ArtsJournal’s own Douglas McLennan on the past and future of, well, arts journalism, as told to Crosscut Seattle:
Where are we now in arts journalism? Newspapers have been dropping critics right and left.
Newspapers
have not been the newspapers that I remember for quite a number of
years now. The day of many competing papers and views in a city is
gone. But the classic newspaper model was not built on a mass-media
vehicle. It was a collection niches. People don’t buy a newspaper
because of its coverage of city hall. They buy it for the comics
section or the crossword puzzle, etc. After they get through their
favorite thing, they will read the city hall coverage. But the genius
of this model is that none of the niche contents can support
themselves, but if you aggregated them altogether, then you have enough
readers and enough revenue to sell to advertisers.In
the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, the newspapers increasingly looked to TV as
the mass media model. The mass market mentality is not niches at all.
It is not excellence of product as the key to success. The mass market
strategy is to find the place in the middle so that what you produce
appeals to the most people. Editors I worked with at newspapers told me
to write at an eighth grade reading level — the mythical, average,
mass-market consumer. As soon as you do that, and when you assume that
every person ought to be able to read every story in a newspaper, then
you are not talking to those who are interested in the niches. Then the
classical music reviews in a given city are not intended for people who
know a lot about classical music. They are pitched to those who don’t
know much. So you end up getting this content that isn’t very good. It
isn’t very satisfying to the audience that ought to be your core
audience, and you get this erosion of leadership of arts coverage.
There are lots of exceptions. I try to post them every day in
Artsjournal. But the majority of arts coverage is not very good.Also,
newspapers have never been able to cover community arts in an
interesting way. Things like dance or jazz get really minimal coverage.
However, now with the ease and the different ways that you can deliver
information, we may discover a new model and improve the way that we
cover culture. Right now we are in between the two models. The old one
no longer works and the new one hasn’t been established.Here’s
an example of what I’m talking about. I just spent a week in North
Carolina with dance critics from around the nation. Like music, dance
is hard to write about. You are trying to describe things that are not
easy to describe. What would happen if we tried to describe an event in
a new way? I broke them into three teams, and signed them up with
blogger accounts, and gave them a Flip video camera, which has a
convenient USB port with which to upload movies to You Tube. I asked
them to use the video to compare dance styles, or show what you mean,
or talk to critics, the audience, or the choreographer. So they had a
day and a half to expand the palette on which they are working, to find
something that is not so linear in form with which to describe this
artistic experience.
I (heart) the Flip video camera, by the way. $149.99 of instant viral marketing potential. I love the idea of orchestras/presenters interviewing audiences before, during (intermission) and after concerts, and immediately posting reaction clips on their sites and YouTube. Also, if they agree to it, video-interviewing artists just as they’re about to go on stage and just as they’re coming off stage.