May 2009 Archives

Newspaper execs gathered in Chicago this week to talk about charging for their content (making sure, of course, not to collude in any kind of way that would draw the attention of the Justice Department's anti-trust lawyers). The time has come to charge readers for what we do, said the execs.

So Martin Langveld over at the Nieman Journalism Lab ran some scenarios imagining subscription prices at modest levels. Here's why putting content behind pay walls on the internet won't work:

So the question becomes: Will the new monthly fees offset the lost ad revenue?  Here's what happens:

• At $1 a month, with viewer retention of 70 percent, subscription revenue would be $566 million.  But ad revenue would drop by 30 percent, or $933 million, for a net loss of $367 million.
• At $2 a month, with viewer retention of 50 percent, subscription revenue amounts to $808 million.  But newspaper sites would kiss away half their ad revenue, or $1,555 million, for a net loss of $747 million.
• At $5 a month, and 30 percent of visitors sticking around, subscription revenue swells to $1.212 billion.  But 70 percent of ad revenue, or $2.173 billion takes a walk, cutting the net by $946 million.
• At $10 a month, sites retain just 10% of visitors, who pay a collective $808 million for the privilege, but 90 percent of ad revenue ($2.798 billion) flies the coop, leaving newspapers poorer by $1.990 billion.
• At $25 a month -- well, I won't bother with the arithmetic.  Make your own assumptions, but nearly all the ad revenue goes away and viewer fees don't replace more than a small fraction of it.

Brian Raftery has been a staffer at Spin, EW, and GQ, which means he's a smart guy who knows how to make writing go down easy. More recently he was an editor at Idolator, which didn't work out, as it hasn't worked out for a lot of people--good luck Maura, see you in a later post. Now he's published a memoiristic cultural history called Don't Stop Believin': How Karaoke Conquered the World and Changed My Life, and the fact that it goes down easy--as befits his training, Raftery is partial to chapters that function as sidebars and chapters constructed as lists--doesn't mean it has nothing to say. In fact, it's one of the more substantial documents of the rise of the song aesthetic, a subject that's generated a great deal of piffle over the past five years.

I've been pro-karaoke ever since I read Charles Keil's 1984 essay about it a decade late in his great Music Grooves collection--anything that helps fans take control of music is good by definition, although sometimes only in theory. Raftery's book--together with the fact that my daughter and her best friend, a native of the karaoke-crazy Philippines, are into it--has certainly intensified my curiosity. One thing you can say for karaoke song connoisseurs as opposed to MP3-blog song connoisseurs is that for them songs are anything but disposable--they value a durable melody and a clever structure. One thing you can say against them is that their performance needs are hell on extended instrumentals and strophic forms. Like Raftery, who really shouldn't take Rolling Stone so seriously, I scoff at the idea that "Like a Rolling Stone" is the greatest single of the modern era. It's not in my top 500. But that doesn't mean I don't like it. I wonder how many karaoke obsessives can see, I mean hear, its virtues as clearly as Raftery claims he does.

This is one of several critical issues that Raftery glances off rather than exploring. It always saddens me when a smart guy who knows music has a book to write and avoids putting any criticism in it. For sure he could have shortened the takeout on the esoteric realm of karaoke video to make room. Most interesting to me is a question he never really addresses at all, which is--what is a "good singing voice," anyway? Wasn't rock and roll out on earth not to obliterate that notion but to broaden it so the pitchmongers could never grab hold of it again? Does karaoke contravene conventional notions of the good voice? Or does it reinforce them with its choice of material, the presentational gifts of the karaoke-specific local stars it produces, and its sometimes candid, sometimes ironic admissions of amateurism and the professionalism that amateurism implies? I wish I thought there was much doubt.

A smart piece on the current news landscape in The Economist. The story gives a good overview of the problems and a survey of what's been eroding and what's being tried. What's the model for the new news portal? The Economist suggests that Huffington Post is the most successful idea. But Patrick Appel thinks that's wrong:

Let's compare overhead. Huffington has around 60 paid employees and an army of 3000 unpaid contributors, many of them celebrities and politicians. The website reports original stories, has influential authors, and opines on nearly every major political story. Drudge Report, on the other hand, is staffed by two, so far as I know, and usually simply links to stories using a provocative headline. Clicking on Drudge's page for the first time one is blown away by the simplicity of his operation. A gaudy website, hand-coded, that looks exactly the same as it did ten years ago. How and why did this become a major news portal?

Growing up as a young Asian-American actor, I didn't notice until I was in eighth grade and my Catholic junior high produced the musical Oklahoma that race mattered in casting.  Up until then, I didn't think much of race at all and naively assumed that only talent mattered.  Then when I didn't get called back for Laurie, it suddenly dawned on me that directors and audiences might think watching an Asian actress play the Oklahoman ingenue would be downright weird.  Ever since then, when discussing the dearth of Asian roles, I've often joked with my fellow actors, "Look at me.  I will never play a Von Trapp."

The same type of thinking apparently came to Olivia Rosaldo-Pratt, recipient of the Judith Lee Stronach Baccalaureate Prize at UC Berkeley.  As an undergraduate she taught drama classes to at-risk youth and students learning English as a second language.  After using drama to address their anger, frustration and language learning, she realized that drama offered benefits that youth of color were not able to access.  Drama programs, even in the most diverse schools, involve few students of color.  

Pratt then used her prize to present Saturday's day-long conference, THEATER MATTERS: Reinventing Drama Education for the Next Generation.  Bay Area artists, teachers, and community activists, including playwright Philip Kan Gotanda, Rhodessa Jones & The Medea Project, and national slam poetry champion Marc David Pinate, joined students in workshops and group discussions to try to create a new vision of theater for the next generation. "We want to make sure that young people of color in Bay Area schools feel they have a place in drama programs and are empowered by the work they do there.  No one should ever feel alienated the way previous generations have," says Olivia Rosaldo-Pratt.  "We want this conference to cause an explosion of collaboration and new projects."  

Stay tuned to this blog to find out what new projects are in the works. 

Watching the travails of print journalism, and spending time with Doug McLennan (which I do because of our shared involvement with the National Arts Journalism Program, my contributing all too rarely to a blog on his ArtsJournalism site and because he's a friend), one spends a lot of time pondering the future of arts writing on the Internet. A worthy subject for pondering, to be sure. But with all due respect to Marshall McLuhan, sometimes the message does, or should, trump the medium.

By that I mean that it's easy to overlook what one traditionally considered with arts journalism, and what the old, once lavishly funded NAJP used to do: foster the actual quality of the criticism and reporting of the arts. (In fairness, Doug still does that, too, especially with the various NEA institutes for theater critcism and that of the other arts.) It's tempting now to question the place of the seemingly burgeoning arts-journalism programs, mostly Masters programs, at our leading universities. They can't all be just places to park recent college grads who don't know what to do with themselves and who don't want to go to film school and whose parents have money.

What these programs do, aside from maybe helping aspiring journalists make contacts, is hone basic skills. Good writers may have an innate gift. But that gift can be polished. Knowing about the field you aspire to criticize; getting the facts right; learning how to dig for facts when their possessor doesn't want to divulge them; writing on deadline -- all these are craft skills. Instruction (or, for a lot of us, on-the-job practice) can count for a lot, no matter whether the end result appears in print or on line.

So while we fret about the loss of formerly well-paying jobs and consider alternate business models, it's salutary just occasionally to remember that good criticism and good arts reporting need to be sustained, too, and to have a little faith that the need for those skills will seem so self-evident to society that ways will have to be found to support them.

Speaking of retro, qualified kudos to City Arts NYC (or however you spell it; the logo is too fancy to tell), a new monthly arts publication, its third (May) issue now out. Essentially a repository of arts writers who filled the back pages (and often, some of the front page) of the recently terminated New York Sun, City Arts offers articles, essays, reviews and listings. The Sun, a neo-con rag sustained against all economic good sense by right-wing supporters who wanted a New York vanity outlet, specialized in the high arts, lots of it, which suited its political stance (pro standards and classics and purity, anti messy populism and transgressive innovation). Some of its writers were pretty good, some not so hot (and some also in the New Criterion and, now, the New York Post). But one had to admire (from way across the ideological divide) any publication, no matter how quixotically, that devoted so much attention to the arts. And now City Arts is trying to carry on the crusade.

