still upset about the fate of his candidate.
Salon told Bateman it would send him to only one of the conventions this year, and he chose the GOP. "I thought this would be a lot more fun for me as someone who makes fun of the political process."
He came with a list of people he would like to talk to, such as a Ron Paul delegate and a "non-scary college Republican." (He didn't have any luck with the college Republicans; he said no one he approached was interested in talking to someone who works for a liberal Web site.)
There are several editorial cartoonists here, but fewer than previous years, according to Nick Anderson, the
Houston Chronicle's editorial cartoonist and president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. Anderson said he figured about 10 of his colleagues are at the conventions. That's fewer than four years ago, he said, adding that the group also had a small turnout at its convention in San Antonio this year.
Bateman also said he's seen few of his fellow cartoonists. "Newspaper budgets being what they are," he said, "they are lucky to have jobs."
Bateman himself was an editorial cartoonist for 12 years, syndicated by King Features. In 2001 or so, he learned Flash and audio editing. He has been doing online animations ever since and said he doesn't miss traditional cartooning. "It's one thing to draw a cartoon," he said. "To do something that moves and has sound is a lot more gratifying to me."
Rob Tornoe, who draws editorial cartoons for the
New York Observer's Politicker Web site,
is following some of the editorial cartoonists in St. Paul:
Bateman does five animations a week for Salon.com, and each one takes about four hours to complete. He uses a small Olympus digital recorder for his interviews and edits the audio with Audacity, a free program. He normally sketches his illustrations and scans them into his computer, but this week he didn't have a scanner. So he repurposed and updated old illustrations.
How does Bateman get people to talk to him? He simply asks them, saying he works for Salon.com. But he doesn't tell them he will add animated characters and commentary to what they say, which, he acknowledged, "could be unethical."
Here's a short video showing how he creates his animations:
