When Art and Politics Don't Mix
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Blog mania
Your newspaper's print circulation is declining. The staff is smaller. Your newsroom managers are so obsessed with boosting Internet traffic that they're waking up in the middle of the night screaming about hit counts and RSS feeds. So what do they want the arts staff to do?
Blog.
It's happening at papers all over. Managers are discovering that blogs about entertainment and the arts can drive traffic. Ours, at The Fresno Bee, is doing well. Not only that, but well written blogs can draw in regional and national audiences, which hit-count-loving corporate types love.
At a Newspaper Guild gathering at a Fresno pizza place last week, we got together to talk about the B word. Blogs are all the rage, of course, and editors who a couple of years ago wouldn't have known a browser from a button hole are now fretting over Top 10 read-stories lists and figuring out how to work "Facebook" into every lifestyle section headline.
We didn't come up with many answers at our lunchtime meeting. But I think it was healthy that we tackled the topic in the first place. The big unanswered question: How can you be expected to do the job you were doing pre-Internet while also filling the Web's insatiable appetite for fresh, constantly updated content? Is cloning legal?
Here's some of what we agreed upon:
Newsrooms need to realize that not all blogs are created equal. Some papers, in a panic, are telling reporters to throw anything they can online and call it a blog. Compilations of news updates, briefs, rewritten press releases and stuff that wasn't interesting enough to get into the print edition might be considered by some people to be blogs, but the time commitment is a lot different when you're producing original (and well-written) commentary.
Blogs take time. I'd love to see every editor in America go through the process of writing and tending to a blog for a week: posting daily, inserting appropriate links, uploading photographs, monitoring comments, responding to readers. Only then, I think, will managers really begin to realize how much time it can take to maintain a good blog. Just one complicated entry -- a roundup of recommended arts events for the weekend, say, rife with links, photos and commentary -- can take a good hour to put together. There's more to writing a blog than just throwing up a few sentences online. Bloggers know that good entries can require additional reporting, fact-checking and -- most important -- a distinctive tone. Sure, there are blogs out there consisting of stream-of-consciousness, rough-draft material. And they read like it.
Blogs need to be promoted. Cross-promotion between the print product and the online product is essential. Blogs can be used to expand on print stories or offer multimedia experiences for readers. Almost every arts/entertainment advance story written today can use a YouTube clip, for example. Often, for an arts feature, a newspaper's photography department will have three or four great shots but will only have room for one in the print edition, so use the rest online. If you have a great local film or theater fesitval in town but only have room to print the top winner, refer people to the Web site for the other awards. (And clips, too, if they're available.) One thing I do with my theater reviews for The Fresno Bee is run longer reviews online, then condense them in print. Cross-promoting can work the other way, too. If you have a great story in print, give a pitch for it online and give the link. Promotion on the paper's home page is essential, too. Often, blogs are buried and hard to find. I've seen newspaper Web sites that make you go on a Treasure Hunt just to find that day's arts stories, and even then you aren't always successful.
Think big. At my paper's blog last week, our pop music writer, Mike Osegueda, actually organized a last-minute music concert at a local venue, then promoted it virally online. All of us bloggers showed up and made a party of it.
Reader interaction is crucial. I'm often told by readers how much they appreciate that I (and my fellow features bloggers) take the time to moderate discussions, offer comments and answer questions. As you build a readership, the sense of community grows. That's one of the things that keeps regular readers coming back.
Alas, all these things take time. That's what our first meeting was all about. And it made me realize that I'd like to ask fellow arts-journalist bloggers (and others as well) reading this entry how other people out there are coping: How are people managing the time demands of this new blogging era? Have editors reduced expectations for number of print stories produced in order to accommodate more blogging? Is blogging something you do at the "end of the day" if you have time, or is it given first priority? Any tips for more efficient blogging? Are any arts-journalist bloggers out there being pulled from print duty entirely and told to blog till the cows come home?
And, finally, does anyone out there have any examples of good blogs doing good things but aren't slowly killing the people who write them?
My theater blog for the Orlando Sentinel, which is called Attention Must Be Paid, has brought together the theater community here in Central Florida and created a theater community online where one didn't exist before.
The blog itself -- which at its most time-consuming can take a couple of hours a day (editors told us at the beginning that blogging would take 10 minutes) -- is a grab-bag compendium of reviews, articles I've read elsewhere, audition notices, quick-hit press-release postings and mouthing off about various issues that strike me. I usually don't have the time to write long, insightful posts, and I think of the writing on the blog as being like a postcard sent to folks I know. The tone is fairly breezy, and it's quite different from the way I write in the paper.
But what's been very interesting here is how theater people have latched onto it as the place they go every day for their theater news. At a paper where we have upwards of 60 blogs, the theater blog consistently ranks in the top 15. For something aimed at a niche audience, that seems fairly amazing to me.
Last month we had our first theater-blog get-together, a potluck at a local theater attended by 25 or 30 people, some of whom had never met before. The people who came seemed really happy that we'd done it and pleased with the chance to meet in a relaxed, non-competitive setting. We're planning to do this every three months or so, each time at a different theater, as another way to try to bring the theater community together.
One sidelight: For most of the time I've been doing this, I've asked people who comment on the blog to sign on with their real names. Most do. The result is to raise the level of discourse quite a bit and to instill respect for each other that might not exist if people were hiding behind pseudonyms. It's really worked beautifully, and I think it's been a key to the blog's success.
Blogging is also changing the protocols or ethics within art journalism. Consider this review of a preview performance of Beckett’s Endgame currently running at the Brooklyn Academy of Music by San Francisco Bay Area-based theatre critic Chloe Veltman. She does this at her lies like truth theatre blog, part of the high profile ARTSJOURNAL website.
As I already said in an earlier comment, in New York this “preview review” is changing the landscape of writing about performance. Productions are now routinely offering certain bloggers preview tickets with the tacit agreement that they will “talk about” their experience in a blog post. But this review of a preview production of a major production in New York by a working theatre reviewer is a real indicator of the critical mass change that is now here.
What is somewhat disquieting is this continued attrition of the old rules (ethics?)of art journalism without any real examination by the journalists most affected by this change. Thanks Donald for this article but what you write here is just the tip of the iceberg.
At least newspaper arts staffers asked to blog aren't in the position of trying to monetize their blogs directly -- they're still getting that weekly paycheck. Not the case for freelancers trying to make sure their opinions have an outlet, as space for freelance work tightens with newspapers' and magazines' space crunch. If one has to sell ads as well as write and promote one's own blog, the ethics questions loom larger, too.
This NPR segment of Talk of the Nation expands on some of the observations here.
Fewer Critics, More Reviews
On the web, everyone's a critic. So while there are fewer and fewer critics employed at newspapers and traditional publications, the number of reviews is growing...
Elizabeth, your theater-blog potluck sounds terrific. It's an example of how online communities can make the transition to the "real world." I remember (many years ago) writing a story about computer bulletin boards, which were the nascent stirrings of the much vaunted phenomenon we now call social networking, and the dynamic that emerged when people finally met each other in person. (It's funny how you get a mental image of someone through their comments and reconciling the first time you meet them in person.)
Re asking people to sign on with their real names: I'm very intrigued. I haven't had a huge problem with nasty posts, but I have rejected some. I'm wondering: In your publishing system, is there anything to stop someone from making up a name and then commenting?
I think blogs and article sites are giving American people a voice they have not had before..God Bless the Internet