It will be interesting to see if they can keep it going. It's published by Manhattan Media, which also puts out the New York Press and a clutch of neighborhood tabloids. I haven't seen the Press for awhile, but it used to be cranky-rightwing-libertarian, though with more of a pop slant in its arts coverage. Whether Manhattan Media or City Arts makes money or has any reasonable hope of making money or is once again propped up by a political agenda, I know not. It has a web site (www.cityartsny.info), but that echoes the print version. So this seems another exercise in retro business models and old-fashioned arts coverage. Can it plant the flag for its kind of fustian "universal" quality in an era so obsessed with hipness and progressiveness and the Internet? We shall see.

I have been gone forever. I feel bad about it. I had a birthday in April--maybe I'm finally getting old. In any case, teaching at NYU plus two substantial monthly columns plus occasional work for NPR and the late Blender and creating a weekly playlist for Rhapsody--yes, that's work too, people talk about these things as if they're bagatelles but if you respect them a little they're not, one reason I missed a couple of weeks--was as much as I could handle and a little more. Which sad plaint pertains to the story I am about to tell.

Early in May, after my teaching was done but in the midst of grading and editing 29 2500-word final papers, I hied with my wife to the second of three Dinners With Friends in a seven-day period--a surfeit unmatched since Christmastime. This one was on the Upper West Side. We were exitbound on the IRT at 96th Street when we were hailed by an old acquaintance--a first-rate journalist I've known for about 30 years and like a lot to this day. He had a new job--editing an NYC section at a widely read website that will remain nameless. And he had an offer for me. How would I like to blog for his section? He needed music coverage. True, he mentioned with admirable dispatch, I wouldn't be paid. But it would open up a lot of opportunities for me.

Politely, I hope--genially, I hope--I told him I had too much work to do as it was and would have to decline. In the intervening weeks, however, I've actually had second thoughts. With both my Village Voice columns currently (knock on wood) available at venues--online-only venues, it is only fair to note--where as far as I'm concerned they're at least as good as at they were at my dead-tree stomping ground, the main thing I miss about the Voice is the opportunity for advocacy. I could make a difference for artists I thought deserved attention--writing a slam-bang Voice Choice for the great Cincinnati band Wussy, who Southern-Ohio-born-and-bred Rob Harvilla just doesn't get (too young, maybe), or going to see the Defibulators dominate the Asylum Street Spankers at this vast new venue in Gowanus (wherever that is--besides Brooklyn I mean--Smith and 9th on the F, though I arrived by taxi after subwaying to Williamsburg by mistake) called the Bell House and then lobbying to write a short about them. And of course I would always have an in to gigs as well, instead of having to luck into a Leonard Cohen ticket which turned out to be one of the greatest concerts I've seen this decade--number two, I think, after D'Angelo at Radio City, though maybe I'm forgetting something and maybe Cohen was even better, this is only a damn blog.

Which is, of course, the point. Here I work for nothing--and disappear for two-three months. I do it because I believe in the NAJP and what it represents and because I want to represent--with my such-as-it-is prestige for NAJP, and for the vernacular arts in general and rock and roll in particular at NAJP, which like all arts orgs is prey to creeping gentility as well as the nasty elitist kind. Even at that I'm uncomfortable with how fast I write here, because I'm a firm believer that even in journalism the best writing is done slowly. And even at that I think I write better than most bloggers I read--not so much here, where the quality is remarkably high (Anawalt, we miss you), but at most of the websites I frequent, including the one where I was offered a--not gig, but spot, venue. Fact is, what blogs I read I read for content only. Only a few--Marshall, Sullivan, Huffington, all of whom, what a coincidence, are clocking major dollars at their web gigs--are pleasures to read as writers. Those who aren't I don't read much.

I am overgeneralizing. There are music bloggers--Maura Johnston at Idolator (who's also getting paid, though I bet not much) and Carl Wilson at Zoilus (who's writing less as his actual newspaper gig takes more of his time)--I read for pleasure, and others I'm sure I'm missing. But if I remain a skeptic in the matter of the web as the salvation of journalism, the fact that I was asked to write for nothing in the interest of furthering my career exemplifies why.

To be continued, I bet. Or hope.

