main: February 2008 Archives

I've been posting lately at the National Arts Journalism Program's new Articles blog. Today I enumerated the business reasons why newspapers are laying off staff, cutting content and scaling back their businesses. Does it really have to be this way?

In my other life (what other life?) I'm the acting director of the National Arts Journalism Program (NAJP). NAJP started out as a project of the Pew Charitable Trusts in an attempt to help improve the state of arts journalism. I was an NAJP fellow at Columbia University in 1996-97. The program offered fellowships, did some of the first research on arts journalism, and convened numerous conferences on cultural issues. Two years ago the program shut down at Columbia, and a year later a group of determined alumni decided to try to revive it.

We relaunched NAJP last fall, began recruiting members, and now boast almost 500 arts journalists from around America, making NAJP the largest association of arts journalists in America.

We're in the process of creating new programs for NAJP, but one of the first projects is a blog where we hope to put news about the field, post opportunities, and point to great pieces of arts journalism. There will also be some pungent debates about the future of arts journalism and even some examples of the critical genre, we hope. Bloggers include: Lily Tung, Laura Sydell, Hollis Walker, Bob Christgau, John Horn, John Rockwell, Glenn Lovell, Patti Hartigan, Jeff Weinstein, Donald Munro, Laura Collins-Hughes, and Danyel Smith and me, and we'll be adding more in the months to come.

So if you're interested in arts journalism, click over to see the NAJP's ARTicles, where rock critic Bob Christgau has already contributed a rollicking essay to get things started.