 Let me begin by introducing our speakers. Bill Marks is the editor of ArtsFuse, an online magazine that covers the arts in New England. And he's also the editor of the World Book Page about international literature for the BBC program, The World. In 2002, Bill created and edited the WBUR online arts, a cultural web scene that won an award for online journalism in 2004. And in 2005, Bill's weekly column on the website was a finalist for the online journalism award for online commentary. He's written about books and theater for the Boston Globe and the Boston Phoenix and a number of national publications. He currently teaches a class at Boston University on American Arts Criticism that follows the evolution of reviewing from the 19th century until today. My hope is that we'll hear a bit from Bill about that interest in essentially the continuities across media and across cultures. I'd also like to welcome some of Bill's students who have attended this session. I'm glad to see you here. I hope this won't be the only time you appear at a communications forum event. If you're interested in signing up for our web notifications, for our email notifications, I encourage you to do so by signing up on our website. We never use that email list for anything except announcements about the forum, so you won't be inundated with the irrelevant emails. Our second speaker, Doug MacLennan, is the founder and editor of artsjournal.com, a leading aggregator of arts journalism on the internet. Before starting Arts Journal, Doug was arts columnist and music critic for the Seattle Post Intelligencer. He earned his master's degree in music from the Juilliard School in New York and was named one of the 100 outstanding graduates of the Juilliard School for the School Centennial in 2005. Doug has written on the arts for many publications, including work as a music critic in the early days of Salon, and has written also for Newsweek, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal. So both of our speakers have a special claim on our broad topic, and indeed it is a very broad topic, essentially what is happening to what we broadly call arts criticism. Let me start with a brief definition. We can confuse the definition or complicate it or alter it in our discussion. But broadly, what we mean by arts criticism is discourse about art, dance, drama, prose fiction, poetry, discourse about the arts in our culture, and where that discourse is located, where that discourse is migrating. That's our broad topic. So let me begin by asking each of our speakers first to begin with a couple of comments about the way they feel the condition, what they feel about the sort of state or nature of what we're broadly calling arts criticism in the era before the internet. You want to go first? I just want to thank you. You want to talk about what I thought arts criticism was like before the internet? Well, I mean, that's a large question. But essentially, if you take it, let's say, in America from the 19th century on, arts criticism in America played a pivotal role in a number of major newspapers and magazines for helping to define the culture, for helping to send people to or away from various performances of the read books or not to read books. So essentially, it was a form of editorial evaluate of discourse that was found in some of the better newspapers and magazines. Certainly, in the early 19th century, it was a highly corrupt practice. At that point, there were no editorial standards. Someone like Edgar Allan Poe was writing the 1830s and the 1840s. Essentially, when they would send out a book for review, they'd send out a $5 bill in the book, indicating, of course. And $5 was a lot in the 1830s and the 1840s. It was in really in the late 19th century that editorial standards began to be applied to criticism, partly because newspapers and magazines wanted to go for a tone of your audience. In other words, if you were writing about museums, if you were writing about symphony orchestras, then the assumption was that you're going to have critics that would have the expertise, have the knowledge, and would have the ethics to cover them. And you also had the Atlantic Monthly and Harper's and a number of other Tony magazines begin at that time to become extremely popular. So the rules for criticism, the definition of criticism began to be codified then. And I guess I would add to your definition of what arts criticism is by saying, for me, the definition of arts criticism is going to be, is an evaluation with reasons. Meaning that even in the time of Edgar Allen Poe, Poe said a review was an evaluation of something. It was a judgment, but you had to evaluate it by the reasons that were provided by the critic. So in other words, a review from the 19th century until today, and now perhaps that definition is beginning to weaken a bit, the definition was a judgment which was backed up by evaluation and reasons. So if you want to move into the, I could keep moving back in the past, but I would say that essentially if you were to say, what was the old fashioned idea of what a criticism was, obviously it was written, it was in a newspaper and a magazine, it was written by someone perceived to be an expert, a judge, and it was supposed to supply some sort of reasoning behind how this judge came to their evaluation. And that began to change, I'd say generally, in the 19, around the turn of the century, the 10s and the 20s, with the oncoming of popular culture. Popular culture came about and there were prescribed ideas of what was a great symphony orchestra, what would they play, what was great music, great painting. But with jazz, with radio, with a lot of other more popular culture films in particular, then those sorts of ideas scrambled the idea of what criticism was supposed to be and tampered with or dealt with that essential idea of evaluation with reason. Have I, do you wish me to go on or not? And I'll move up to the present or I'll move up to the 40s, 50s, 60s, or what would you like? Let's stop for a moment. All right. Lost in a lot of conversation about what, the argument about what we're losing, what we're gaining in terms of arts criticism these days is that we do need to, a lot of us think about a kind of a golden age of arts criticism where the newspapers have full staffs and they have critics and we're talking about this kind of a value to process. The reality is in most of this country though that most newspapers did not have that kind of thing up until about the 1970s. So even cities of the size of Minneapolis or Seattle or Salt Lake City or a lot of the cities in the West, it was very rare for them to have a full critical staff. And that's largely a phenomenon beginning in the late 70s, early 80s. So this shrinking down of arts staffs at newspapers is actually in a way kind of going back to what we had pre-70s. I would sort of agree, I'd agree with that. I would say that you had centralized newspapers. We still have the New York Times, the New Yorker magazine perhaps on the West Coast as well. Their criticism was republished or sent to newspapers around the country. So when someone reviewed New York Theater and you're in Indiana or wherever you were, Alabama, you would often read the reviews of or get knowledge of what was going on in those centers of culture through the critics who wrote for the large newspapers. They're often syndicated and sent around. That's why they didn't need to hire an art staff. Basically, if they needed to plug their art hole, they would have syndicated material from some of the larger newspapers and magazines. So people were aware of what criticism was but by having it sent from some of the larger newspapers and magazines, and they represented an ideal of what criticism should be. And often in practice, that's not what you saw in a lot of newspapers and magazines around the country, but I'm talking about sort of like what critics at their best saw themselves as doing. Right. Wouldn't you also say though that one of the functions that newspapers played at least in the 20th century was a kind of advice to consumers role where some reviews were barely evaluative at all, simply descriptive, in which I'm thinking especially of discourse about film and other forms of popular culture. I guess what I'm saying is that it seems to me that this definition of criticism as an evaluative process describes only a portion of what the sort of popular press in fact would often do. I mean, I'm thinking for example, just of feature stories about actors or about directors or about new projects that a particular theater or dance group were doing. Well, I'm talking about, we're talking about specifically art's criticism of the arts, which to me, you know, I'm gonna argue pretty strongly deals with that evaluative judgment. There are other forms of writing about the arts coverage, such as features, what I would call, you know, puff pieces, you know, writing about educational pieces, someone's coming into town, we're gonna write about this, you know, or whatever artistic figure is coming in. And part of what you saw happening in Doug mentions the 70s and the 80s, part of what happened in the 70s and 80s was an attempt to sort of meld the two discourses together. There was a time, I don't know if you remember Tina, when Tina Brown was the editor of The New Yorker, she said, I don't want reviews. I want what she called feature reviews. In other words, if you reviewed Angels in America and you read the review by John Laher, it's a review, but that includes an interview with Tony Kushner. It includes interviews with the people in the production. It was an attempt to say the review itself, the evaluative act is not as important in and of itself. What we need is that additional material, broad interview material, feature