Slate's Jack Shafer tries to take a long historical view of the American news business:

One imperfect measure of newspaper employment during the late-period consolidation of newspapers is the annual newsroom diversity census, produced since 1978 by the American Society of News Editors. From a base line of 43,000 newsroom employees in 1978, the numbers steadily rose to a high of 56,900 in 1990 and hovered at about 55,000 until 2008 when they dropped to 52,600. The 2009 census results of 46,700 newsroom hands indicates a genuine decline, but the loss of newspaper jobs has had more to do with the shrinking of most daily newsrooms than the closure of newspapers.

His conclusion:

The cheap tools and affordable devices the average Joe has at his disposal to produce precision journalism and distribute it around the world are enough to make the reporters of yesterday sob in envy. It's the difference between digging ditches with a spade and excavating a canal with dynamite.

If the downside of the battered-down barriers to entry is less pay and lower status, the potential upside is that a flood of new entrants into the field could portend a journalistic renaissance. No, I'm not saying that every junior blogger and pint-size videographer will immediately stand as tall as Barton Gellman and Errol Morris and that the Washington Post and NBC News should be flushed. But journalism has generally benefited by increases in the number of competitors, the entry of new and once-marginalized players, and the creation of new approaches to cracking stories. Just because the journalism business is going to hell and it may no longer make economic sense to maintain mega-news bureaus at the center of war zones doesn't mean that journalism isn't thriving.

As Washington Post critics Ann Hornaday (NAJP fellow '94-'95), Ron Charles, Peter Marks, Tom Shales and J. Freedom du Lac consider -- some more seriously than others -- whether critics still matter, Marks makes an important connection: "Drama criticism retains some outsize influence: Because theater tickets are more costly than movie admission, playgoers tend to be older and more attentive to newspapers, and theatergoing in general is more of a niche pursuit."

As a former rock critic for the NY Times, I covered the Jackson 5 and the Jacksons and Michael Jackson, so part of me felt that I should weigh in with SOMETHING about his death on my blog, Rockwell Matters. But I didn't. I was excited by his greatest LP's and videos and singing and dancing as much as the next person. At his greatest he was great, maybe the last great pop personality to come close to uniting the culture, around the world.

Even at his peak, though, there was a patina of show-biz artificiality about him and his persona. Call us naive, but those raised on 60's rock clung to the notion of "sincerity" in our pop voices, and there was no way, ever, of telling whether Michael Jackson was sincere. The distinction had something to do with white folk-rock morphing into rock & roll vs. the black show-biz revue tradition, but Jackson pushed artificiality to its outer limits. He was a carefully self-constructed artifact, a brilliant artifact at his best. Maybe the whole notion of sincerity and naturalness that infused so much 60's pop culture and art was an anomaly. Maybe constructing an artifact is the one true art. But Jackson never moved me, and the descent of his career and life into weirdness was painful.

So I wrote nothing. But now, for this ARTicles blog, which is about the relation of journalism to the arts, a brief word on the media overkill surrounding Jackson's death. On television, on the radio, in the tabloids, it was impossible to escape it. People say the ayatollahs and Mark Sanford were lucky to have been knocked out of the news by Jackson overkill. But we here in America (and the Western world) aren't so lucky.

The whole orgy of crocodile tears was and is sick and exploitive, and the nerve of the tabloids (mine are the NY Post and the NY Daily News) to attack the Jackson family for being mercenary (which I'm sure they are) one day after running maudlin special Jackson Sunday supplements, all to capitalize on the same death the family is trying to cash in on, is disgusting. Not since the death and canonization of Elvis have so many tried to make so much money with so much cynicism.

We live in a strange, tacky, cheezy world, a world in which popular culture is equated with greed with no one batting an eye. A long way from the idealism of the 60's. If that, too, was ever real.

Google did it to artists, LinkedIn did it to translators, and both managed to infuriate the people they'd sought to woo. The offense? Each organization, neither of them starved for cash, wanted experienced professionals to trade their services not for money but for exposure.

My wife and I chose the hours of 11 a.m. Thursday through 11 p.m. Friday to take off for a much needed escape to Brattleboro, Vermont, where we ate a supernal $100 meal, two excellent $30 meals, and a free, late motel breakfast; swam in the full-size motel pool and a secluded private pond owned by the widow of a Dartmouth classmate; sat in the motel hot tub; shopped briefly for books and clothes during a rainstorm; listened to a lot of music in the car (Crazy Horse! Mamani Keita! Wussy!) and some by the pond (Mbuti Pygmies!); and did the other things couples do on much needed escapes. We had a great time.

Luckily, time was so short I decided not to bring my laptop, no newspapers were on sale, and the computer in the motel breakfast room had bitten the silicon. On the way to the restaurant Thursday night, however, our 24-year-old daughter called and told us that Michael Jackson had died. For Nina this was a big deal, and after dinner we called again and talked about how disorienting it felt--for her, this pop loss was a first, an oddity worth pondering. Post-grunge, there were lots of deaths (not just Kurt Cobain but Lynn Staley, Elliott Smith, lesser lights), but she was a little young for that and has always been a pop person anyway. And in that pop generation (not hip-hop, obviously), there's been trauma aplenty but, so far, no deaths unless you count Rob Pilatus of Milli Vanilli. Even Britney Spears has made it through. It's been said often and truly in the past few days that MJ made the post-identity aesthetics of such raceless yet r&b-contoured pop possible. It's also been said that he heralded a return to showbiz, an overstatement--arena-rock offered showbiz aplenty (read Fred Goodman on Dee Anthony in The Mansion on the Hill)--that's relevant here. Pop has transmuted into a strange profession that rewards hard work and personal discipline, making self-destructiveness less likely among its practitioners. And it's also been said that MJ was the last pop star everyone could share--a universal signifier whose like we will not see again. Many reminiscences from LA and NYC have recounted how ubiquitous his music instantly became.

As a point of information, then, I should mention that not once in Brattleboro--a sizable old-hippie town that harbors quite a few liberal NYC retirees, though its countercultural presence was one vegetarian restaurant when my friend bought his patch of woods 40 years ago--did I hear a scrap of Michael Jackson's music or even his name. He wasn't even brought up by the webwise r&b recording engineer from down the dirt road who surprised us by biking in for a dip. I'm not saying the reports of ubiquity were inaccurate or meaningless. But universal is BIG.

One of the many ideas floating about to reinvigorate arts journalism is consortiums of local arts institutions sponsoring some sort of online art-journalistic presence. Such a consortium would include listings, of course, and advertising and features, and also criticism. But as Doug McLennan reported to the NAJP board in one of our recent conference calls, no one model for just how it would work has yet emerged.

When Andrew Sarris got offed at The Village Voice about 20 years ago, I'm chagrined to admit that the main thing that upset me about it was the precedent. We were both institutions at the paper by then, but he was certainly the bigger one, and if he could go, so could I. Never a big gossiper, I don't know whether management in general (as opposed to then film editor Karen Durbin) had it in for Sarris--probably there was a new blood thing in there somewhere, but I doubt that was enough of a reason. The guy was a legend. Of course, he  was also and quite possibly still is an annoying person--imperious, thin-skinned, highly territorial. He harrumphed a lot, and had taken to quoting himself in his reviews. ("Never do that," I warned myself, and I've been pretty good about it.) I remember once he'd just learned of the existence of disco and couldn't resist gloating to me in a putatively jocular way about how rock and roll was dying--when I told him I thought disco was rock and roll he didn't know what to say. Also, I was a Kaelist back when that was a hot topic--disapproved of the genius theory buried not too far from the surface of auteurism.

When I had to prepare a syllabus for the course in cultural journalism I taught at Princeton in 2007, however, I needed to revisit the Sarris-Kael debate because I was teaching it. And re-rereading some of Sarris's reviews--not an easy thing to do, as I'll explain--I found that I liked them much more than I remembered. Not that I'd ever stopped using The American Cinema--still haven't. But the individual reviews were often more insightful (and funny) than I would have imagined. Born in 1929, Sarris never understood hippies, but he knew he didn't understand them, and rather than being all sour grapes about it, he found a tone that self-mocked as it carped. Also, his stubborn insistence on taking popular movies every bit as seriously as (probably more than) Kael has worn well--often he gets at essential virtues in flicks others simply don't think through if they think about them at all.

