Recently by Douglas McLennan

UPDATE: The first blogs are beginning to sign up to stream: www.createquity.com, www.artsDC.com, http://gatheringnote www.seattledances. One blogger has already tried to embed the feed in Blogger and got back an error. Anyone familiar with embedding in Blogger? Leave a note in the comments at the end of this post and we'll figure it out.

UPDATE II: There's a fix [ONLY NEEDED FOR BLOGGER - OTHERS USE THE CODE AT THE END OF THIS POST] Rosie Gaynor at SeattleDances found for the Blogger embed:

 <object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" width="400" height="320" id="utv582837"><param name="flashvars" value="autoplay=false&amp;brand=embed&amp;cid=1470782"/><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true"/><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/><param name="movie" value="http://www.ustream.tv/flash/live/1/1470782"/><embed flashvars="autoplay=false&amp;brand=embed&amp;cid=1470782" width="400" height="320" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" id="utv582837" name="utv_n_507251" src="http://www.ustream.tv/flash/live/1/1470782" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" />

</embed></object><a href="http://www.ustream.tv/" style="padding: 2px 0px 4px; width: 400px; background: #ffffff; display: block; color: #000000; font-weight: normal; font-size: 10px; text-decoration: underline; text-align: center;" target="_blank">Video chat rooms at Ustream</a>

This Friday - October 2 from 9AM-1PM PDT - we're holding a first ever National Summit on Arts Journalism at USC Annenberg in Los Angeles. We're presenting ten projects in arts journalism from around America, and each we think has something to say about the future of how we cover the arts. It will be in the auditorium of the journalism school in front of an audience of 200, but it's primarily conceived of as a virtual online event. You can read more about it here.

We need your help.

We'll be streaming the Summit from www.najp.org/summit, where you can go to watch and read about what's happening. And comment and Twitter and chat. But why not host your own Summit on your own blog or website? People can come to your website and see the live webcast and participate in the chat. You'll get visitors to your site, and they'll maybe stick around for a while. The point is - we want as many people as possible to see this, and we don't care where they see it.

But it would also help us out. This Summit is a big ambitious experiment. We're trying to start discussions beyond just a one-time conference in a room somewhere. And there are an awful lot of moving parts. There are so many ways the technology can go wrong. There are bandwidth issues, streaming issues and server issues. There's the equivalent of producing a live TV show at Annenberg. There's coordinating all the social media. And there's trying to design an event that actually has something of substance to say. We don't know if it will all work - part of the fun of this is in trying to invent something new and seeing what works. We're learning a lot. A lot.

One thing I do know. Mobilizing large groups around something always makes it better than what just a few can do. Our big choke point in all this right now is the streaming broadcast. If we do it all through one site at najp.org/summit, it's a big load. If that one site freezes or goes down, no one sees the live webcast (not too worry too much - everything is being recorded and we'll be posting it all on UStream and YouTube in addition to the Summit site). But why not spread the bet around?

So we thought - why not ask arts journalists and artists everywhere if they would help out and post the live webcast in their own blogs? It's as easy as embedding a YouTube video in a blog post. If you want to be ambitious, you can even embed the chat and Twitter feeds as well.

Drop us an email before Thursday night, and we'll even publish a list of who's hosting streams. Then - if there are any technical problems on the official site, viewers can look at the list of other webcasting blogs and tune in there.

We don't know how many people will be tuning in on the day itself. We expect most people will watch after the fact, looking at the archived presentations. But the (free) seats for the live audience at USC sold out in a flash. And we've got a least a dozen live satellite events around the country where groups are gathering to watch and discuss.

So I hope you'll join us by tuning in to watch. And if you can, please consider participating in a little piece of history by hosting the webcast on your own blog or website. There are no bandwidth issues for you in hosting - it's being fed from UStream and they pay the bandwidth charges, like YouTube does.

