This week's host Jeff Greenfield

Need to Know correspondent Mona Iskander updates her report from Greenville, Mich., about a town that tried to reinvent itself by bringing in a solar panel manufacturing company. But the company has struggled greatly in part because of global economic forces. Prices for solar panels have plunged in the face of Chinese competition.

Jeff Greenfield interviews David Biello, the associate editor of Scientific American, about the future of the American solar power industry.

And to coincide with Memorial Day, on “American Voices,” David Kipen, essayist and formerly the Director of Literature at the National Endowment for the Arts, talks about the value of volunteerism — and the threat it poses to working people.

What’s on this week:

	Update: It’s not easy being green Need to Know correspondent Mona Iskander updates her report from Greenville, Mich., about a town that tried to reinvent itself by bringing in a solar panel manufacturing company.
	David Biello Jeff Greenfield interviews David Biello, the associate editor of Scientific American, about the future of the American solar power industry.
	American Voices David Kipen, essayist and former director of literature at the National Endowment for the Arts, talks about the value of volunteerism.

Watch more full episodes of Need to Know.

As NTK gears up to bring you more stories of how Election 2012 will affect communities all around the nation, tell us: What issues do you want to see covered? What stories are most important to you? Let us know on Facebook,Twitter, or in the comments below.

When I left my job as director of literature of the National Endowment for the Arts early last year, I opened this nonprofit lending library and used bookshop in a working-class Los Angeles neighborhood called Boyle Heights. The shared Jewish and Mexican heritage of the neighborhood gives the shop its name: Libros Schmibros. I opened up last year on the day that neighborhood public libraries all over town were giving up their Monday hours because of budget cuts. For now at least, this story has a happy ending because Libros Schmibros has become a genuine, if precarious, success, and the smart electorate of Los Angeles has voted to add back those lost library hours.

But what if the library hadn’t reopened on Mondays? What if the anti-tax zealots had capitalized on the opening of Libros Schmibros to make the case that library funding isn’t necessary? What if, they argue, that quixotic volunteers like me are always going to step forward to do what government supposedly can’t afford to do anymore? It’s a fair question, since I don’t want to be Exhibit A in anybody’s push to defund public services. I don’t want to be anybody’s point of light. I only opened Libros Schmibros because I thought it was criminally shortsighted for my city to be laying off librarians. I also suspected that opening a lending library would be a gas and a half – if admittedly nobody’s ticket to riches.

But there’s always been a word for people like me who will do what other people have historically been way better paid to do, and it’s not volunteer either — it’s scab. Sure nobody’s trying to break the librarians union for money here the way a scab or a strike breaker would. But today any kid can walk into my shop and borrow a book without consulting the much better-qualified librarians down the block. I hope that doesn’t make me a scab, but I wonder.

Up to a point, of course, this is all pathetic liberal handwringing. Tax-cutters are the last people to worry much about the public servants they throw directly into poverty with their layoffs. But these questions have consequences well beyond public libraries. Who needs cops when vigilantes are so much cheaper? And who exactly do you want playing librarian in Boyle Heights? An underemployed book critic and federal arts administrator like me? Or that crackerjack youth librarian who can get kids to cough up the name of the only book they’ve ever finished, and then immediately recommend five more like it?

Pretty obviously, we get what we pay for. Volunteers like me are way better than nothing, but nowhere near as good as the real thing. We’re not scabs, we’re amateurs, doing what we do because we love it, and because there’s a need. Not for a minute would I ever want to preempt the work of real librarians, like all the great ones who inspired me to create Libros Schmibros in the first place. Besides, lots of volunteers like me do get paid, in a way. We get paid to reinvent ourselves by a program just as valuable, and just as vulnerable lately, as library funding. You see, my biggest source of income since I started Libros Schmibros has been my unemployment insurance. And, barring any longshot extensions, it’s about to run out.

In April, we spoke with syndicated sex-advice columnist and LGBT rights activist Dan Savage. He told us about the practical implications of same-sex marriage and why it’s become so important to the gay rights movement and the country as a whole.

“It was very surprising,” said Wuerker, who hadn’t expected any sort of excitement during what seemed like a typical Monday afternoon. He had just won $10,000 and journalism’s top prize for his editorial cartoons. “The newsroom all jumped up, and I got to run around and high-five everyone.”

