Barbara:

I liked what you had to say about newspapers, and wanted to add a little. I'm an arts reporter at the Boston Globe. My beat includes classical music, museums, opera, etc.

Arts leaders always seem to be so convinced that coverage is being cut/dumbed down that they often ignore the facts.

Here's one good example: http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/exhibitionist/2006/05/fact_checker_sa.html

Here at the Globe, we had to make paperwide cuts last year. The paper's leaders knew that the folks in arts who accepted our buyout offer - classical music critic Richard Dyer and chief theater critic Ed Siegel, to name two - needed to be replaced. And so while the Globe cut positions in the newsroom and eliminated our home section, it immediately started national searches for critics and kept those arts positions. (Jeremy Eichler, for example, will start at the paper in the fall and Louise Kennedy has replaced Ed.) I'll also add that my position, added in 2002, was a new one.

But wait. What story got out to the so-called public? Here's a good one:

http://blogs.wbur.org/arts/index.php/2005/11/is-arts-coverage-dying-at-the-boston-globe/

Beyond that, I found myself acting as a personal fact checker at Symphony Hall. During intermission, I'd hear two clearly intelligent gentlemen exchanging information over cappuccinos. They would be telling each other how the paper wasn't going to cover classical music anymore, that they had heard this from so-and-so and wasn't it sad what was happening to the Globe. At the American Association of Museums conference, I sat in the audience as a panel assembled to critique media coverage - a panel that included an unknown freelance writer, a former staffer at the local alternative paper, and a producer-type from our local public radio affililiate - proceeded to tell that same story.

Yes, it's true that this is not an easy time to be in newspapers. I'm sure many are cutting back on arts coverage, along with coverage in other areas. (Did I read that the Los Angeles Times is no longer sending its beat reporters out on the road to cover the Kings? That's a MAJOR LEAGUE SPORTS TEAM!) But I also found so many papers and writers looking for ways to connect and reconnect with smart readers. We're doing it the old fashioned way, through compelling narratives, reporting and reviews. And we're branching out to do blogs and audio commentaries and slideshows.

How will this all pan out? I'm not sure. But I do get a sense we're trying, and that many of our bosses recognize there's an audience for arts coverage.

Whoa. This was way more longwinded than I meant to be.

Geoff
gedgers@globe.com

I might add that Andrew Porter never wrote longer essays and feature pieces for the New Yorker. His work consisted entirely of reviews. In the ten years I've been at the New Yorker, we've made classical music a regular presence not only in the critics section at the back of the magazine but in the lead slots in the middle. I've written 5000- or 6000-word pieces on Mozart, Schubert, Verdi, Wagner, Strauss, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Morton Feldman, and Theodor W. Adorno, extended profiles of John Adams, Thomas Adès, Valery Gergiev, the St. Lawrence Quartet, and the "Doctor Atomic" team, and various other essays on musical topics. From a certain angle this could be seen as an advance rather than a decline. In general, I get the space I ask for and the space that I need.

My apologies, Alex, if the information on my
posting about classical music coverage included
erroneous information regarding the amount of space you get at the New Yorker compared to your
predecessor. I saw that in print elsewhere recently, and it jibed with my own memories--it
seems to me that Andrew Porter's reviews ran more frequently than yours have during the last few years. And I was thinking primarily
about reviews, not about the longer critical essays and extended profiles you mention above
which certainly qualify as "coverage." I should have been more specific about that, and I should have checked with you first.

Oh, no, I don't deny that Andrew Porter wrote more often for the magazine, and produced a larger quantity of sheer verbiage each year. But I think I've been able to achieve a comparable presence in the magazine by mixing shorter and longer columns. I could stop writing the essays and profiles, which are often very time-consuming, and produce twice as many reviews, but would that necesssarily be a good thing? Since I love doing the composer essays more than anything, I don't have any desire to make a change. I write 36,000 words per year, and that number has stayed fixed for the past ten years.