Cartoonists are surplus to requirement in the online media according to Peter Preston writing in The Observer today.

In print images are used as prompts to draw a reader in according to Preston and pages are laid out around the visual content.

“News photographers already know that, alas. If you’re laying out a page or series of pages in print, you need great pictures to make the reader pause and dig in, photographs that catch human suffering or joy in memorable frames.”

In the online world its SEO-driven headlines and tightly cropped images that count. And so says Preston, there is no longer a role for a cartoonist online.

“Photographs have to fit with a story (and Google ads) on a pretty tight page. So they’re run small or as mugshots.”

I think Preston’s made the wrong call. In the online world cartoons are social objects circulated via world of mouth with the means of driving traffic back to a web asset. If anything there is more opportunity than ever for creative visual content.

Hugh MacLeod spotted this opportunity more than five years ago.

Update 1 Sept 2009: Further evidence of the potential of cartoons to drive traffic to a news site comes from Paul Bradshaw, Course Director of the MA Online Journalism at Birmingham City University’s (UK) School of Media. Last October Paul conducted an experiment to investigate the traffic potency of cartoons. His thesis was that news organisations should be making more use of them online. In one week the 5 Stages of a Blogger’s Life cartoon posted on his Online Journalist Blog received more than 40,000 hits, making it the most popular single post ever.