Breaking news alerts and tweets quickly pointed out the significance of how Politico – along with The Huffington Post – was one of the first online news outlets to win the Pulitzer Prize since its inception in 1917.

But in the wake of Wuerker’s win, the cartooning profession has also come under scrutiny, as media critics debate its contemporary relevance in the increasingly digital world of infographics, photo memes and data visualizations.

Slate’s Farhad Manjoo fired the first shot with his piece, “Editorial Cartoons Are Stale, Simplistic, and Just Not Funny,” in which he called Wuerker’s genre “an increasingly timeworn form…blunt, one-dimensional jokes, rarely exhibiting nuance, irony or subtext.” Manjoo went on to suggest that the Pulitzer committee should “cast a wider net and get more flexible in how they recognize graphical journalism.”

(View full post to see video)
Video: Cartoonist Steve Brodner on creating political satire for the YouTube generation. Produced by Hannah Yi

Wuerker is the first to admit that political cartoonists have enjoyed a monopoly over editorial graphics until now. “We had it really good for several centuries when American political cartoonists – even dating back to the Revolution – didn’t have to share that part of the media landscape with anyone else,” he says.

The earliest example dates back to the 1870s when cartoonist Thomas Nast took on New York City’s political machine Tammany Hall and its leader William “Boss” Tweed. Nast’s cartoons about their corruption plastered the cover of Harper’s Weekly. Eventually the power of ink and paper sprinkled with satire led to the downfall and arrest of Tweed. Fast forward to the 1950s when cartoonist Herblock depicted the Cold War hysteria and even coined the word “McCarthyism.”

“Herblock cartoon’s against McCarthy had a profound effect in the same way Doonesbury cartoons were effective during Watergate,” said Stephen Hess, the author of “American Political Cartoons: The Evolution of a National Identity.” But whether he could name a recent cartoon with similar impact, “Oh, I don’t think so.”

Hess partly blames the blunted impact to the simple fact that the traditional home for cartoons is on the wane. As print newspapers fold and aggregation websites blossom, cartoonists – along with anyone working in journalism – are left to compete in a fragmented and chaotic media landscape.

“When Thomas Nast was doing cartoons, he had a huge chunk of the media pie, maybe two-thirds since there were very few newspapers then,” said political cartoonist Steve Brodner. “If Nast was a cartoonist today, even with all his talent and passion, he’d only have a crumb of that pie.”

The fight over crumbs is pushing some veteran cartoonists to figure out new ways of giving life to their paper characters.

“I’m finally finding my footing,” said Brodner, who’s been a cartooning for 35 years but only started dabbling in animating his cartoons in 2008.

Brodner’s style fuses his traditional paper cartoons with cutout photos, music and politician sound bites. Viewers of Brodner’s work often see his hand in frame drawing his cartoons. In his most recent work for the Washington Spectator, a pencil sketch of Mitt Romney is layered over photos of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini while Brodner voices his own commentary.

This week's host Jeff Greenfield

Need to Know’s Stacey Tisdale travels to Missouri, where activists are collecting signatures for a ballot initiative that would cap payday loan rates at 36 percent. (Some now charge more than 400 percent.) Supporters of the measure say the measure would protect the poor from usurious loans. Opponents say it would hurt the very people it’s designed to help by denying them the only loans they can get.

Anchor Jeff Greenfield interviews journalist Gary Rivlin, who has written extensively about extra charges placed on the poor. He says “it’s expensive being poor.”

The “American Voices” essay features Cy Richardson. He is a vice president at the National Urban League, where he is responsible for programs that “promote asset building and wealth creation for people of color in urban America.”

What’s on this week:

	Loans on the line Need to Know’s Stacey Tisdale travels to Missouri, where activists are collecting signatures for a ballot initiative that would cap payday loan rates at 36 per cent. They are now more than 400 percent.
	Gary Rivlin Anchor Jeff Greenfield interviews journalist Gary Rivlin, who has written extensively about extra charges placed on the poor. He says “it’s expensive” being poor.
	American Voices Vice President of the National Urban League Cy Richardson.

Watch more full episodes of Need to Know.

In Missouri, there’s an effort to put an initiative on the ballot this November that would cap payday loan interest rates, as 17 other states already do. But will capping rates mean no credit at all for some Missourians? Stacey Tisdale reports.