Recently by Douglas McLennan

As the Cleveland situation asserted, no critic has a "right" to a compensated opinion. We serve at the pleasure of our employers. And yet we're only worth reading when we push our luck and ourselves, and remember that without a sense of freedom, coupled with a sense that we cannot squander it, we're just filler. As David Mamet said to a gathering of theater critics back in 1978: If you are not "striving to improve and to write informedly and morally and to a purpose, you are a hack and a plaything of your advertisers." 

The advertisers are fewer now. Times are not easy. But a critic must write as if he has everything and nothing to lose, just as a filmmaker or an artistic director or a music director should have no choice but to aim high and dig deeply and damn all the rest of it. Otherwise, it's steady as she goes and one more paycheck (if you're fortunate) gratefully received, and that simply is not good enough.

It's an interesting piece and a meditation on what it means to be a critic. 

Approached the wrong way criticism is an inherently arrogant and narcissistic pursuit, yet what I'm left with, increasingly, is how humbling it is. It's hard to get a review right for yourself, let alone for anyone reading it later. It's even harder to be an artist worth writing and reading about, because so much conspires against even an inspired artist's bravest efforts.

I've been thinking about John's castle-building and wondering it there's another way of approaching it. Instead of building the solution first (the publication vehicle) perhaps the place to start is to ask what is missing now in arts journalism? (yes - the easy obvious answer is a way to pay journalists) But maybe the difficulty of figuring out what the castle should be and how it could be supported would be easier if we were more clear about what the need is. It (whatever "it" is) won't be supportable if there isn't a market for it.

I'd offer two things to start:

1. 1. Reporting on the arts. To me, the thing that seems to have suffered most as traditional publications have shed arts journalism is knowledgeable reporting on the arts. There are major American cities where there is little or no arts reporting. And the local reporting that does see print is often feeble. (this vs. this.) But I wonder - arts reporting was always a hard sell in the traditional press. Is that because it didn't have readership or because many editors thought it was too niche for a general audience? If so, in a niche economy maybe it does better?
   
   
2. 2. Good ways of sorting through vast amounts of chatter and information and finding the "good stuff." I don't just mean key-word search alerts or new roundups or crowd-sourced story votes. I mean quality writing, provocative ideas, engaged debate, insightful reviews. There's plenty of all of this, but sorting through it to get there is onerous.

Is there a lack of reviews? Certainly not in terms of quantity. Quality sure, but how do you offer quality across a broad enough range of work that finds a large enough audience to support it?

Wow. Just wow.

I'm referring to Peter's rant about the lack of NAJPer discussion about John's Castles in the Sky post below and his subsequent Castle-building, step two. I must admit, I saw John's original post and sighed with a kind of Groundhog Day feeling. Not because it's a futile topic. Not because it's a bad topic. Not even because it's not a really worthwhile topic. But this is a conversation I've watched and participated in hundreds and hundreds of times in the past few years. Hundreds. Really. I've approached foundations and philanthropists looking for money. I've helped write some business plans, even.

That this is a well-tread topic isn't a reason not to have the conversation. No, my deja-Bill Murray reaction was because the part of the conversation John started is the easy part. Sure a publication. Sure a philanthropist. We can spend a ton of time talking about what the publication might look like. Whether it's online or print. That it will pay arts journalists. That it covers the arts in meaningful ways. Check, check and check. And then? Of course it comes down to money.

And yet, it doesn't really.

Is there anymore such a thing as a national culture in this country? Over at the Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf posits that there is, and further, that New York sets what that culture is to a degree that stunts the rest of the country:

New York City's role on the American scene isn't unhealthy merely because it attracts creative, ambitious people with its dynamism, or because its residents have a healthy ego about the relative merits of their city. The problem is that along with those inevitable traits of great cities, Manhattan and certain of its surrounding boroughs happen to dominate American media, finance, and letters so thoroughly that even the most impressive achievements of other cities are routinely ignored while New Yorkers talk about local matters of comparatively smaller consequence, either tempting or forcing the whole nation to eavesdrop on their chatter depending on the day.

In Houston, Phoenix, Dallas, San Diego, and San Antonio, all among the top ten most populous cities in the United States, the smallest with well over a million residents, the average person has watched countless hours of television set in various New York City apartments, and perhaps never seen their own city portrayed in a sitcom. The executives read The Wall Street Journal far more carefully than the local newspaper, the aspiring writers dream of getting a short story published in The New Yorker, the local Starbucks sells The New York Times, the romantics watch Breakfast at Tiffany's on AMC at six month intervals, and every New Years Eve people gather around to watch a tape-delayed broadcast of a ball that dropped on Times Square hours earlier.

New York is a great city, but in America today, someone who seeks out the best television or novels or magazine writing or art or newspaper reporting is confronted with an even greater degree of NYC centric stuff than is justified. The city is a legitimate giant, yet its shadow somehow reaches much farther than it should. It thereby deprives other cities of the light they need to grow half as tall.

At the risk of spinning a cliche, this seems like such a New York point of view: New York is the only place that matters. Of course people outside New York read the Times and watch the TV shows set in New York and follow New York media. Duh. Does that really mean that New York dictates national culture? Perhaps we can concede that culture from New York plays an outsized role by virtue of the density of cultural activity collected there. But is there really a New York cultural identity that still dominates the rest of the country?

Do we think of American Ballet Theatre as being particularly New York in character, aside from the fact it is located there? Do we think of CNN as having a particularly Atlanta slant on the world? Leave aside that most of the creative energy working in New York comes from outside New York. The idea that a place like NY imprints a geographically-dominant identity is largely past I think.

David Schaengold has a different complaint:

It seems inevitable that as a country we will have national newspapers and national magazines and places that loom large in the national consciousness. Isn't in much better that these national institutions retain some local savor? Isn't the New Yorker, in part because it sometimes seems like a local, even a parochial journal, superior to the tranquil no-whereness of Time magazine? Isn't the inimitable New Yorkiness of the Times, what Fr. Richard Neuhaus used to call "our parish newsletter," one its few redeeming features, especially compared with the truly national and placeless USA Today?

That seems about right. Friedersdorf's premise is only interesting if you buy the idea that New York not only has more of everything, but also sets the agenda for culture in America. That was certainly true at one time. Is it today? In this age of access to everything everywhere, I'm not so sure.

Guardian theatre critic Michael Billington on being a print critic in the digital age:

while print still matters, technology has democratised debate. Since I've always argued that a review is not a Mosaic tablet but a way of starting a discussion, I welcome that. But I'd like to nail one myth that is rapidly gaining ground: that, in the pre-internet era, newspaper readers were simply passive consumers. I seem to have spent much of the last 40 years responding to letters which challenged my views, nailed my inaccuracies or even, on one occasion, suggested I be horsewhipped. And, when I once rashly suggested that Shaw was second only to Shakespeare as an English language dramatist, I unleashed a debate in the correspondence columns that went on for weeks. What's changed is that any opinion is now open to instant rebuttal. But don't kid yourself that, even in the days of snail-mail, criticism was a cushy number in which our knuckles went unrapped.

The Stage survey also raises the question of why people still savour the print-merchants. I'd argue it's not just for what we say: it's for how we say it. Opinions are two a penny. What's damnably difficult is to write well; and, for me, there is still a personal challenge every night in trying to set down my views in 45 minutes with any degree of lucidity. And, when I dip into the critics of the past, it is less fortheir views on the event than for their style. Hazlitt's reportorial vividness, Shaw's polemical vigour, Tynan's voluptuous ease: these are the things that matter even when they are writing about long-dead plays. And today, even though I'm not a Daily Mail reader, I always turn to Quentin Letts in Theatre Record because he knows how to write.

On the web, Google gives the words "too big to fail" new meaning. The company's dominance in directing the flow of information and people around the web is so big that if Google decides to block information, then there's not much you can do about it. And once you get caught up in its gears, it's difficult to extricate yourself without getting ground up in the process.

I run a small news site called ArtsJournal. Every day we look at a thousand or so arts stories from all over the world and aggregate the best of them into a daily digest of arts and culture news. I started the site in 1999, and was one of the first wave of aggregator sites of this sort. In those days I had to hand-code all the pages and paste each story into the html. No content management systems then.

Over the past 10 years we've become the leading digest of arts news, and cultural leaders and arts journalists all over the world use us to keep up with cultural news. We're also home to almost 60 arts bloggers, including some of the leading arts journalists on the web. And from time to time we host conversations about issues of the day. We don't get Andrew Sullivan numbers or Boing Boing numbers or Gizmodo or Mashable or Gawker numbers, but we reach a very specific niche. What Romenesko does for journalism news, we do for arts news.

What Happened

Monday night about 10:30 I had just sent out our daily newsletters when I got an email from a professor at the University of Oregon that he was getting blocked trying to get to ArtsJournal and that a notice had come up saying ArtsJournal was a "Reported Attack Page." The notice is red and scary-looking. We had been hacked.

Now, I'm a journalist, not a techie, but I have picked up enough over the years doing ArtsJournal that I can usually figure out the technical side. I followed the directions Google pointed to for how to scrub a site of malware. I made sure the software powering the site was latest-issue, and went through all the pages Google had flagged as being infected. When I couldn't see any of the code they referenced, I went back to the Google Webmaster page and submitted the site for review. A few hours later Google reported that we were still infected.