material, which is brought in, which, so what you're saying is that the line between the feature, the reporting, the I was there and I'm gonna tell you what happened, has melded, particularly since the 70s and the 80s, has begun to meld in with what you would call the evaluative function of arts criticism. See, I would really strongly disagree with that. Mostly because, I mean, I think that the whole Tina Brown idea of melding there, that you refer to, is in large part a reaction to what was happening in the popular press, which became more and more thumbs up, thumbs down, right? It was a pure recommendation. We don't want all that other stuff. We wanna be popular. We wanna have that consumer reports type of thing. And if you look back at the last 25 years of criticism in American newspapers, the preponderance of that, the vast majority of that is that kind of consumer reports type of writing. I would say, and I agree with you, but I would just turn the argument out, flip it and simply say that the Tina Brown approach, like the consumer guide approach, essentially is still about thumbs. I mean, I did not read a single Tina Brown feature review that was a negative review or even very mixed. I mean, if I'm gonna interview Tony Kushner, I'm gonna interview all the actors and I'm gonna have all what they say in this review, I'm certainly not gonna pan angels in America. And generally John Lar only, and I just wanna talk about John Lar, but other critics who did that were inevitably positive. In other words, it was thumbs. It was just all the thumb was always up. And the attempt was to provide more education and information in the thumbs up because there was the fear of, I would say the fear of or of the reluctance to deal with the Evaluate of Act, which would challenge the reader to have to deal with the fact that the critic is raising interesting provocative points that are negative or are actually critical of the art that they're reviewing. That's what everyone is sort of afraid of. And that includes the thumbs up and thumbs down because there's no evaluation there. It's only, I love it, I hate it, with no evaluation either why you like something up or why you like something down. Right, but I think that when you bring up the New Yorker, which has maybe three, four theater pieces in a given month, there's a very small number of things that you can choose of. Proportionately a tiny fraction of what you could actually write about. Or if you're NPR and you have just a tiny window of it, they've made a decision at some level that, oh, okay, all this other stuff that we don't like, we're gonna already screen that out. So in a way, yes, it's positive, but it becomes positive because there's a pre-screening that says, oh, we're not interested in this stuff, we're not interested in it. And I would just argue that that, we did not have as strong a pre-screening in like the 19th century or the turn of the century where people were excited, provoked by reading reviews that were evaluated and that could be mixed or that could be somewhat negative. I would say the pre-screening came in with the attempt to create arts pages and to turn arts reviewing into a form of publicity. I mean, not just publicity, but an attempt to say when you turn to our arts pages, you just wanna read good news. I mean, you've got a certain number of leisure dollars you're gonna spend, right? So you wanna spend your leisure dollars this weekend and this is why we want you to read our section because we're just gonna have positive things to say. It's all been pre-screened. All the bad art or all the art we don't think you're worth, we haven't explained to you why we think it's not worth covering. We haven't explained to you why we think that art is not worthy. Just take our word for it, we pre-screened it and we're only gonna give you positive reviews of the things that we think it's worth spending your money on. I'm sorry, I don't mean to become bad. No, no, I welcome it. No, I think though that if you're distinguishing your local paper, they reveled in the bad reviews. I mean, how many movie reviews and pop reviews and all kinds of reviews, there are bad reviews. Those never went away. But when you're talking about, shall I say, sort of high end kind of more thoughtful writing, I think that they did make a conscious choice to do that kind of pre-screening. But that consumer reports type of thing, which is the overwhelming majority of what has been in the arts press for 30 years, never shied away from that negative kind of. Well, I mean, I would argue that when you're talking about like pop music, you're talking about film, now we're talking about again that divide between popular culture and sort of high culture. It's a matter of economics in that case. In other words, you covered a lot of movies because you had the movie ads that were coming into your newspaper or magazine or TV station. So that meant you wanted to cover, since there are all these big Hollywood film production companies that are sending all these, let's say mediocre films out, you don't pre-screen those because they're buying ads in your newspaper and magazine you want to cover them. But that's also a vast majority of audiences. Yeah, no, I agree because there are mass art that there's a vastly larger audience for them. And so you're going to, but you could pre-screen them. One of the implications of what you guys are saying is that not only that there was no golden age, but you sort of set the groundwork for the idea that once we begin to talk about what's happening on the internet, there can be a falling off because you've in a certain sense been so dubious about the idealizing claims for this older form of discourse. But the only thing I would add is that it's important to recognize that it's oversimplified to talk about a split between a so-called high culture and popular culture, but it's not oversimplified to talk about a kind of split in what we might call art's criticism that appears in places like the old defunct partisan review or commentary or the New York review of books as against the kind of, or the poetry magazine as against the kind of writing about arts that we would find in more popular places, even more generalized popular places such even the New Yorker, which probably occupies a kind of middle position between those. And it doesn't seem to me that the kind of discourse we're talking about has declined that much in these what I'll call sort of high culture or literary environments. I mean the poetry magazine is still publishing vituperative reviews by various angry poet critics who are very hostile to their contemporaries and there's a great deal of that kind of thing still going on. I mention that partly because I want to introduce a basic principle that seems important for us to be thinking about as we discuss because we're gonna move now to talking about what's happening on the internet with arts criticism which is what these folks really have something that's important to tell us about, I think. Let's remember that if there is a kind of revolution in quotation marks going on, it's a very, very long revolution. It's really that there clearly is, it is clearly the case that virtually all the elements of what we might associate with print culture is migrating into digital form. But that process is going to take decades, if not centuries. It's not going to happen overnight. There isn't going to be a sudden moment where we wake up in the morning and there's no longer any print discourse and all of the discourse is taking place on the web. And there is also as our speakers I'm sure will be able to illustrate for us some kind of overlap between what goes on in print culture and what goes on on the internet. So the perspective I wanna suggest is a perspective of continuity. That is to say let's accept that big things are happening but let's also recognize that they're not happening in a kind of revolutionary way so that the old is suddenly completely obliterated by new developments, quite the opposite. The new imitates the old, takes its forms from the old, extends itself by modeling itself on its ancestors as before it begins to discover what is unique or special about the new media that are emerging in our own time. And if we keep that continuity principle and perspective in our minds it can help put many of the arguments that we'll be hearing this afternoon in context. Well let's turn, we've talked a bit then about some of the powerful limitations that existed even before the internet on forms of popular or generalized arts criticism. Let's turn now to more specifically what's happening to all these traditional formats for arts discourse because of the internet. How is the internet changing things? What are some of the decisive points that you guys would point to to illustrate the ways in which the emerging digital culture, this impending future that we're all moving into whether we want to or not, how is arts criticism altering and changing? So I wanna build on a couple of things that you've just said. One is that there are things that the traditional press never did very well in terms of covering culture. Never covered dance very well. Never covered community arts very well. I mean there's a whole range of kinds of culture that the traditional press never found a way to either capture, pay attention to, or translate in a kind of interesting way. And what we're finding now, there are 300,000 arts blogs out there right now. 300,000 people who feel like they have something to say. It's not to say that they all do really in fact have something to say, but that there is a desire out there to engage in a kind of conversation. The second thing I wanted to bring up is that you said that it's sort of a gradual thing over a long period. I actually would disagree with that. I seem to be the panel disagreeer here today. I think that we're undergoing a revolution in the larger culture right now. I think that the ways that people are using culture, the ways that people are making culture, the expectations for how they get it, how they use it and how they want to participate it are really radically changing. We're going from an era where it's been essentially a broadcast model where whether I'm a theater or I'm a musician or I'm a journalist, I have something to make. You, the audience, come and see it and then I say goodbye to you and you go off and you do your thing. Now it's a much more interactive kind of thing and because people have access suddenly to the entire world it seems and there are thousands and thousands of choices for how you want to spend your time or what gets your attention, that that conversation is basically changing and what the studies in cultural choice tell us right now from the Kerb Center, Vanderbilt and USC's center for the digital future is that younger people particularly are not going online to find information anymore. They're going online to have community. They're going online to be interactive and to have interactive experience. So they tend to, the studies also say that they tend to trust less those kinds of media that they have interaction with that have closed editorial systems. So in other words, we distrust, they distrust things which are the expert kind of analysis that I'm just telling you this and you do with it what you want. They tend to trust more things in which they can participate in the editorial experience. That's not just to talk about things either. It's in creating things. Recent Pew studies is that something like 89% of everybody under the age of 25 makes art on the internet in some way. They do want to have that interactive experience. So if the culture is changing radically like that, I believe, and we're going back actually not to something that has never happened before, I think this is a continual kind of reinvention that happens every time new technology has happened and we've undergone it many, many times before in history, but it is still fundamentally different. That if that culture is changing and how people are going to approach culture and interact with culture is changing, then the journalism around it necessarily has to change in pretty significant ways. And that means not having that kind of expert from afar kind of association. People want to have, people like expertise still but they also want to have some sort of interaction with it. Well, let me build on a couple of points, one point that David made. I mean, I do think we're in an age of transition and Doug was talking about, everyone is making art and the interest in art. I would say we're also at an age of transition of how we articulate our reactions to and evaluate what art means to us. And in that way, I'm with David in the sense that I think that there needs in this transition, there needs to be some taken from the old and brought into the new. Because as I mentioned before, if I think criticism and I believe it is, it is judgment with evaluation, then the biggest thing I see missing in a lot of going on and writing about the arts is the evaluative act. We have people describing, we have people reporting, we have people emoting, we have people opinionating. They have opinions, but they have no ability apparently to articulate, to react to the art in a way which can communicate to others in a reasonable way why the art made them feel the way they feel, why they value the art. Now to me, and this is one thing we missed in talking about the value of arts criticism, part of what arts criticism has always been about, at least ideally, I agree that it's been a lot of potholes along the way of history, is that we articulate the importance of the arts to us, the value they give us, the value they give our lives in order to communicate that importance, that value to the culture and the society at large. In other words, you can see a great performance, you need to be able to articulate about how you came to your conclusion about why that performance was so great to others, to share it to others, and also simply to make that become part of the culture. It's about articulating. So what we need, the articulation aspect is what we need to sort of transition from the past when there were expectations under sort of editorial guidance that when you opened a review, you would read, ideally, you read a review that not only gave you a judgment, but also evaluated it. That seems to be slipping to me in what's going on in what we're talking about in the 3 million blogs, or it's 3,100 blogs that we have writing about the arts, people who are reacting to the arts, people who are making the arts, but are unable apparently because they really don't have an idea of what reviewing criticism or articulating value is to be able to put that into some sort of language. So I'd say that's part of it, but the point I gave with Doug is that it is a, the interactive part I find the most exciting part of what's happening now, because through the interaction, it seems to me that is where those who can articulate, can train, educate, learn from, those who need or are struggling to, or who want to articulate what the arts mean to them. And that then becomes part of the internet culture, also becomes part of the society, and the general culture. So it's that connection that I see the interaction can bring between those who can articulate, and those who want to, I mean, because I see a great need in a way. I mean, a lot of when I teach at BU, I have a lot of students who, they have reactions, they have opinions, and they actually become interested in the idea, they realize that they have an opinion, and then they begin to realize that they have to learn ways in which to articulate that opinion to give some of the listener or whatever the reasons behind that opinion, in order to share their insight, to make that valid, make that clear to the person who's listening. So to me, the interaction brings about the connection between the professionals and the non-professionals, hopefully in a place where both will feel free to be able to exchange opinions and views and learn from one another. So to me, the top down of this one quickly, I mean, I think the blog is an interesting form, but I must admit, when I look at a lot of blogs, and I'm not saying all blogs, but a lot of blogs are still, they get comments, the comments sit there, right? The comments are sort of badges of honor. Gee, I said something and I got a lot of comments. Where's the community? The critic doesn't talk to the people who are commenting. The critic doesn't try to make them part of the blog by saying, hey, come on and explain more about what you say about this art or that art. Essentially, it's just numbers, right? I wrote a blog in which I got so many reactions, and what really needs to be done in the next step is probably going to be finding ways to be able to bring the blogger together with the people who are already interested. They're responding, right? And use that space to be able to create the, talk about, you know, to create the means of articulation and training of both that need to be done. So I don't see enough interaction in criticism. Let's complicate this argument about interaction a little bit because as you were talking, I was thinking of what I would think of as sort of more traditional forms of activity on the internet that also involve a modicum of interactivity, not the same kind of interactivity that would be involved in the notion that someone would put up a piece of prose fiction and invite his or her readers to write a chapter. To me, a very dubious kind of interactivity actually, but I can certainly, I mean, I've seen texts that have emerged like that, but a more modest kind of interactivity of the sort that occurs all over the place on the internet, maybe even larger in terms of numbers than what you get from blogs. I'm thinking about the way in which traditional media like the New York Times have a presence on the web, and after virtually every article, not just their articles on the arts, there's a reader's forum and there are elaborate commentaries and discourse amongst the reader. That's a form of interactivity that grows out of a very traditional kind of media arrangement, but the Times realizes now that it's online, it has this new option. I think we ought not to be too quick to denigrate or ignore these more modest forms of interactivity, because I think they're quite exciting. Maybe what they do in effect is they invite the readers of the commentary to react and to disagree or to enlarge or to carry the argument in different directions. And I mentioned the Times because of course it's a very important web presence already, but it represents this continuity principle to me, and I think that there are many other examples of this sort of thing on the web. One other example I want to mention that I find actually very inspiring because of course one might think of poetry as the oldest art since it began before print, before language, before writing actually, people were reciting poetry in the era before the alphabet. And yet one might make an argument for the idea that the net is reinvigorating certain access to poetry in ways that have never been possible before, a kind of marriage of the old and new that I find very inspiring. And my example is the wonderful monthly discussion on Slate run by the former poet laureate Robert Pinsky. Every week in Slate, Pinsky as the poetry editor publishes a poem by a contemporary poet. And in three of the four weeks, it's just that poem and readers are encouraged to comment on it. But in the fourth