Douglas McLennan: September 2009 Archives

UPDATE: The first blogs are beginning to sign up to stream: www.createquity.com, www.artsDC.com, http://gatheringnote www.seattledances, www.salvadorcastillo.wordpress.com. One blogger has already tried to embed the feed in Blogger and got back an error. Anyone familiar with embedding in Blogger? Leave a note in the comments at the end of this post and we'll figure it out.

UPDATE II: There's a fix [ONLY NEEDED FOR BLOGGER - OTHERS USE THE CODE AT THE END OF THIS POST] Rosie Gaynor at SeattleDances found for the Blogger embed:

 <object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" width="400" height="320" id="utv582837"><param name="flashvars" value="autoplay=false&amp;brand=embed&amp;cid=1470782"/><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true"/><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/><param name="movie" value="http://www.ustream.tv/flash/live/1/1470782"/><embed flashvars="autoplay=false&amp;brand=embed&amp;cid=1470782" width="400" height="320" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" id="utv582837" name="utv_n_507251" src="http://www.ustream.tv/flash/live/1/1470782" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" />

</embed></object><a href="http://www.ustream.tv/" style="padding: 2px 0px 4px; width: 400px; background: #ffffff; display: block; color: #000000; font-weight: normal; font-size: 10px; text-decoration: underline; text-align: center;" target="_blank">Video chat rooms at Ustream</a>

This Friday - October 2 from 9AM-1PM PDT - we're holding a first ever National Summit on Arts Journalism at USC Annenberg in Los Angeles. We're presenting ten projects in arts journalism from around America, and each we think has something to say about the future of how we cover the arts. It will be in the auditorium of the journalism school in front of an audience of 200, but it's primarily conceived of as a virtual online event. You can read more about it here.

We need your help.

We'll be streaming the Summit from www.najp.org/summit, where you can go to watch and read about what's happening. And comment and Twitter and chat. But why not host your own Summit on your own blog or website? People can come to your website and see the live webcast and participate in the chat. You'll get visitors to your site, and they'll maybe stick around for a while. The point is - we want as many people as possible to see this, and we don't care where they see it.

But it would also help us out. This Summit is a big ambitious experiment. We're trying to start discussions beyond just a one-time conference in a room somewhere. And there are an awful lot of moving parts. There are so many ways the technology can go wrong. There are bandwidth issues, streaming issues and server issues. There's the equivalent of producing a live TV show at Annenberg. There's coordinating all the social media. And there's trying to design an event that actually has something of substance to say. We don't know if it will all work - part of the fun of this is in trying to invent something new and seeing what works. We're learning a lot. A lot.

One thing I do know. Mobilizing large groups around something always makes it better than what just a few can do. Our big choke point in all this right now is the streaming broadcast. If we do it all through one site at najp.org/summit, it's a big load. If that one site freezes or goes down, no one sees the live webcast (not too worry too much - everything is being recorded and we'll be posting it all on UStream and YouTube in addition to the Summit site). But why not spread the bet around?

So we thought - why not ask arts journalists and artists everywhere if they would help out and post the live webcast in their own blogs? It's as easy as embedding a YouTube video in a blog post. If you want to be ambitious, you can even embed the chat and Twitter feeds as well.

Drop us an email before Thursday night, and we'll even publish a list of who's hosting streams. Then - if there are any technical problems on the official site, viewers can look at the list of other webcasting blogs and tune in there.

We don't know how many people will be tuning in on the day itself. We expect most people will watch after the fact, looking at the archived presentations. But the (free) seats for the live audience at USC sold out in a flash. And we've got a least a dozen live satellite events around the country where groups are gathering to watch and discuss.

So I hope you'll join us by tuning in to watch. And if you can, please consider participating in a little piece of history by hosting the webcast on your own blog or website. There are no bandwidth issues for you in hosting - it's being fed from UStream and they pay the bandwidth charges, like YouTube does.

You can see our Ustream channel here http://www.ustream.tv/channel/a-national-summit-on-arts-journalism and you can pick up the embedding code there as well. Or you can copy the embed code below and paste it into your blog - just the way you would embed a YouTube video. Thanks for the help. See you Friday (I hope).

To embed the webcast window in your blog or website paste in this code:

<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" width="400" height="320" id="utv150969"><param name="flashvars" value="autoplay=false&amp;brand=embed&amp;cid=1470782"/><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true"/><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/><param name="movie" value="http://www.ustream.tv/flash/live/1/1470782"/><embed flashvars="autoplay=false&amp;brand=embed&amp;cid=1470782" width="400" height="320" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" id="utv150969" name="utv_n_233276" src="http://www.ustream.tv/flash/live/1/1470782" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" /></object><a href="http://www.ustream.tv/" style="padding: 2px 0px 4px; width: 400px; background: #ffffff; display: block; color: #000000; font-weight: normal; font-size: 10px; text-decoration: underline; text-align: center;" target="_blank">Live video by Ustream</a>

If you want to embed the chat as well, paste in this code:

<embed width="563" height="266" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" flashvars="channelId=1470782&brandId=1&channel=#a-national-summit-on-arts-jo&server=chat1.ustream.tv" pluginspage="http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer" src="http://www.ustream.tv/flash/irc.swf" allowfullscreen="true" />

And if you want to host the Twitter feed:

<iframe src="http://www.ustream.tv/twitterjs/iframe?prefix=%40artsj09&suffix=Live+at+http%3A%2F%2Fustre.am%2F6aCi" width="549" height="325" frameborder="0" style="border:0px none transparent"scrolling="no"></iframe>

Thanks everyone. Drop us a note at summitinfo@najp.org if you're going to do this and we'll post a list. Or you can write to me directly at mclennan@artsjournal.com (though if I'm a bit slow in answering I hope you'll understand). See you Friday.

This week I gave a talk in San Francisco and I mentioned that Sunday - today - ArtsJournal is ten years old. In web terms, that makes us pretty old. Except, in the room were the editors of at least a couple of other arts sites that are older than AJ. Lori Sparrow of Voice of Dance and Patty Gessner of San Francisco Classical Voice run sites that are at least a couple of years older (also there was John Trippe who runs the very fun FecalFace.com; Zoneil Maharaj, who runs OhDangMag.com; and Marianne Stark, who writes the Stark Guide to San Francisco Art).

The first year or two of AJ, we didn't have a content management system. Every time I wanted to add a story, I had to go into the code of the page and add it there. This made for all sorts of odd formatting issues. And every month, to make archives of our stories, I had to spend a couple of hours cutting all the stories out of our pages and pasting them into new ones. Here's an example of one of our early pages.

Over the years things have changed enormously. When AJ started, there weren't really any
arts blogs. Now, Technorati tracks some 300,000 of them (depending on how you define the search). A couple of years into AJ, we started adding blogs - Terry Teachout, Greg Sandow, Andrew Taylor and Tobi Tobias were the first. Now we have some 64 bloggers working on the site.

Ten years ago newspaper websites were pretty rudimentary. One of the most difficult jobs in putting AJ together at first was just finding where the arts stories lived. Now, sadly, the number and quality of arts stories in newspapers have declined precipitously and it's difficult to find them for different reasons. Many newspapers we used to draw stories from have cut their coverage. In many cities, good arts stories in newspapers are a rarity.

The good news is that there are lots of amazing people and projects out there creating new ways of covering the arts. In the past year as arts coverage in the traditional press has declined precipitously, dozens and dozens of independent websites have stepped up to fill the void. But it isn't just that the new is replacing the old. The very nature and definition of arts journalism is changing. The emphasis of coverage is changing, and ethically, it's a Wild West out there at the moment.

Nonetheless, the breadth of what's being written/videoed/recorded has expanded enormously. We've gone from single critics at local newspapers to a cacophony of voices debating and drawing attention to a much wider range of culture.

There are so many people I want to thank who have helped on ArtsJournal. I'm reluctant to make a list of names because I'll forget people, but I want to give a special shout out to Sam Bergman, who for nine years was a major part of AJ's success as associate editor. And I'd also like to thank Laura Collins-Hughes and Matthew Westphal, who now help to choose and write a good part of the site.

And the future. We're working on the next version of ArtsJournal, which we hope to launch in the next month or so. As the media world changes from newspapers to other sources, we want to make sure we're casting our nets in the right directions. And we want to make it easier to find the stories they're looking for. Here's to another ten. Thanks to you for reading.