You can see our Ustream channel here http://www.ustream.tv/channel/a-national-summit-on-arts-journalism and you can pick up the embedding code there as well. Or you can copy the embed code below and paste it into your blog - just the way you would embed a YouTube video. Thanks for the help. See you Friday (I hope).

To embed the webcast window in your blog or website paste in this code:

<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" width="400" height="320" id="utv150969"><param name="flashvars" value="autoplay=false&amp;brand=embed&amp;cid=1470782"/><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true"/><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/><param name="movie" value="http://www.ustream.tv/flash/live/1/1470782"/><embed flashvars="autoplay=false&amp;brand=embed&amp;cid=1470782" width="400" height="320" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" id="utv150969" name="utv_n_233276" src="http://www.ustream.tv/flash/live/1/1470782" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" /></object><a href="http://www.ustream.tv/" style="padding: 2px 0px 4px; width: 400px; background: #ffffff; display: block; color: #000000; font-weight: normal; font-size: 10px; text-decoration: underline; text-align: center;" target="_blank">Live video by Ustream</a>

If you want to embed the chat as well, paste in this code:

<embed width="563" height="266" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" flashvars="channelId=1470782&brandId=1&channel=#a-national-summit-on-arts-jo&server=chat1.ustream.tv" pluginspage="http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer" src="http://www.ustream.tv/flash/irc.swf" allowfullscreen="true" />

And if you want to host the Twitter feed:

<iframe src="http://www.ustream.tv/twitterjs/iframe?prefix=%40artsj09&suffix=Live+at+http%3A%2F%2Fustre.am%2F6aCi" width="549" height="325" frameborder="0" style="border:0px none transparent"scrolling="no"></iframe>

Thanks everyone. Drop us a note at summitinfo@najp.org if you're going to do this and we'll post a list. Or you can write to me directly at mclennan@artsjournal.com (though if I'm a bit slow in answering I hope you'll understand). See you Friday.

When we decided to plan the National Summit on Arts Journalism (October 2, 2009) at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication, I thought we'd get about 40 projects in arts journalism. With a day to go before deadline, we have almost 70 projects submitted, and the variety is amazing. To be inspired by the future of arts journalism, go to the Summit site and read about the projects.

And if you think you have the next great model for doing arts journalism, you've got until midnight Pacific Time Monday to put your project forward. In the next week or so we'll announce who has been asked to present at the Summit and more details of what the day will look like.

I've been meaning to respond to John's thoughtful post in response to my ruminations on the failures of the old models supporting arts journalism and what lies ahead. Short response: I agree with everything John wrote, especially this:

The best critics are complicit with their readers, not snobbishly superior to them. The principal form of blogging on the arts is still the proffering of opinion, sometimes informed, sometimes irresponsible, but opinion (a review or review-ish commentary) nonetheless. People like to write their opinions and other people, depending on the writer, like to read them. Mostly, if you are any kind of informed reader, this has to do with seeking out a countervailing opinion to one you already hold. It's a conversation, even if the reader traditionally could not engage the critic in an electronic conversation, and the critic would not have had the time to respond to all those readers, anyhow.

I sometimes (okay, more than sometimes) forget in all this discussion about the future of arts journalism and the difficulties of the present that I need to keep reiterating my baseline beliefs. I grew up a news junkie. I have sought out and eagerly consumed arts journalism since I was a kid. I believe that a well-articulated critical response to a work of art is art itself and can be intensely inspirational. As a writer of reviews myself I know the rush of that moment when you feel you've cracked the code of understanding and believe you've figured out how to express it. I love reviews. And, like John, I've tended to be hostile to know-nothing editors who fail to appreciate that reviews are the bedrock of good cultural coverage.

Also, let me stipulate now and for evermore that I believe that the knowledgeable, well considered expert critic is a gift. We need to seek out and find those who have a talent for critical thought and the expression of it and elevate them in discussions of art. Double stipulate.

