I had an unnerving experience at an event last week.  Matt Buck, who had been asking me probing questions during a presentation at the News Innovation un-conference in London, caught up with me afterwards, said he was a cartoonist and showed me a quickfire caricature he’d done of me (right).

I should say that I have tried and failed several times to teach myself how to do caricature.  I have nothing but admiration for those who can capture the essence of someone in a few lines.

There is something incredibly personal about the form and I was both shocked and delighted by this picture: it’s possibly the least flattering image of me yet (and believe me, there’s a wide selection to choose from).

And the fact that it was immediately uploaded to Twitpic got me thinking about drawing and news.

Traditionally, artists in news media have been employed to create cartoons to a 24-hour news cycle. But now that’s changing. The decline of newspapers and the rise of online are pushing cartoonists into online animation on the one hand and into covering non-news events on the other.

I asked Matt to come along to an online event I was helping to organise — a social media interview with Nick Clegg, leader of Britain’s Liberal Democrat party — and he duly produced a sketch that I think complements the large number of photographs taken.

Later I was intrigued to hear Matt talk about how putting someone like Nick Clegg into an unfamiliar situation — in this case answering questions direct from voters via Twitter — can reveal a great deal to a caricaturist: