Recently by Douglas McLennan

The ailing news magazine is buying out 111 staffers, including several senior critics. David Gates, who wrote about music and books; movie critic David Ansen; and Cathleen McGuigan, the magazine's senior arts editor, covering architecture, books, theater, design and culture; all are gone.

There was a time when the news magazines at least made a stab at covering culture. But that has dwindled in recent decades.

This is the second major buyout at Newsweek in six years. The first one claimed senior staffers like Lucy Howard, art critic [and NAJP member] Peter Plagens, long time religion editor Ken Woodward, Jean Seligman, Joan Engels, and David Alpern.

Plagens still writes occasionally for the magazine as a contributing editor, and David Ansen (the magazine's senior--and much-loved--movie critic since 1977) and Cathleen McGuigan may also continue to contribute after they cease to be staffers this year.

The Economist's new Intelligent Life magazine has a go at making a list of the best critics working today. It's an idiosyncratic compilation, at the very least. To start - there are 10 book critics named, but only one dance critic (The NYT's Alastair Macaulay), two visual art critics (Peter Schjeldahl and TJ Clark), one TV critic (Nancy Banks-Smith) and two classical music critics (the New Yorker's Alex Ross and the Evening Standard's Norman Lebrecht). Lebrecht doesn't even consider himself a critic, and he doesn't, for the most part, review concerts. 

My first reaction was to quickly compile a but-what-about list of my own that proves the parochialism of The Economist's 24 writers and editors who voted in this exercise. But in making my list, I realized that these things tend to say a lot more about those making the lists than they do about any definitive standard or ranking.

Next thought. How many critics in any field actually belong on a list of bests? My list of best American classical music critics starts to fall off after nine. But that depends on the criteria. There are probably another dozen who are good serious voices - a solid second tier. After that it's not so pretty.

But then when you add in people writing about classical music on the internet, the list suddenly swells. Sure there's a lot of crap on the web, but there's also lots of interesting writing too.

I tend to think that the vitality of an art form is reflected in the quality of the discourse around it. One of the bad things in American culture in the 80s and 90s was the narrowing of public discourse about the arts. When people stop arguing about the quality of the ideas, those ideas get less relevant.

So how many great critics does it take to make a discourse?

Matt Wolf in The Guardian suggests some other flaws in the list, and makes the inescapable observation:

 Fun though it is as a critic to rifle through these assessments, one has to wonder whether the general public gives a fig for such rankings or whether they don't represent the last gasp of a critical enterprise that has been all but submerged in a welter of PR puffery. What becomes particularly apparent from Intelligent Life's article is the number of magazines that no longer regularly review the live arts, such as Time and Newsweek, whose theatre critics (Ted Kalem and Jack Kroll, respectively) were major names in their own right when I was growing up. I myself spent 21 very happy years reviewing and reporting on theatre out of London for the Associated Press, but when I moved on, so - unsurprisingly - did that job.

Roger Catlin figured his job might be safe after his newspaper was sold by the "faceless" Tribune Co. But no:

New owner or not, it is part of the same sad march to downsizing we've been on for a decade. We've seen it before: with the best people (and those still marketable enough to get jobs elsewhere) taking off, leaving behind a lesser paper, empty desks, and the rest of us slugs to work even more to take up their duties.

I shouldn't take this personally.

Among TV writers with whom I'm associated, after all, this is not an uncommon thing. After decades of service and knowledge more vast than most network executives, they are laid off, outright fired or sent back to the tiny town bureaus where they began their careers - there are, after all, fires and car thefts to cover.

David Menconi sends along this item from Gawker:

In the March issue of Maxim, writer David Peisner reviews the new Black Crowes album, "Warpaint." The verdict: Ehhh. Two and a half stars, out of five. The problem: Maxim didn't listen to the album.

The problem is, the band hadn't made review copies available. So how had Peisner done the review? After contacting the magazine, the band says they got the following email back:

'Of course, we always prefer to (sic) hearing music, but sometimes there are big albums that we don't want to ignore that aren't available to hear, which is what happened with the Crowes. It's either an educated guess preview or no coverage at all, so in this case we chose the former.'"

The band, of course wonders about the credibility of this kind of "review"...

 

UPDATED: Maxim today posted a response to the band:

Maxim editorial director James Kaminsky responded Tuesday with this statement: "It is Maxim's editorial policy to assign star ratings only to those albums that have been heard in their entirety. Unfortunately, that policy was not followed in the March 2008 issue of our magazine and we apologize to our readers."