And so do Sasha Anawalt and I:

NAJP director emeritus Andras Szanto bats cleanup:

The NAJP was started as a fellowship program, and was, right out of the gate, one of the best in the business. A year to follow your interests, study and recharge, free of the grind of deadlines that regulate the lives of professional journalists.

When the program began in 1994, most of the applicants were staffers at news organizations. The program didn't really look much at freelancers, and freelancers weren't a significant share of the applicants. Over the next dozen years, applications to NAJP flip-flopped. By the time the fellowship program ended in 2006, most of the applicants were freelancers.

That's been true at the NEA arts journalism institutes as well. The majority applying for the programs are freelancers now. And this, about the applicant profile and those selected for the most prestigious journalism fellowship programs this year:

...even though newspaper employees once dominated the top journalism fellowships, their share had been slipping for a few years, and in selections made over the last few weeks for the next academic year, it has plummeted. Four of the best-known programs -- at Harvard, M.I.T., Stanford and the University of Michigan -- chose 29 employees of American newspapers for fellowships in the year that is now winding down, and just 11 for next year. There have also been declines in the number of people from magazines and wire services, but not as pronounced.

At the same time, applications to those four programs, for positions that are open to American journalists, jumped 62 percent this year, to about 600. The pool was swelled by legions of journalists who no longer have steady work, and by people from the growing nontraditional media. The slots that used to go to newspaper people are going, instead, to freelancers, including many who do some work for papers, and to people in online and broadcast media. Some programs are also giving more positions to journalists from overseas.

Certainly this reflects changes in the ranks of journalism. Layoffs and downsizing are changing the way journalists work. Is it good for journalism? Right now, not so much. On the other hand, the consumption of news has increased, not gone down, so there's a market for what journalists do.

I am certainly biased in favor of journalists having more control over their own work, so I'm not shedding too many tears about news organizations who have made stupid editorial decisions based on bad business practices. I haven't run into too many journalists in recent years who have been happy with the ways their publications have made business decisions (and thus editorial decisions).

In the end, I suspect this freelance-ification of the news business has the potential to give journalists more control over their work than they had in the old system. And with it, ought to come a bigger upside to share in the financial rewards. Right now, though? It sucks for a lot of people.

The Tucson Citizen stopped publication  Friday. It's sad when a newspaper goes out of business. And it's becoming more and more common these days. Still. The paper's parting shot in an editorial is a bit much:

To all those bloggers and "citizen journalists" who, if you believe the Internet, are this close to reinventing the industry, here's your opportunity.

Now is your chance to cover never-ending board meetings, make Freedom of Information Act requests to dislodge facts from public officials, call sources - you have cultivated sources, right? - and otherwise do what we in our dying industry like to call "reporting."

To do it right, you'll have to work eight to 10 hours a day, five to six days a week.

If it sounds like a job, not a hobby, it is. But don't expect to get paid; apparently, that business model has been discredited.

We're rooting for you. Public officials need vigilant scrutiny if our dollars are to be wisely spent and public policies are to be sane and progressive. So good luck with that.

Bitter much? Sorry. But if you can't adapt to reality, you disappear. It's not like the Citizen was a great newspaper. In fact, Google the paper and you'll find sadness about its closing but not regret for the passing of a great news institution. Okay to give up the fight and disappear into history. Not okay to be snide about your own failures (even after a 138 year run).

Nothing particularly arts-journalism-worthy about this one. But at a panel this week at the University of Syracuse, the CEO of Sony Pictures Michael Lynton, was categorical in his belief that the internet has been a disaster:

"I'm a guy who doesn't see anything good having come from the Internet. Period."

And just in case he had left any wiggle room is that assessment, he followed up:

He complained the Internet has "created this notion that anyone can have whatever they want at any given time. It's as if the stores on Madison Avenue were open 24 hours a day. They feel entitled. They say, 'Give it to me now,' and if you don't give it to them for free, they'll steal it."

There are lots of things you can say about the internet. Even more things you could say about how people use the internet. But the internet is a reality for anyone doing business. There are people who see it as an opportunity. And there are people who see it as a threat to everything they hold dear. Who would you want running your multi-billion-dollar mega-media operation?

