• by Shankar Gupta , June 12, 2006

Like countless other political cartoonists, those at The Orange County Register have poked fun at presidents George W. Bush, William J. Clinton, and actor-turned-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. But unlike many other newspapers' political cartoonists, those at the Register are doing so with short, animated clips.

Last month, the Santa Ana, Calif.-based paper quietly added Internet video to its online opinion pages. "To me, it's just a natural extension of political cartooning," said Cathy Taylor, the paper's vice president for commentary and editorial director.

The cartoons are a collaboration between Mike Shelton, the paper's political cartoonist, and Jocelyn Leger, the paper's art director, who does the technical animation work. The cartoons are currently hosted on Shelton's blog, but the paper plans to host them on its own page and sell ads against them, Taylor said.

The animations have multiplied traffic to Shelton's blog. According to internal traffic counts, Shelton's blog recorded roughly 8,000 page views in April, and 31,000 in May, when the cartoons posted. "We've gotten a really instant, good response from readers," Taylor said. "Online is a lot about the visual. We love words, but online has to have a big visual component to it, and this is a big part of that."

So far, Shelton and Leger have posted four animations, and the fifth, about the California gubernatorial race between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Phil Angelides, is scheduled to launch this week. With election season on the way, Taylor said that the paper would be looking to produce cartoons more frequently. "We're building to the fall elections," she said.

Taylor said that the paper experimented with animated shorts six years ago--around the time of the presidential impeachment hearings--but the time and effort to produce them made the venture unfeasible. "Frankly, they took a long time at that time to develop. It was a very ponderous process," she said. But since then, animation technology progressed to the point that the feature can be a regular addition. "Now, with the changes of technology, it's down to more of a matter of days and minimal weeks, rather than many weeks, to develop one," she said.