When, in writing about the failures of journalism (and specifically arts journalism) to evolve, I wrote that one of the reasons for this was that "the traditional emphasis on the review as the primary form is suicide,"I should have qualified the statement. What I meant is that far too many newspapers have thrown up rote "reviewing" of the basic local arts institutions rather than thoughtful "criticism" of local culture, and called it a day. The failure to put the arts in larger context or explore beyond the obvious (a basic lack of curiosity?) does a disservice to the arts and to readers.

And where has there been experimentation in evolving the generic review to the next level? The written response can be magnificent, but is it truly perfection of the form? Maybe it is; I'd concede it might be. But shouldn't we be experimenting anyway, given that everything seems to be in flux right now?

As to the point about community arts and the failures of traditional arts journalism to cover some things well, if at all: I do think the resources devoted to dance criticism in this country have been woefully inadequate. Craft and architecture have been given short shrift in the traditional press. Book clubs, choruses, multi-cultural arts and festivals... we never did figure out how to cover them in interesting ways. Perhaps it's not surprising; many of these things don't lend themselves to the kinds of critical coverage we've practiced. But now that tyrannies of space and distribution have been largely rendered irrelevant, there may be opportunities to broaden the kinds of attention we pay. These things don't replace the expert critic, they're additive.

The bottom line is that I believe that there are many good things about traditional arts journalism. I happen to believe that we're not witnessing the death of arts journalism, but are in the middle of the reinvention of it into something that has the potential to be even better. For years many of us have been complaining that the arts haven't been accorded their proper place in American culture. As that culture is being turned on its head and reinvented, I think there's opportunity to reassert the place of art. Arts journalism ought to have a role in it.

Since NAJP closed its doors at Columbia University in 2005, we've struggled to find a way to continue the organization in a significant way. It's been tough. There's been no money to support arts journalism, let alone an organization that's trying to support arts journalism. When we made the rounds of funders as the program was closing at Columbia and in the year after, we tried to make the case that arts journalism as we have known it was undergoing fundamental change. Our position was that arts journalism wasn't going to go away, but that its successful reinvention would require thoughtful attention. Without investment in the next new thing, the new baseline might be the lowest common denominator.

What seemed like hyperbole even two years ago about how radical the changes in our field would be has become fact. Traditional arts journalism is unraveling, and more than half of all staff arts journalism jobs have been lost. Materially, the amount of arts coverage on the pages of the nation's newspapers has noticeably diminished, accelerating in the past six months. There's no NAJP Reporting the Arts III to confirm it, but as the editor of ArtsJournal.com, I can report that in the past two months the drop-off nationwide has become harder and harder to ignore.

At my blog diacritical I wrote earlier this week about some of the reasons I think traditional arts journalism is in decline, so I won't go into it again here. There's no use in sitting around lamenting this. What's coming next? I still believe, as I did when we were out trying to raise money for NAJP, that arts journalism has a bright future; I actually think its best days are ahead.

What will that future be? We want to see if there's the beginning of an answer. So we're helping to organize a one day National Summit on Arts Journalism on October 2 at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. Here's the setup: we want to find ten projects in arts journalism that we hope offer promise as new models for sustainable arts journalism. That's sustainable as in a way that supports imaginative arts coverage and the journalists who make it happen.

Five of the projects will be chosen through an online competition, and anyone can submit (please make sure you read the competition's FAQ before you decide whether you're eligible).

We're not looking for blogs, even if they're very cool blogs, unless they have a way of supporting themselves. There are 300,000 arts blogs out there, according to Technorati, so if you're pitching No. 300,001, it has to be a model that supports you. The point of this exercise is to find a new model, not just a cool blog.

Each of the five projects chosen by competition will get $2,000 and a representative of the project will be flown to Los Angeles to make a ten-minute presentation. The presentations will be streamed and archived for online viewing. We're organizing viewing parties all around the country (if you want to organize one, let me know at summitinfo@najp.org). Then, members of NAJP and alumni of the National Endowment for the Arts' Arts Journalism Institutes will be invited to vote on the best. First prize gets $7,500, second gets $5,000 and third gets $2,500. You can see entries already submitted here. 