The most lucrative advertising in the A&E sections of newspapers has been from movie studios and theatre chains. But just like other advertisers, the movie industry has figured out that online ads are reaching their audiences more effectively. The Regal theatre chain, the largest in the US, says that its advertising in newspapers is "about a quarter of what it was in 1999, shrinking from $13,000 per screen average to $3,000 per screen last year." The trend is only accelerating:

We have conducted a number of surveys and analysis...clearly, customers are getting their movie and showtime information online, and newspaper has become a second or third choice.

And we thought Joan Rivers's big win was a shocker. Tonight, should it be Adam or Kris or Danny? And would it be Helen or Tara or Mike? Then, out of the clear blue, far from reality show jangle and pop culture frenzy, this really big news item tweets, casting a LED shadow on all else: ROCCO LANDESMAN named NEA Chairman. The New York Times runs with the choice. I, for one, am thrilled and bedazzled.

Quote from Tony Kushner, whose "Angels in America" Landesman's Jujamcyn Theaters produced:

"It's potentially the best news the arts community in the United States has had since the birth of Walt Whitman. He's [Landesman] an absolutely brilliant and brave and perfect choice for the job."

Buy stock. Who knew?

John Podhoretz suggests at the Weekly Standard that the "deprofessionalization" of movie critics is a good thing and that newspapers haven't produced more than a dozen or so worthwhile critics in the history of newspapers. His point seems to be that professional critics are worse than amateurs because as "experts" they are inherently out-of-touch with the regular folk who like movies. yes, yes, it's tiresome. More about his argument here at my blog.

Everyone seems to agree that the old print-newspaper business model is broken. But no one can figure out a new, Internet business model that will generate enough money to pay critics and reporters and editors to carry on the vital business of digging up the news and leading the cultural discussion. The Internet is free and some of the most successful sites, political and cultural and otherwise (including ArtsJournal.com), are based on their ability to link to extant newspaper and magazine sites cost-free. When some of those sites have attempted to charge readers for content, their traffic drops precipitously (remember "Times Select," the New York Times's failed attempt to get readers to pay to read their columnists and such?).

But some day soon someone will suddenly and unexpectedly figure out a way to make the Internet pay. As Frank Rich points out today, nobody thought pay-per-view television would work, until it did. Maybe advertisers will rally around some aggregated platform of Internet publications and blogs. Maybe the public radio and television model will gain traction, with loyal readers willing to pay for the privilege of high-level coverage.

As a retiree, I can afford to observe these developments with detached fascination (at least as long as the Times sustains its pension fund). There will be news and there will be arts journalism and criticism. But what form it will take is pretty exciting to contemplate, however grim the situation may seem now. And when the solution does come, everyone will accept it and wonder why they didn't foresee the advent of something so simple and obvious sooner.

A new large-version Kindle e-reader is rumored to be launching this week. Some in the newspaper industry think this will help them. The New York Times is said to be offering a new e-subscription for the device. But:

What are the publishers really proposing? Taking a product available for free on the Web, dumbing it down, and then charging for it. News without links, comments, or video, in black and white, updated once a day? In an age when print media ought to be learning to do more with less, they are instead fixated on getting customers to pay more for less.

It took newspapers a while to figure out that allowing reader comments on stories was a good idea. Problem was/is: most reader comment sections in newspapers are fetid pools incubating the lowest common denominator. Now news organizations tout their "interactivity" because readers can comment. Problem is, most haven't figured out ways to curate comments in ways that make meaningful contributions to the story. And interactivity doesn't mean the up/down kinds of conversations newspapers think they are. Here's a story about newspaper comments framed in the traditional newspaper mindset:

Comments are a tricky proposition for newspapers, which must be vigilant about their abuses. But as they struggle to hold on to readers and find ways to engage them, online comments have become a bright spot, helping them build new, stronger relationships with users.

The added comments keep readers on the Web sites longer and create engaged communities, which can turn into more money-making opportunities through increased advertising, said Steve Semelsberger, senior vice president and general manager of Pluck, the company that provides social-media tools to 250 newspapers, including USA Today, the Washington Post and The Chronicle.

He said comments can boost page views by 5 to 15 percent and can serve as a starting point for social-media interaction on a news site.

"Comments are both an offensive and defense move," he said. "You have to do it to be a relevant conversational Web property, and you can also make money off it."