Ticketmaster announces a billion-dollar loss, blaming "declining ticket sales, costs associated with layoffs and a massive impairment charge." The loss is real (in a 2009-paper-losses, bank-accounting kind of way), of course. But:The bulk of Ticketmaster's loss was because of a $1.1 billion charge the company took because of a precipitous decline in its share price since being spun off from … [Read more...]
Of Poverty, Banking, and the Arts
Yesterday on CNBC, host Mark Haines said that Wall Street could not possibly be run well by people making $250,000. Here's the transcript:Let's get back to what I regard as a fundamental issue here. I know it's politically unpopular, politically incorrect. I know it goes against all of the populist indignation that's out there right now. But you can't really, it seems to me, expect that these Wall … [Read more...]
Help For The Arts (But 10,000 Arts Groups Could Go Out Of Business)
Americans for the Arts has warned arts organizations to plan scenarios for 40% cuts in their budgets as the economy gets worse. And the group says that 10,000 arts organizations could go out of business in this recession. Some have been saying for some time that the arts were overbuilt in the boom of the 90s when America built some $25 billion worth of new theaters, concert halls and museums (the … [Read more...]
Ominous sign…
when the most committed owners of newspapers start selling off their shares:Donald Graham, the chairman and chief executive officer of Washington Post Co.has sold tens of millions of dollars worth of stock in the past year through a series of trusts he oversees for his relatives. In the process he has decreased his control of the company's publicly traded class B shares to 3.2 million shares, or … [Read more...]
Apparently, the News is Free
Is there anything ironic about National Public Radio canceling its newspaper subscriptions? This is, after all, the member organization that often fund-raises with the line "The news isn't free." … [Read more...]
Is the NEA bad for the arts?
A ridiculous question, sure. The National Endowment for the Arts is the channel through which the federal government invests money in the arts. And though it's not much money, compared to what other countries invest, it's something. Besides giving money, the NEA also has the value of drawing attention or legitimacy to the things it supports. Good things. But some of the recent debates about … [Read more...]
Time to start blogging
I've been using this blog mostly as a place to put administrative posts about AJ. But I've decided to take up blogging myself. First, a couple more administrative notes. We've been adding more blogs to AJ in recent weeks. Former NYTimes reporter Judith Dobrzynski's Real Clear Arts debuted last week with a bang, and she's been breaking news almost daily, so check her out.Today is a sad day. The … [Read more...]
Some new assistant editors at ArtsJournal
I've been meaning to post this for some time. As my previous post explained, I was looking for some more help at ArtsJournal this fall, and posted the job notice in the post below. Ultimately, we had 134 applications for the editor job. There were some really great applicants. In the end, I chose two. They are: Matthew Westphal, who most recently was news editor for PlaybillArts and before that … [Read more...]
ArtsJournal is Hiring [UPDATE]
ArtsJournal is expanding and I'm looking for a part time editor. The job involves culling stories from the publications we monitor (basically anything about the arts in English, worldwide) and choosing 10-15 stories per shift to feature on AJ. Each shift takes about two hours and we do the site in two shifts per day - once very early in the morning, the other in late afternoon/evening. Morning … [Read more...]
Why Newspapers Are Failing…
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? … [Read more...]
A New Blog At NAJP
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 … [Read more...]
The Rise Of Arts Culture
Today I want to make an argument about the rise of arts culture. In the 1950s, at the dawn of TV, the medium's pioneers believed that television would be the great democratizer - exposing culture to the masses. The best of the world's culture could be brought into the living rooms of America. The early shows were full of high-art culture - symphony orchestras, plays, high-minded debates. Of … [Read more...]
A Low Pressure Air Mass…
If the power of mass culture is based on the ability to attract a mass audience, then perhaps it's worth looking at the size of the mass. Magazines: People magazine is solidly mass market. In 2006 it had a circulation of 3.8 million. Its rivals Us Weekly sold 1.8 million and In Style sold on average 1.7 million copies. Time magazine sold 4 million a week, Newsweek did 3.1 million, and US News … [Read more...]
Rethinking Mass Culture
We're consumed by the idea of mass culture. Since television (and before it, radio) brought the immediacy of produced culture into our living rooms, we've treated the power of a massive aggregated audience with awe. That something is popular enough to attain common currency means it has power. Mass culture pervades everything. Writers place a character or location by dropping pop culture … [Read more...]
Time to Start Blogging
I've decided to make this blog active and use it to write about some of the issues I care about. I've been using it as a kind of administrative tool for things which don't easily fit on other parts of ArtsJournal, but there are ideas I'd like to explore through my writing, and diacritical seems like the place to do it. So I'm going to try posting more or less once a day and see if I can get into … [Read more...]