week, and in fact every poem that's published in Slate is then followed by a very elaborate sort of discourse about the poem by a community of poetry lovers. But every fourth week, Pinsky publishes a poem from the past that's out of copyright. Poems by Sir Walter Rawley, by Shakespeare, by Sir Thomas Wyatt, by lesser known poets as well. Writes a brief introduction and then encourages people to discuss the poem. Those are among the most interesting forms of discourse about poetry that I think I've ever read. And one of the reasons for it is an astonishing number of practicing poets take part in those discussions. This is simply one example. And those of you who don't know about this, even if you have only a modicum of interest in poetry, you might take a look at these monthly sessions. They're all archived on the Slate site because they seem to me to represent an immense enlargement of what we might think of as traditional forms of discourse about poetry. Again, a kind of partly a continuity argument. So I would again qualify what you guys are saying, even though I don't actually, in any way, disagree with the basic thrust of your argument. See, I think human nature doesn't change. I think the reason that we have, you know, the reason, we have all of these, all of this vocabulary that tells us, you know, in media, this story is more important than that story. Pay attention to this, pay attention to that. You know, if something's on A1 in an important newspaper, we know it means something. If it's on page 22 and, you know, we know it means something else. We have that in spades on the internet. There are all sorts of ways, but it's a different kind of vocabulary. It's a very strongly articulated vocabulary, and it's one in which you actually have to take an awful lot of labor to learn. You can't just make the switch overnight. So that's part one. Part two is that I think that the values of traditional journalism, of traditional arts journalism and criticism and all of that, we have developed them over an awfully long time. They don't suddenly just disappear because we have, you know, we have a shiny new tool to play with. They want them to disappear. That's right, and they will be re-articulated and re-imagined in some very interesting ways. But I think that those values will continue to re-exert themselves as we go along. I mean, I agree. I guess I'm just a, you know, maybe I'm more impatient to the extent that, you know, I see a generation of students now that they really don't know what a review is. In other words, if you're not given that sort of exposure to a review, you know, in other words, you don't, you know, the typical newspaper review or whatever and you would get it in your hometown paper and at least know what a review was. If you see what passes for reviews on YouTube or a number of other, you know, a three minute video, video sometimes, you know, videotape rant, then the idea is that they don't know that it's what evaluation with reasoning means. They really don't. I do think I'm not, I am optimistic ultimately, but I think the struggle, so I guess your transition, I think I'm a bit of a revolutionary in that way. I do think that these values that you're talking about are not just gonna sort of naturally sort of pop up. I think, you know, people who work on the web and write about the arts on the web have to actively put, you know, put those values forward to make sure that they're not contributing to people who really no longer know what a review is. The definition of a review becomes like what they saw in Siskel and Ebert. I mean, that essentially is what, really, it's what for a lot of younger people, that's what a review is. You have a movie clip and you say whether you like it or you don't like it and then you have another movie clip and you say thumbs up or thumbs down. They see it purely as a consumer guide sort of option and not about as evaluated reasoning. And so, and if they're not exposed to it, if they're not talked to about it, if they're not shown what a review can do and the power of it and how it can be illuminating, then, you know, I mean, I'm with you but I'm just saying that I'm, we need more people to assert those values to make sure that the generations can continue that transition. What you say makes sense, Bill, and I'm sure you're right about that. But as you were talking, I was thinking, for example, about the, let's call them reviews and quotes that you see on Amazon, right? The fact of the matter is, if you read through the responses to particular texts on Amazon, it's very easy. No reader could possibly fail to recognize which responses are actually really substantial, respond to the content of the text in a way that you find persuasive and as against those that are just puff pieces or so totally subjective that they're useless to someone else. And I think that some of that is good, so there's some element of kind of self-education happens because as people get more and more practice with blogs and with responses of the sort you find on Amazon after particular comments on particular books on Amazon, you begin, and so many other places on the web where things like that occur, you begin to develop your own sort of critical standards because you're forced to. You know that you can't believe everything that you read and some of what you read seems so silly that you immediately dismiss it. So while I agree, Bill, and I would like all students to study either in my class or in Bill's class so we could teach them how there are actually some objective standards that one could use to begin to talk about what constitutes an effective or powerful forms of art, I think it's also possible that people begin to sort of educate themselves through a process like that. I agree, I will say, but just about Amazon, just because we haven't even talked about it, we touched on the issue of independence or ethics, and that's, I know a number of highly articulate people who have written reviews of books that are competing with their book, and they have put it under another name, and they have deep sixed very articulately, very thoughtfully, the book that essentially may be taking some of the market share away from their book. So I agree, but I wanna say that without, as we are back in pose Wild West days here, and you cannot necessarily, as articulate as a review may be, it can also be compromised, corrupt, and the web is one way in which you can use perhaps a modicum of intelligence to make your point in a very, let's say, underhanded or devious way. And so that's the problem without any sort of editorial control. Do both of you guys feel that the opportunity for this kind of abuse is more common on the web than earlier? And one reason I mentioned that is to reinforce something Dill said at the very beginning. We tend to idealize the past, but the fact of the matter is that the more we learn about the history of the reception of literature, the more we discover that this kind of corruption was endemic. Many of you may not know this. It's sort of an embarrassment to people who love James Joyce, but James Joyce interfered with and took the reception of his books in all kinds of ways. He actually wrote reviews of his books under other names. He had books published under the names of friends of his that mostly were his work. He tried his best. This great, this pivotal figure of modernism, no doubt a very great writer, was very concerned with his reputation and had no conscience at all about trying to sort of enhance his reputation in various published forms. And of course, this is not a unique situation at all. There are hundreds of stories about this. Some of them about our most admired and respected writers and artists from the past. And I'll give you a quick one. The only that, you know, I'm a big fan of Edgar Allen Poe. I think he was one of the greatest American critic of the 19th century, but he routinely reviewed his own works anonymously. In fact, Poe being Poe, he once reviewed one of his own works anonymously and panned it. He also did a wonderful review of Nathaniel Hawthorne in which after saying how great Hawthorne was, he then had a chunk of a short story saying, I think Hawthorne, for all of his greatness plagiarized from this story in order to make some of his stories so good. And of course, the story that he said Nathaniel Hawthorne plagiarized from was by Edgar Allen Poe, William Wilson. So I don't really think, in terms of just the Wild West ethics of it, I think that online is not all that different than what Poe had to deal with in the 1830s, 1840s, where reviews were anonymous, where in fact, I think it's actually a little better because I haven't heard of anyone getting killed over review. I haven't heard of any duels. Routinely in Poe's day, if you wrote something very bitufrative and personal and they did all the time, including Poe, someone would, you know, the fellow critic would find you in a, you know, having a drink somewhere, invite you out and people either A, brought into court or they were killed and some critics did end up bloody bruised and even dead. If once they found out anonymously, you see, they would find out through the editor who really wrote this review and panned my book and they'd go out and draw blood. So I think we're a little better than that. I haven't heard of any, unless Doug's heard of any death through criticism online. No, but I do think that one problem right now, and it is a wild west out there, is that whereas, you know, in the last 50 years, let's say, there were some pretty bright lines that were drawn about, you know, what is ethical and what is it? Not ethical, which is not to say that people didn't cross back and forth across them all the time, but there was at least a sort of understanding that there