Thing was, finding his reviews wasn't so easy. Unlike Kael, every increasingly captious and willful word of whom has been recycled and oft rerecycled, he's basically unanthologized--the last collection ends in 1969. I bring this up now because the New York Observer  just destaffed Sarris in a June 5 massacre whose details remain remarkably murky for the Nothing Is Sacred but the Salmon-Colored Truth contingent. (For the record, books editor Adam Begley, whose enjoyable Begley the Bookie column I had been missing, emails me that he resigned in March to write his John Updike bio. He adds, however, that if he hadn't he would have been fired June 5.)  Even before I did my Princeton research I'd noticed that I was enjoying Sarris's NYO reviews far more than I'd anticipated. Especially cheek by jowl with Rex Reed (and that's a whole lot of jowls), he was remarkably lively and down-to-earth, still forming crushes on ingenues and tracking the track records of directors four decades his junior. He turned 80 last September, and I actually think he wrote better in his seventies than in his fifties.

So some university press should do a big book. Maybe his firing--like Reed, he will now "contribute," we are told, but we'll see how often--will get people's attention. I mean, he's a legend, and his Wikipedia entry is a damn stub. Even his wife Molly Haskell gets a real article (albeit a comically ill-written one, should anyone have the stomach to check). Wonder if some online site will take him on. Won't pay, but for sure it will open up career opportunities.

Already this year a couple of major newspapers have closed their doors, including the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Denver's Rocky Mountain News. Longterm business erosion and the recession are threatening any newspaper that was already struggling. Most industry watchers anticipate there will be several more newspaper failures this year, and several are currently in bankruptcy. So which city would be the first to have no daily paper? The answer is: Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Ann Arbor? Home to the huge University of Michigan, birthplace and headquarters of the Borders book chain and a pocket of relative prosperity with only light collateral damage from the auto industry, a literate place, population around 100,000, one might expect to be appreciative of what print newspapers offer.

 

But some of those apparent strengths seem instead to have proven drawbacks -- a curious state of affairs that may provide an unexpected window into what kinds of newspapers are most vulnerable in the brutal business climate of 2009.

So what are those factors?

"What people don't understand is that, yes, Ann Arbor is a dynamic, vital market... But there are a lot of things about Ann Arbor that make it harder to succeed as a print daily paper. Print papers do a little better with an older audience, and Ann Arbor is a little younger. We do better where there is a high level of home ownership, and there's a lower level of home ownership. We do a little better where there is a higher level of longtime residents. Ann Arbor is much more transitory."

And this, conjectures Poynter's Rick Edmonds:

I don't think it is a stretch to extrapolate the Ann Arbor problem to metro markets in the worst trouble -- San Francisco, Boston, Minneapolis, Seattle, San Jose. Youngish, upscale, hip, high-tech , a big artistic community -- those may all be economic engines for the city but a business negative for the one-size-fits-all traditional newspaper.

A mini-scandal has broken out in Milwaukee, where the city's police chief and a smitten journalist who wrote a breathless magazine profile of him have admitted that they had an extramarital affair. The controversy -- which, if nothing else, surely has been great for driving traffic to Milwaukee Magazine's website -- has zero to do with arts journalism in particular (even if "The Music Man" provides a key metaphor in the 5,400-word piece, where Shakespeare also crops up now and again). But it has everything to do with journalistic ethics, and with an unavoidable ethical issue we tend not to discuss.

"Perceived you instantly - knew you were a good person who does things for the right reason," reads one signed Jessica. "As a result, I began to struggle with the story - having to give time to vitriolic baseless attacks."

The 6th NEA Arts Journalism Institute in Classical Music and Opera is now accepting applications for its 10-day session October 17-27, 2009, hosted by Columbia University's Journalism School. 

The institute is open to writers and editors seeking to improve their criticism skills and gain new knowledge and contacts in classical music and opera.  Participants will attend performances, lectures, meetings and workshops led by Columbia faculty, music experts, and other journalists and bloggers.  Most expenses are covered by the Institute.

Deadline is July 23, 2009.  For more info, download the flyer.pdf or go to: www.jrn.columbia.edu/events/nea.