I redoubled my efforts and discovered that

Some newspaper websites are so driven by clicks that stories go up on the front page for a few minutes and quickly get put back in cold storage if they don't draw mice. A/B testing is increasingly common in the web world, and reader usage data more and more drives editorial decisions at many publications. So how many newspapers would put a theatre review on their front page, even if for a few minutes? Okay, this big picture at the top of the page and its accompanying review were only up for a few minutes Tuesday night, but arts stories have frequently been making the Times's front. And the arts bug near the top of the second-from-the-left column is regular play.

Charles Isherwood takes on the issue of critics who have different reactions to a show than the audiences around them. He calls it the "odd-man-out syndrome".

Does the critic have a responsibility to include any reference to the audience's response, if it appears to be markedly different from his own? The pearl-clutching answer from reviewers who favor the ivory-tower approach would be certainly not. The critic's job is not, after all, to poll the opinions of Row G and report the median response. It is to offer his or her own perspective, hopefully informed by expertise, knowledge and taste.

But tastes range widely, and a thoughtful critic knows there is some gray area here that demands consideration. What if you happen to be a classical music writer with a wholesale aversion to Mozart? Because responses to artworks are so personal, a responsible critic must acknowledge that idiosyncratic predilections may play into his or her responses to a show, and must be careful to separate considered aesthetic judgments from plain old personal prejudice. (Or at least admit to plain old prejudice; "I hate farce," my guest informed me before the curtain went up.)

The entertainment industry is lining up against plans to create a futures market on movie box office grosses. The scheme would establish a market where investors could bet on how much money movies take in at the box office.

A week after expressing its opposition against the launch of two new movie futures exchanges, the Motion Picture Assn. of America has assembled a coalition of entertainment industry representatives to urge the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to delay its approval of the ventures.

Meanwhile, researchers at HP Labs report that they have been monitoring Twitter comments about movies and can predict box office sales with 90+ percent accuracy. They...

started by monitoring movie mentions in 2.9 million tweets from 1.2 million users over three months. These included 24 movies in all, ranging from Avatar to Twilight: New Moon.

Then they took two different approaches, dealing with two very different performance metrics: the first weekend performance, which is largely built on buzz and the second weekend performance, which is largely built whether people actually like the movie.

To predict first weekend performance, they built a computer model, which factored in two variables: the rate of tweets around the release date and the number of theaters its released in. Lo and behold, that model was 97.3% accurate in predicting opening weekend box office. By contrast, the Hollywood Stock Exchange, which has been the gold standard for opening box-office predictions, had a 96.5% accuracy.

Meanwhile, to predict second-weekend performance, the authors created a ratio of positive tweets to negative ones. Then they blended that with the Tweet rate metric in another prediction algorithm. This time, the method was 94% accurate.

Do box office grosses equal popularity? Not quality, surely. What, then? America is obsessed with movie box office grosses, even though those numbers are considered bogus. By Saturday night, stories about weekend box office numbers are already washing over the web.

Steve Buttry, one of the more interesting thinkers in re-imagining journalism, writes to send word of a real live arts journalism job at a new online publication launching in Washington DC. He says: "We're planning on a strong A&E staff and are looking for the right person to lead our A&E effort."

Until recently Buttry was a top editor at the Cedar Rapids Gazette in Iowa. His work was featured in last fall's Arts Journalism Summit at USC. His new effort is a startup and features some impressive backers:

It's a new digital startup (new enough that we don't have a name yet) that will be launching this year, covering local news in the Washington metro area.

Jim Brady, former executive editor of washingtonpost.com, is leading this operation for Allbritton Communications, owner of Politico and several television stations, including WJLA and News Channel 8 in Washington. Jim is a leader and pioneer of digital journalism and I am delighted and honored that he has invited me to join this effort. My staff, colleagues and I will work to turn some of the ideas I presented here, especially in my Complete Community Connection and mobile-first strategy posts, into real, thriving business practices.

Also involved is Erik Wemple.

Wemple comes to Allbritton after eight years as editor of Washington City Paper...

Said Wemple: "I am greatly honored to have this opportunity in front of me. We're talking about a massive investment in local newsgathering, plus an amazing assemblage of Web talent. Our goal will be to deliver a product that lives up to the company's commitment."

Allbritton Communications Company operates eight television stations in seven broadcast markets, including Alabama, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Virginia and Washington, DC.  Allbritton Communications also owns and operates the political newspaper and website POLITICO and POLITICO.com.

For more information, contact Erik at ewempleATgmail.com.