is this kind of ethical divide here. I think that a lot of people writing now, they don't even have, they're not even aware when something is unethical. You know, somebody pimping for their own thing, somebody, you know, pushing a friend's book. I think there are a lot of people who are writing and think they're being completely ethical, and they have no idea. So in one way, it's we, even if nobody, even if a lot of people or a lot of publications didn't follow the ethical rules of the past, there were at least ethical rules of the past. And I'm not so sure that those have been articulated in any kind of compelling way that's been widespread adopted. We only have a few minutes left in our conversation before we open it to the audience. Let me ask you to be, each of you, to be a little bit more specific. Pick some element of arts criticism on the web or a site on the web that you think illustrates positive and hopeful directions in this. You go first. Well, we recently, I recently helped organize a thing at USC as a summit on arts journalism. Arts journalism, state of arts journalism. And one of the things that we tried to do was to find, it came out of this idea that we saw hundreds of new sites launching. And a lot of people trying to solve various problems. And so, you know, wouldn't it be great to get 10 ideas out on the table and let's take a look at it? We opened it up, people could nominate sites and we got 109 nominations of sites to participate in this. What was interesting for me was that there was no site out there that really had figured out a model, a thing that is particularly working right now. Some of them had something very interesting going in. Someway there's a site by the name of Flip Media, F-L-Y-P, that's trying to reinvent the magazine for the digital world. And it's using all sorts of very interesting design and graphic and interactive things. But there are problems with content and it's not fully realized yet. There's a project called Departures, K-C-E-T, the public television station in Los Angeles, where they'll go to a neighborhood and they'll put people, they'll try and capture the culture of that neighborhood by doing a whole series of interviews and embedding them in a collage of images of the street. And by the way that they choose them and by the way that they order them, you get a pretty good sense or you get a sense of what's happening on the street. But there's a critical element missing. There are sites that are doing criticism, pure criticism, essentially transferred from the traditional print model to online. And they seem to be doing pretty well. Glass tire does Texas art. San Francisco Classical Vice does classical music in the Bay Area. And in some of these places there are cities now like San Francisco where classical music is better covered now than it ever has been before. Because you have these sites that are going, they've developed a whole cadre of 40, 50 people who will go out and review and actually know something about what it is that they're talking about. And do it in kind of an interesting way in a comprehensive way which the local newspapers have never ever before been able to do. So here and there you see sort of glimmers of things going on. The things to me that aren't happening, one is nobody has figured out a business model yet. I mean at heart here what we're talking about is a failure of a journalistic model to support arts journalism, to support any journalism frankly, but to specifically support arts journalism. And while you have some sort of struggling models out there, nobody has really kind of figured out a way that is gonna propel it forward in a way that can be replicable in a lot of communities. The other thing is that with all of the technical facility and the various media that we have available now, for the most part, most of the stuff that's happening out there continues to be some sort of reinvention of something we're already doing. In other words, there is this idea out there that the 500 word critical response, text response to a piece of art is somehow the perfection of the critical response. And I would suggest that if you're describing dance, every time you try to describe what's happening or to make judgments about it, it's a compromise to translate it into verbal language. Maybe there are better ways in different media to be able to capture or to react to make that critical response. And there isn't nearly enough going on. I can point to lots of examples of little things, but nothing that you sort of go, oh, that's such a better way of trying to respond to a piece of art. But one reason that's such an important point, it seems to me, is that there are certain forms of criticism, dance criticism is a wonderful example, but so is film criticism. Theoretically, the web enables forms of dance and film criticism, even of drama criticism, if you could film the performance, that allows you not to fall back simply on words, but to actually look at the physical movements of the performer and draw conclusions on the basis of that or just call attention to certain things. And the web enables, let's say, a form of film criticism or a form of dance criticism that never existed in print media earlier. And you're suggesting that, in fact, that hasn't been exploited as richly as it should be. In music, for instance, maybe if you're trying to describe the texture of a sound, maybe a visual image describes it in a better way. Or maybe just hearing the sound. Right. Yeah, I guess, I mean, this excites me only because I really, I completely concur. I mean, it seems to me that, that's why I'm optimistic and excited about arts criticism, because it seems to me that if you use the technology, if you use the multimedia, if you experiment with what articulating your response to the arts means, then it seems to me that's gonna be an important part of the future. And for some reason, and I don't know why, and it's awfully frustrating, we don't see enough attempts to use, for example, in dance, actually to use video, to intricate that with whatever, you know, with a podcast, video cast, whatever you wanna do to intricate actually seeing something and then evaluating it, describing it, and, you know, and illuminating it, hopefully, forever who's watching. So I agree with that entirely that that, for some reason, I don't know why that challenge, and it is a challenge, and that's another thing why I'm sort of revolutionary. I mean, that's a challenge that should be taken up by people who are interested in arts criticism. When I teach at BU, they say, for example, the graduate, the comm department at BU, or, you know, journalism J school, when they, when people write on their applications for graduate school, what kind of thing do they wanna do in journalism? The majority of them wanna cover the arts. They want to cover the arts. They wanna write about the arts, because it interests them. So it seems to me that's where the energy, the ideas are partly gonna have to come from, from people who are familiar with the technology and can literally reinvent the form of the arts review, as long as you keep at least one eye on that idea of the past and the idea that one has to articulate some sort of evaluative, you know, you have to have reasons to behind your judgment. But I think you can easily marry that with the things that you're both talking about in terms of articulating how you respond to work of art. Let's conclude our part of the conversation, get your questions and arguments ready, audience, with my asking each of you briefly to talk about the sites you're responsible for and what you're up to with your sites and why. All right, all good. Here's my, here's my, you know, I get my commercial in here. I had the arts views, which is at a, as you can see the site up there. And it's essentially a dedicated to covering arts in New England. It focuses on critical responses, although not only on those. The thing I wanna highlight now is that you can see Judicial Theater Review number one. This is my attempt again to experiment, not so much with technology, but to experiment with the idea of creating a sense of dialogue and civic community online. So what I've done is I've taken the US Supreme Court as a model and essentially what I do is that I send out a number of judges to, in this case, it was to a theater piece. One of them is a, you know, not all of them are professional critics. Someone is specialized in the subject matter that the play was about. They came back with their judgments. I edited them, I posted them. I then give you a, if I can get you to see this or nothing. Oh, I gotta, hang on for a second. So I edited them. So I have a little preference explaining what this is. There's a majority opinion, a dissenting opinion. Then I have the different judges. There are their judgments. Then I have the artistic organization. Then has a friend of the court brief. So the idea is to create a community where you can have three different points of view because all the judges were somewhat different in how they saw the show and they're coming up from different points of view. And you're including the response of the artistic, you know, in this case, the theater company that was involved in a place where, because not all the judges loved the show. They actually were somewhat missed about it. They mixed about it. They thought it was an important play about an important subject in this case, Rwanda and genocide in Rwanda, but the characters and the plot had problems. Yet the artistic, the community, the artistic institution in this case, company one felt comfortable enough about posting and responding. This is, to me, my attempt to try to create a community because I want people who respond and I invite anyone here please to read and respond