SPJ: Phoenix, Arizona Chapter

Photo courtesy of David Fitzsimmons

Your Valley of the Sun SPJ chapter board is urging the chairman of the board of Lee Enterprises, owner of the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson, to allow decades of former Star cartoonist David Fitzsimmons‘ original editorial cartoons to be donated to the University of Arizona library.

Fitzsimmons, now retired from the Star, has recently posted on his Substack blog that disagreements over reproduction rights for his cartoons once the drawings arrived at the library have delayed their donation for several years.

In an Aug. 5 letter to Lee’s Board Chairman David Hoffman, chapter President Tim Eigo and Vice President Nicole Greason encouraged Lee officials to agree to an arrangement Fitzsimmons proposed.

Eigo and Greason wrote that Fitzsimmons’ proposal calls for Lee Enterprises to retain the commercial rights it believes appropriate while permitting customary scholarly, educational, exhibition and archival uses by the university.

“We encourage Lee Enterprises to work promptly and constructively with Mr. Fitzsimmons and the University to reach an agreement along those lines,” Eigo and Greason wrote.

For nearly 40 years, Fitzsimmons chronicled Arizona’s civic and political life as the Star’s editorial cartoonist. A Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1988, Fitz, as he is known and beloved among his readers in the Old Pueblo, was judged the best political cartoonist in the state by the Arizona Press Club for multiple years.

“But the collection described in his proposal – including more than 10,000 original cartoons, correspondence, research materials, political memorabilia, awards and other artifacts – is more than the record of one distinguished career. It is a significant body of Arizona’s journalistic and public history,” Eigo and Greason wrote.

“Preserving the original work and the materials surrounding its creation will give future journalists, students, scholars and citizens a valuable resource for understanding Arizona’s communities and the role of a free press in civic life.”

Read Phoenix SPJ’s entire letter to Hoffman here: