main: September 2006 Archives

In just about a year-and-a-half, YouTube has become the biggest website on the internet. Each day 65,000 videos are uploaded to the site. One hundred million videos are streamed from the site everyday. It's an amazing service - easy to use both as a watcher and as an uploader. People are adding video of every kind, from things they've shot themselves to current TV to classic videos. Video is finally getting the digital revolution that came to photo sharing with flickr a few years back and music six or seven years ago with Napster.

Of course the popularity of the site means that producers of video will have to rethink their business models. The music industry blames downloading for the downturn in CD sales and has been energetically suing its customer base. There are signs that the same might happen with video. Last week Universal threatened heavy legal action against the video sharing sites. But then this week, Warner strides boldly into the future, announcing a deal with YouTube to offer free video. The site will be ad supported.

It's an interesting move, one that suggests lessons learned from the music downloading experience. Free is the primary currency on the internet, and people are used to getting much for nothing. Successful companies such as YouTube or MySpace are able to gather enormous numbers of loyal fans who incorporate the websites into their daily lives. Those millions of visitors are worth something. We're still in the early stages of learning how to make money on the internet, but one thing has proven consistent over time: more people = more money.

Of course, iTunes has proven there's a business model that works. And already companies are finding that video can be successful in the iTunes model.

Walt Disney CEO Bob Iger said that Disney has already sold 125,000 movies on Apple's iTunes store. Disney just began selling films from its movie library on iTunes last week. Iger said the downloads have generated $1 million in revenue already and that movie downloads could easily generate $50 million in sales a year for Disney. "We believe this is just the beginning," Iger said.

Of course, then there are the failures. Napster, which kicked off the downloading phenomenon, is nearly out of business a struggling to find and buyer for its pay service.

I like the Guardian. Though it has a good stable of writers, its biggest strength is its editing. The Guardian is a consistently lively read day in and day out. This is a paper that isn't afraid to argue with itself. A critic might sound off on some topic one day, only to be contradicted a few days later by another critic. A day after that the head of the National Theatre is weighing in to tell both critics they're full of it.

There's room for long arcane essays about stone sculpting in the Renaissance or a neglected Russian composer, for no reason other than they're worth the read. You might get a spirited five paragraph defense of one of the city's orchestras, short and sweet. Culture news is treated as important to the life of the city and the country. Cultural figures frequently appear not only as subjects but also as writers.

Though there are dumb stars attached to reviews, the writing about performances and events isn't all about the Consumer Report. The paper has invited well-known artists in to redesign the paper for a day and play with the format. The Guardian regularly runs these impossible quizzes about culture designed to humble you. And over the course of a month, you're likely to see a pretty wide swath of topics. You have a sense over time that the Guardian believes culture is fun and interesting.

The website is one of the best-designed of any newspaper, with clear navigation and a practical sense about how people use an online newspaper. The Guardian has played with multi-media, but it is integrated into the site in a way that isn't gimmicky. The paper's "Culture Vulture" blog has become a place to find the kinds of musings that, while they might not make for an entire article, are things an audience member who's paying attention might wonder about.

But the two best things about the Guardian's culture report are:

1. The paper doesn't talk to readers as if they're stupid. Guardian editors don't assume that everyone comes to the paper with the same level of knowledge. What they do presume is a level of interest, a desire to engage with the topic. That seems like it should be obvious, but many newspapers are so busy chasing some mythical Everyreader that passion is often leeched out.

2. There's a strong sense of world view. Contemporary culture is so vast and diverse that it's impossible to make the claim that any newspaper is getting it all. Or even the best of it. But too many newspapers' cultural coverage is a scattershot affair - a little of this, a little of that - so it's difficult to know what exactly the newspaper believes is the place of culture in its community. The Guardian seems to have a sense of it.

Oh there are irritants. Curiously, the amount of space devoted to dance seems stingy for a city that offers so much dance. And the paper hasn't yet figured out how to tap into its readership in more interesting ways. The social networking of Web 2.0, with all its user-generated community-building has so far eluded the paper. It would be nice to see the Guardian be even more experimental online, try some cultural debates and formats that better take advantage of the internet's faster flow of ideas.

Still - the Guardian is by far the gold standard for cultural coverage on the internet.

Over the past three years I have talked a couple hundred people into blogging. While I've never considered ArtsJournal itself a blog, it does satisfy one reason to blog - pointing readers towards interesting things elsewhere on the web, and I think of the skein of these stories as a curated conversation about culture and ideas.

There's been an explosion in the number of blogs about culture in the past two years; now it seems like there's a blog about almost anything you could imagine. So why add to it with another one? I'll let you know when I have a better answer, but for now, I'd say that in my daily assembling of ArtsJournal, I see lots of connections between stories that I find interesting. Sometimes I'd like to make those connections more explicit than the fact that I've chosen them for AJ.

This week is ArtsJournal's seventh birthday; by my rough calculation, we've posted links to just over 49,000 stories in that time. Considering we post about one story for every 35 we look at, that's an awful lot of reading and trying to make connections.

We're living at a time when we have more access to more culture than ever before. This means a dizzying number of choices not only for consumers but also for artists and producers. It also may mean that the ways we make, distribute and use culture may have to be rethought. Business models that have been successful in supporting the production of movies, music, TV, books, and theatre may have to be reinvented. As they are, our relationships with culture will change.

This makes for uncertain times if you're a producer of "content". But it also makes it a fascinating time to be an observer of culture. It is in these periods of big change that cultural journalism is at its most interesting; it is also periods like these that critics have traditionally had their biggest influence. Yet this time arts journalism itself is undergoing many of the same wrenching changes as the larger culture.

A lot has been written about the future of critics in an age when anyone can publish and millions of citizen bloggers find voice. Does this mean the end of traditional critics? No. But the institutions that have supported traditional critics are changing, and, just like the rest of the culture, critics are going to have to reinvent their business models. We have traditionally depended on critics to define their territory, walk the perimeter and report back about what's new, what's interesting and how they connect. As the amount of culture we have access to becomes ever more overwhelming we're going to need people to help us make sense of it. There are some awfully smart people out there trying to do exactly that. One thing I hope to do with this blog is to point you in the direction of some of them, Proust.