to become part of this community talking about this play and maybe eventually at some point becoming a judge. You know, in other words, getting on a panel. And a panel also can be taken from local communities. So I could have judges or panelists coming from all over the state that could become part of, you know, covering this particular event for their community. So it's an attempt to create this sort of commutal space that will bring together professionals, people who articulate about the art sort of for a living or used to, and then those people who are interested in articulating their responses to the art in a place where everyone can feel because it is, there is an edited quality to it, meaning I am editing the material. I don't want comments on there that are demeaning or stupid or insulting. I'm not interested in snark. What I'm interested in is actually seriously talking about, in this case, this play and hopefully involving a community of people who can trade ideas and views on it. So this is what I edit and this is my latest idea to try to reinvent the art form by combining the professional with the non-professional and trying to create a community around that. So that is the Art's Views. Oh. Something called artsjournal.com. We just had our 10th anniversary. We started in September of 1999. And what Arts Journal was an attempt to do, I actually came up with it when I was browsing in the Philadelphia Inquirer site one day and discovered a story about the Barnes Collection being in difficulty and realized that it was a couple, they don't need to see it. I'm going to put art so you don't need to see it or don't see it. That it was in trouble but it was a couple of weeks old. And so I thought there are probably stories like this all over the place. And if I could just put them together I could have my own art section. That was on a Tuesday. On a Wednesday I registered the name and bought some books on HTML and spent the weekend kind of putting it up. And it launched on the Monday and it's been going for 10 years. We have bloggers on the site. We have 64 bloggers currently. Most of them are ex newspaper people or still newspaper people. All with various kinds of followings across all of the arts. What Arts Journal does, sort of its main function is we look at about 200 publications worldwide, anything in English, every day. About 1500 to 2000 stories every day. And then we boil it down to the 20 to 30 that we think are interesting and that you ought to know about. And then we have all of these other blogs. We also curate discussions. So we'll invite the 12 people you'd like to hear on a topic and they'll blog about it for a week. We're in the midst of completely reinventing the site. I don't think that what Arts Journal is right now is going to be viable going forward. We have about 50 to 60,000 people a day that use the site. I found two years ago when I redesigned it the last time, I was kind of surprised to discover that only about 25% of the people actually use it ever come to the website. In fact, the vast majority of people don't even know it's a website. They were getting it in newsletters. We've got 35,000 newsletter subscribers or in feeds or they're counting it in other sites or et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I think that the challenge in journalism right now is we have too much information out there. Although somebody told me recently it's like there's not more information now than there ever has been. It's just our access to it is more comprehensive. So the challenge now is not to create so much more information, it's to find ways to make the information that we have coherent and put it together in some interesting ways. So the new version of Arts Journal I'm moving towards is more community based where you'll be able to curate what it is that you wanna see in various levels. So you can get the very highly curated thing that we do now, but then there'll be different levels of curation with the involvement and interaction of the community, which is actually very smart. Didn't you also tell me that your site actually makes money? Yeah, this seems an important point. We launched in September of 1999 at the height of the dot com bubble. A month later, the New York Times wrote about us and that helped. And about a week later, somebody called a company called up and says we can make you a millionaire for Christmas. You take that call. And immediately we started making money. Are they telling the truth? Yeah, they were. So you're a millionaire? No, because I didn't sell it. They, that was the day, those were the days in web 1.0 where, you know, content is king. So everybody was desperate for content. So we could sell feeds of our content to all sorts of clients. And so we grew rather large. In a six week period in April of 2000, all of a sudden every one of our clients went out of business, including the people who had offered the million dollars for the site. So it was a good thing we didn't take it, right? Because all of those, you know, wild ideas, they really didn't pan out. And what I've learned over time in doing arts journalism is that you can't, you know, I thought it would be, I would find a source of revenue for the site and that would be it. That has not proved to be true. We sell subscriptions, people buy subscriptions to the newsletter, premium newsletter. We have advertising, we have, we supply news to other sites. There are a variety of ways. And there are times when one mode is generating most of our revenue and the others are not, but it changes over time. And you have to be nimble enough to be able to go for the mix. Now we turn to the audience and I urge you when you, there's a microphone here. Is there another one on this side? Only one side? There's a microphone on either side. If you line up in front of the mics, I will call on you in order. Identify yourselves before you speak so you can become part of the permanent record of the event. Is that on? Is that microphone on? I don't hear it. Okay. Okay, I'll lean closer. And I was, first off, I'm really glad that you're here because you have a perspective that I don't often see on the internet. In fact, to the point where I was wondering, do we share the same internet? Like, do we, you know? And I'm beginning to think that maybe this is a sign of just a complete worldview difference, probably because of our generations. I guess the thing that I've been wondering is you continue talking about this apart from occasionally wanting you to give examples such as blogs where the comments don't like lead to greater things because I feel like I go to many blogs where the comments get involved. But I start thinking, you know, you guys are very into this thing of expertise. You're very into expertise. You're into someone curating for you is what I'm getting. You're into the idea that there are people who are experts who have been like created experts by a journalism school or wherever, which I think that there is value to this, by the way. Many of my friends are journalists, but you're into this idea of these people that we are going to return to their place, sort of, right? Like, the web has destabilized this journalism thing. And somehow, those of us who aren't experts are going to want to return the experts to their place, are going to want to listen to the reviews of someone who has gone to journalism school and has their own background, their own opinion, you know, and has heretofore been sort of on a broadcast model been telling us what they think without real, you know, with the major soapbox. They've got the big soapbox. I'm having a hard time understanding why I would want to do that. Why wouldn't I want to continue to educate myself as much as I can and form my own opinions and get into conversations and not look to one major, you know, reviewer or one central place or even a small panel of people, even a three-person panel who may or may not share my own, you know, sort of goals as to what I should be listening to. And I understand that you guys are a small subset of what you would dream arts reviewers to be, but it still seems to very, it does not seem to very internet-like to me what you guys have been talking about. Well, to me, I don't quite see, if you're going to, you want to go around and you want to educate yourself, then you're going to go to as many different sources and you're going to educate yourself in as many different ways as you can. So this panel of three might be one way, art journal might be another, in other words, you're going to try to absorb and use and ultimately filter. Unless you want to just continually go and go through hundreds of blogs every day or every week. So that you're part of your education process is that you are going to becoming educated about those people whose ideas, opinions matter to you and perhaps then you'll write to them and then you'll create that relationship. So I don't see the, you know, I mean, how are you going to educate yourself? You're going to be learning actively by going on the web, taking what you need and discarding what you don't need. I actually agree with you. I'm sorry. I don't see that there's going to ever be a return to the expert. I wouldn't tout that as a model that we should, you know, want to go for. I think that the nichefication of culture that's happened means that that kind of broadly based mass culture in which, you know, the mushy middle rules because it can aggregate the most eyeballs is not a model that is ultimately going to be able to sustain itself. And we're seeing all of those kinds of mass culture lose audience share, you know, 40, 50, 60%. I mean, all of those business models are failing. That said, I mean, I spend, some of the most interesting people I'm reading these days are not journalists. They're people who are doing the things that they love and are studying it and have a way of expressing their point of view about it. In a way, they are experts in their thing. And you value those with, you know, very much. And so I think that the challenge is really to find curators that you grow to trust people who can filter for you and, yeah. I just, as you've been speaking, I realized that my main response, I think, was because you guys were talking about, oh, the many bloggers who are doing it wrong and the many YouTube commentators who are doing it wrong. And my perspective is, hey, those are probably, you know, young people who are trying to learn to do it right. What's wrong with them doing it wrong, you know? There's so many amazing blogs and things that, you know, yeah, I mean, lots of blogs are doing it right. I mean, I'm excited by the activity that I see going on. And look, I don't know. I didn't want to say they're doing it wrong. I think they are on the process of getting hopefully better and better and better. I just think that if you see a sort of Cisco and Ebert-like review on YouTube, I'm hoping eventually that this critic will grow out of that model and will be able to write, you know, be able to write or deal with film art in a far more sophisticated way, you know, more complex way, that's all. But I think for every one of those, there is somebody who's doing it in a complex way. Yes, of course. You know, this whole sort of movement right now doing response videos to things that you see online. Some of them are just amazingly well done. We obviously need to say more, and I hope both panelists and the audience will talk more about this broad question. Clearly, there is a kind of profoundly democratizing tendency built into these new technologies. And there are both positive and negative implications of them. The positive implications may not have been stressed enough, but I do want briefly to respond to Flourish Clink's comments by reminding her that she's a very active blogger and in fact, especially active in certain territories on the web, and she's listened to more than others are. Why? Not because someone designated her as an expert. Maybe we need this distinction, but because there's a difference between what we might call authority and expertise. You get authority not because someone grants it to you, but because you write well and people start paying attention to you. That's why people read Flourish on Harry Potter more than the other Harry Potter bloggers and that's why presumably, hopefully, particular participants in these endless forums will generate more views and more responses than others do. If that is going to happen, or if that is a prime tendency on the web, as I hope and believe it is or will be, I think that's a very healthy sign. It means that not that there won't be people whose opinions or whose perspectives are not more valued than others, but they'll be valued because the authority they've generated has been granted to them by a kind of response by all of the readers, all of the users. That was part of the traditional idea of journalism. In other words, when journalists began writing reviews, they might have been gotten the job, but if they became popular, admired, whatever, they had to fight. Hi, I'm Nick Siever. I'm a master's student compared to media studies also and I have a similar question on a similar idea, but not so much about who was doing the criticism, but how? You talked a lot about how people aren't doing enough evaluative work or judgmental work and are mostly just summarizing what happens in sort of puff pieces. And I'm curious if you could get more specific about how you see the evaluative function changing as criticism moves online, moves in these various ways with different people, because you talked expertly about the history of how arts journalism evolved over time, but there was this sort of implicit assumption that the role of the evaluator was somehow static in here, like the proper way of evaluating has been the same and they used to be bad at it and they got good at it and they were bad at it and then they were good at it again. But I'm curious whether you see that role, that evaluative function changing at all, like with the times, because I would imagine arts journalists from 1900 would have weird things to say about arts from 2009. Are you just... This is to anyone. All right, I mean, I'll take it and just, I mean, I wish I had, I mean, I think you, that's a really pivotal issue for me. And in a way, I don't have an easy answer. I mean, that's sort of, to me, that's what's being discovered right now. In other words, if we take the idea of what evaluative reasoning was in the 19th century, the 20th century, if you go back and I would suggest if you are writing arts journalism or think about writing arts journalism online, read some of the great critics of the past. You don't have to imitate them, but they perhaps will give you the tools and the values to begin to think, what can I bring from the past to what's going on online now? What do I now have to do different, new that wasn't done in the past? So we already talked about various uses of multimedia. Perhaps you could do a dance piece where you don't necessarily writing a 500, 600 word evaluation, but you're using video. Maybe reviews are going to go more towards a form of podcasting or video cast. And you perhaps will be working with ways in which one can place more evaluative material in it, either using visuals or using language. But to me, that to me is a fascinating challenge of what's happening today. What is it? If we assume that evaluation is pivotal in what makes a review, then what can we transition from the past that will fit online with what a lot of people feel are arrested attention spans and people who don't wanna read long magazine-like pieces. What forms of evaluation can we bring that go beyond the sort of thumbs up and thumbs down or simply giving an opinion? So I don't have an easy, I think this is what we're working on right now. It's what people are going to be, and unfortunately we haven't seen enough experimentation on that end in terms of how can we take evaluated discourse, traditional discourse and place it online? What works? What doesn't work? What pleases readers? And what maybe doesn't please readers, but that you wanna do anyway because it's challenging because you are concerned with the craft and criticism itself and you wanna see what values you can bring from the past and bring it into today and see what works and what doesn't work. Thank you. Hi, my name is Dinah Cardin and I actually am one of the 300,000 art blog people you talked about, although we don't like to think of it as a blog and it's an online arts magazine for the North Shore called Artthrob based in Salem. And I teach at Salem State College and I have interns there who are involved. And Doug, I was one of the 109 people to participate in your online arts model in California. And I thought that was a great project. Sitting here today, so many things that you've said are, I'm nodding along. Someone's mentioned a cadre of writers. That's what we call our writers as our cadre. And with dance, we've had a writer who is a dancer writing about dance, talking about how hard it is to write about dance. And the idea of video is actually really good. My background is in journalism from Boston University, but I wouldn't want to see the written word go away because that is my background. I've been an arts writer on the North Shore and also worked as a staff writer in straight news. But the thought of, it really scares me to imagine that you would go online and just see videos of people doing things because the last thing we need is for young people to literally live online and not go out and see for themselves what's actually out there. And one of the things that we're doing is building community with this publication. And we're already hearing we're only six months old that people are looking to us more than the mainstream publications for arts writing. But I just would like to hear you talk about that, about we do a mixture of magazine pieces and also the brief 500 word post. And we're trying to be very multimedia. I dream of NPR style audio interviews and we do do video and other things. But I just, coming from the background of the written word, I do want to continue to do that. I'd like to hear you talk about that. There's a recent book out, and I can't remember the name of it at the moment, but making the case that we haven't become less literate in the age of texting. It's actually made us more literate. We're now more literate now than we've ever been before because if you go back 20 years ago, once people got out of school, they never wrote anything again. Now you've got this proliferation of people writing, even if they're small texts and it has its own kind of form. I think in an odd way that all of this really short hit stuff, in some ways, values the larger pieces. It kind of reasserts them their purpose, you know? When there was a forest of those kinds of pieces, probably not everything needed to be that long. And probably a lot of it was self-indulgent and probably, you know, et cetera, et cetera. If the standard moves to something else, there is, you know, when somebody attempts the longer form, I think that there's a more appreciative audience for it. So by no means am I saying, hey, we should get rid of text reviews or that the text is not still the primary form of critical response to something. All I'm suggesting is that with all of the options available right now, I don't see an awful lot of experimentation. When people attempt something, it's usually based on that kind of traditional model and they try and shoehorn it into whatever it