Recently by Donald Munro

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.

Now for a bit of good news. In the midst of the terrible headlines about laid-off critics, slashed arts coverage and cutbacks in music education in the public schools, I figured I'd pass on some positive tidings for a change. I was excited recently to write a different kind of arts story: a piece about a fantastic new performing arts center opening smack in the middle of California's Central Valley.

And here's the most amazing thing: It belongs to a high school.

The Clovis Unified School District puts a premium on the arts, and officials here have planned for years on how to provide superior facilities for its students. After voters passed two bond measures, the district budgeted $17.5 million to build an arts center that houses a 750-seat concert hall and a 150-seat black box theater.

Back in the Dark Ages, before online reviews and theater blogs, reader comments in reaction to a critical review of a local theater production would usually trickle in to the newsroom: perhaps a few phone calls, a handful of irate emails, several articulate and well-composed letters delivered via snail mail. Of these responses, we'd pick a representative few and run them in print after verifying names, checking for inaccuracies and personal attacks, etc.

Man, those days are long gone.

Now the comments can start literally minutes after I've posted a review on my Fresno Bee blog. If my review of a production is highly critical -- or if I am underwhelmed by a show put on by a local community theater that normally produces a high standard of work -- those comments can come in a flood. As the blog "owner," I'm responsible for approving those comments one by one. And I've been learning that it isn't as easy as it sounds.

In honor of the Oscars, the Atlantic Monthly has some fun reprinting a 1948 essay by Raymond Chandler about the Academy Awards voting process. My favorite part is when Chandler points out that many Academy voters don't actually see the nominated films and rely on studio marketing campaigns for Oscar buzz. He wrote:

All this is good democracy of a sort. We elect Congressmen and Presidents in much the same way, so why not actors, cameramen, writers, and all rest of the people who have to do with the making of pictures? If we permit noise, ballyhoo, and theater to influence us in the selection of the people who are to run the country, why should we object to the same methods in the selection of meritorious achievements in the film business? If we can huckster a President into the White House, why cannot we huckster the agonized Miss Joan Crawford or the hard and beautiful Miss Olivia de Havilland into possession of one of those golden statuettes which express the motion picture industry's frantic desire to kiss itself on the back of its neck?

Sixty years later, Chandler is as relevant as ever.

When it comes to covering live events, print arts journalists often use blogs to either 1) dump stuff from their notebooks online that wouldn't otherwise get into print; or 2) write in the same style and format as the print edition.

When it comes to covering live award shows such as the Grammys and Oscars, however, the best thing is to think past the old mindset of the next-day wire-story-style wrap up. Use the advantages of the blog to create an immediacy and connection with your audience. We have a tiny staff at The Fresno Bee, but we manage to cover live awards shows that draws in readers in ways that a next-day wire story never could. Our pop music writer, Mike Osegueda, is really good at this with the Grammys. I did it last year with the Oscars as well, and we're already running promo house ads to join "Donald's Oscar Blog Party."

Here are some tips for making awards-show blogs work:

The Internet might be the all-powerful Beast in newsrooms these days, but there's still a stigma attached to a story being labeled as "Web-only." It's as if an editor came by and decreed, "OK, this is sort of important, but not important enough both to print in the newspaper AND put on our Web site." I think this is particularly the case for cultural stories, especially reviews and commentary. Stuff gets buried really easily online. On many newspaper Web sites, it's hard enough to find  the top news story from yesterday, much less a theater review of a show that opened two weeks ago.

But at The Fresno Bee, where I am a cultural jack-of-all trades (I cover movies, theater, visual arts, classical music, you name it), I've been experimenting with ways to make our Web-only (and Web-expanded) coverage not only enhance the print product but create an online following of its own.

Donald Munro covers film, theater and the arts for The Fresno Bee. He's worked there since 1990. Not only does he frequently make it to San Francisco and Los Angeles to sample those cities' cultural highlights, he's also one of those guys who genuinely likes community theater. (Even when he sees "Beauty and the Beast" three times in one year.) He has a bachelor's degree from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and a master's degree from Columbia University. In 2002-03 he was a mid-career fellow with the National Arts Journalism Program.