A spokeswoman for the magazine contacted by The Associated Press declined to say whether the writer would face disciplinary action.

Is there anyone not talking about a crisis in the news industry? The New York Times is dumping 100 jobs. The troubled Tribune Company is offloading 400-500 people. And across the country there are reports of slumping advertising and impending layoffs. Now this report in AdAge:

U.S. media employment in December fell to a 15-year low (886,900), slammed by the slumping newspaper industry. But employment in advertising/marketing-services -- agencies and other firms that provide marketing and communications services to marketers -- broke a record in November (769,000). Marketing consulting powered that growth.

So things are pretty bad, and we're working in a dying industry. Nobody's reading newspapers anymore. 

And yet they are. And in record numbers. Look at this report in Editor & Publisher. The online audience is soaring, and here's the growth rate and numbers of unique readers for newspaper websites in January 2008 (with 000's at the end):  

NYTimes.com -- 20,461 -- 45.1%
USATODAY.com -- 12,314 -- 19.4%
washingtonpost.com -- 9,902 -- 14.6%
Wall Street Journal Online -- 6,962 -- 81.4%
LA Times -- 5,715 -- 4.7%

Not only are these huge audiences, but the growth rates continue to be spectacular. By far, more people are reading newspapers than ever before. As just one example, scroll down the list to No. 16, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which has a unique web audience of 2.2 million. The P-I's print circulation, when it was considered healthy in the last century, was somewhere in the low 200,000's.

This is spectacular growth in audience. And yet, as the P-I's print circulation has declined to the mid-100,000s, its newsprint ad revenue has slumped, the paper is losing money, it's not replacing staff, and the owners are riding down its content, managing losses. As the paper's content has degraded, the perception of it in the community is one of declining influence and quality.

The problem, say newspaper industry execs, is that...

The New York Press has a fascinating look at reporting of the Hollywood writers strike by New York Times' movie editor Michael Cieply.

Do the usual rules of journalism apply when celebrities are involved?

The Wall Street Journal is considering adding an expanded culture section:

If given the green light, the culture section would be another move toward Murdoch's stated goal of competing with The New York Times. As Journal managing editor Marcus Brauchli told The Times on Monday: "In the news department here, we believe there is no reason that people should have to go to another news source beyond The Journal to find news of consequence to them in any sphere -- politics, economics, even culture and the arts."

A Spanish mayor proposes paying kids in his town a Euro for each hour they read. A high school exam board in the UK thinks the reason students don't read is that the books aren't fun. So it proposes letting students pick from the reading list of a popular TV book club. And in Philadelphia, there's a program to give away copies of movies because visual image literacy is low.  

"..by its very nature, film tends to elicit a passive attitude in viewers. 'There's far more distance between a reader and a novel, since it takes longer to read and absorb a written story.' Visual media can affect us in a direct, visceral way, which bypasses the intellect and appeals directly to emotions.

Are these stories linked? I'm not sure, but it does seem astonishing to me that in an age in which there is so much art and access to it has never been easier, it's fascinating we still feel the need to bribe people to try it. My head hurts, there's so much to read, see and hear. If there were 20 of me I still couldn't get to all the things I'd love to do. And we need to pay people to read, tart up our reading lists and give away movies?

And while I'm at it, why does so much "education" in the arts seem so evangelical - like the art we're trying to teach you is better than whatever other thing you'd do on your own? Are these attempts at social engineering culture because we want to broaden culture and creativity, or are we stuck on definitions of culture and literacy that are too narrow? I'm no visual art or movie critic, but it seems to me that our visual literacy is higher now than it has ever been.

James Wood has a new book out this week. It's How Fiction Works and the early reviews have focused more on the critic than the book. But then, it's probably not surprising for the critic that everyone seems to love to hate.

Still, here is a guy of enormous talent and influence who decided pretty empahtically that reviewing books what what he wanted to do with his life. From a profile on him in this weekend's Financial Times:

Wood's chief obstacle lay in persuading the paper that had given him the journalism award to let him write about books. The then editor of The Guardian, Peter Preston, responded that, yes, Wood could live a life of borderline dereliction in Brixton punctuated by the odd, finely spun essay for a literary magazine but that, on the whole, he should consider beginning as an apprentice reporter: book reviewing was not a proper occupation.