Will we find the Next Big Thing out of this? Maybe not. But even if we don't, we'll draw a little attention to some good ideas, give people an idea of different ways journalists are trying to solve the arts journalism problem, and throw a little money at some worthwhile projects. It's a start.

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.

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.

For a day, Israel's Ha'aretz newspaper brought in some replacement journalists to write the news. Some replacement arts journalists:

The idea behind the paper's June 10 special edition was to honor Israel's annual Hebrew Book Week, which opened the same day, by inviting Israeli authors to get away from their forthcoming novels and letting them bear witness to the events of the day.

This wasn't a Sabbath supplement, a chance to balance the news with extra color. This was a near complete replacement of the newspaper itself. Save for the sports section and a few other articles, all the reporters' notebooks were handed over to poets and novelists, both bestselling and up-and-coming. Their articles filled the pages, from the leading headline to the weather report.

And how did it go?

Among those articles were gems like the stock market summary, by author Avri Herling. It went like this: "Everything's okay. Everything's like usual. Yesterday trading ended. Everything's okay. The economists went to their homes, the laundry is drying on the lines, dinners are waiting in place... Dow Jones traded steadily and closed with 8,761 points, Nasdaq added 0.9% to a level of 1,860 points.... The guy from the shakshuka [an Israeli egg-and-tomato dish] shop raised his prices again...." The TV review by Eshkol Nevo opened with these words: "I didn't watch TV yesterday." And the weather report was a poem by Roni Somek, titled "Summer Sonnet." ("Summer is the pencil/that is least sharp/in the seasons' pencil case.") News junkies might call this a postmodern farce, but considering that the stock market won't be soaring anytime soon, and that "hot" is really the only weather forecast there is during Israeli summers, who's to say these articles aren't factual?

Alongside these cute reports were gripping journalistic accounts.

The New York Times publishes another story slapping the "rumor-mongering" of blogs. It uses the example of a recent report on two prominent blogs that claimed that Apple might buy Twitter.

Neither story was true. Not that it mattered to the authors of the posts. They suspected the rumor was groundless when they wrote the items. TechCrunch noted, 133 words into its story, that, "The trouble is we've checked with other sources who claim to know nothing about any Apple negotiations."

But they reported it anyway. "I don't ever want to lose the rawness of blogging," said Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch and the author of the post. (Owen Thomas, the writer of the Gawker post, has since taken a job at NBC and did not want to comment on the record.)

Such news judgment is not unusual among blogs covering tech. For some blogs, rumors are their stock in trade.

There are plenty of examples of bad journalism one could point to in blogs. This seems weak to me. The story was speculative, and it was labeled as such. Jeff Jarvis has a good post on this:

The problem with this tiresome, never-ending alleged war of blogs vs. MSM (Arrington attacks The Times) and MSM vs. blogs (The Times attacks Arrington) - (Mark Glaser scolded me for rising to The Times' bait) - is that it blinds each tribe from learning from the other. Yes, there are standards worth saluting from classical journalism. But there are also new methods and opportunities to be learned online. No one owns journalists or its methods or standards.

Jerry Saltz, the art critic for New York Magazine, has been cultivating a community on Facebook. He's got almost 5000 Friends following his posts,and each of his updates gets dozens, even hundreds of comments. Saltz doesn't blog, and says he has found that the key to Facebook success is use it as a discussion starter. His style is to post a provocative idea or question in a short paragraph or two, then watch who picks up the threads.

So last week he returned to a theme he's hammered on in recent years: why do so many big New York museums have so few women artists showing in their galleries? He did a count at the Museum of Modern Art and reported back. His Facebook community launched hundreds of comments in response, and finally officials at MoMA  felt they had to respond. That's when it got freally interesting. I've posted more on the story at my blog diacritical.

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.