is. But you know, for instance, I recently saw a review of a graphical novel. Graphical novels are really big right now in the form of a graphical, in the form of a graphical novel, you know, panels. It was kind of interesting. Music in response to music. Movement in response to movement. You know, some of that is so ephemeral, what is it actually commenting on? On the other hand, you know, seeing some of these response videos to somebody dancing or somebody doing something on the web is pretty interesting because it's got a lot of commentary on what the original thing was and it dissects it in some pretty interesting ways. So yeah, I wouldn't say we want to get rid of text at all. I just think though that we have to be really clear about how it is that we're using text. Perhaps we should note parenthetically. Again, the utopian or dystopian discourses that surround new technologies always distort a more complicated reality anyhow, but one of the radical oversimplifications has to do with the death of language. Clearly, language is migratory across platforms and will always endure. Language will be, however visual the net becomes, it will still be a medium of language. It will still be a medium in which people need to use the language and the people who use the language well and effectively will generate more authority than those who do not. Can I make another point on that too? You know after the Iran elections and there were all the uprisings and they wouldn't let news organizations in? Okay, for 50 years our idea of the most compelling way of telling a story in real time has been the television clip, right? It's the guy standing in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square. It's incredibly compelling. We go to text to bat cleanup to find out what it all means and to make the associations and set the context, right? So you get to these uprisings and there is no, really is no television and what you have is people started twittering and at the height of it there were 2,500 tweets a minute coming out and what was really kind of interesting to me about that is that the reality of television and that compelling visual image is you've got the 42nd clip that you wanna see but then you've got four hours of Wolf Blitzer droning on and on and on and on and on and it's really boring and you can't fast forward. You can't pick the pieces that you like. However, what happened with twitter is that people started posting videos and started posting pictures and other people started sorting them into ah, here's the good stuff here. Ah, here's a report over here and what you could do is because text is scannable and you can go through and you can find out the parts that are interesting to you. It ended up being a much more compelling way of telling a story in real time because you could pick the videos you wanted. You could pick the pictures that you wanted and you could sort of impressionistically at least see what was, you know, see the main currents of what was going on. So it may be, ultimately, that text reasserts itself in terms of that real time kind of a way to cover something. I'm the executive director of StageSource which is the Greater Boston Theater Alliance and for the last 18 months or so I've been working with some colleagues here in Boston assessing the state of Boston arts journalism in the hopes to find an online arts journal solution, some sort of model that would exist for the Greater Boston arts and cultural community. And so I'm curious, Doug, about the summit that you organized and hosted and you'd mentioned in your remarks earlier that there doesn't seem to be a business model out there that exists and I wonder who's doing work in this area to assess it, to do some research around this, who's talking about this, was there any sort of next steps that came out of the summit in terms of this should be a priority? One concern we have here in Greater Boston or we had a big scare this year was that the Boston Globe, our primary newsprint source for arts and cultural coverage, you know, the threat was that it was gonna go away. I know in Seattle, there's the post-intelligence there that's no longer in print and so I'm curious really about some ideas and who is talking about this in terms of the future for models and opportunities. Well, first I should say that there are lots of models out there that actually are making money. I mean, Boing Boing sells millions of dollars worth of ads a year, I think last year it was over $2 million and then three people who write it. That's a model that makes money. Talking Points Memo started as a one-person blog, Josh Micah Marshall, now has something like 21 reporters that they're hiring, that's a model that works. Politico is a model that works. I mean, there are starting to be a lot of models that work. Here's the problem in the arts, is that the readership, the eyeballs that you can attract are gonna be smaller than the big political blogs. I mean, that's just a way that it works. The genius of newspapers originally was that you aggregated all sorts of niches for which you couldn't have a daily, you know, you couldn't publish a daily crossword puzzle as, you know, the economics wouldn't work out. But bundle that with this and this and this and this. The reality is that people aren't buying the newspaper for brilliant coverage of City Hall even though they appreciate that it's there and they will read it. So you have to find, you know, that the news business has always been a subsidized business, you know, the cost of your subscription barely pays for the printing and the delivery cost doesn't pay for the news gathering part of it. So most of the solutions, most of the things that people have been trying in terms of arts have been very traditional in the sense that we'll hire reviewers or we'll get citizen critics and we'll put it online. Well, the reality is when you start looking at all of those sites is that if they get more than a couple hundred people a day, that's pretty amazing. And the fact is that you cannot sell and not advertising on a site like that to make it work. The current CPM rate, if you're really wildly successful, is, you know, I mean, the average out there is about 41 cents. You get 41 cents for every thousand times the net is shown. If you're really lucky, you'll get $5, right? But some of these sites, some of these sort of Metro sites, they say that they need about $18 to be able to make it. So, you know, so then you go down the other route. Is it gonna be a nonprofit? And so do you incorporate and try and be, well, that creates a whole other set of things that you've got to deal with, which is not necessarily gonna get you there either, although it might. I mean, you know, there are lots of people, there are lots of people trying it, lots of sites trying it. So, for me, the challenge is, is how do you network and aggregate enough readership to be able to build a community that's sufficiently large enough against which you can create a number of revenue sources, whether it's live events, whether it's added kind of ticket sale kind of thing, whether it's memberships, whether it's subscriptions, whether it's, you know, I mean, all of these things. And until you get to five or 10 or 15 or 20,000 people a day, you can't even start to go there. The universe of people who actually want to advertise to that group is pretty small. Now, I will say the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel just laid off a good number of its arts writers, only the visual art writers next. The classical music critic went to the venues which he had been covering and said, hey, you know, why are you spending $300,000 advertising in the newspaper when they're not gonna cover you anymore? Come join my thing and throw us a third of that and we're there for you. So I do think that there's a way in which arts organizations, cultural organizations, everybody's talking about this right now. What are we going to do? And they're all approaching it in a variety of ways. But I think that if you were able to get a bunch of them together, that you'd find some willingness to advertise and to support something. I'd like to add something here. One of the problems I think that Bob is talking about here has to do with the conflict between the global and the local or the national and the local. It seems to me it's clear in some degree that the web has already demonstrated that because of its global reach, it can create communities that are not localized. The problem is that if you're talking about arts journalism of the sort our panel has been interested in, local arts communities, local arts organizations are only marginally helped if there's a journal that talks about dance across the world or dance across the United States. So I think there is a kind of national audience for poetry, for dance, for drama criticism. The problem has to do with the way in which all of these activities are also localized in a way that requires support, requires audiences. I think the real question is whether or not the web is going to be viable as an environment to create these local communities, as against the national communities. And one footnote to what Doug was saying, again I know about Slate because I know about, Robert Pinsky is a friend of mine and he's talked to me about his problems at Slate. One of the reasons that Pinsky went to the tradition of once a month doing a poem out of the public domain, so that in the public domain so he could publish it without pay is that he wants to pay his poets. But of course Slate counts the number of hits that come to each section of Slate and guess what part of Slate gets the smallest number of hits, the poetry. So in order to preserve the poetry presence on Slate, one of the things Pinsky did was he said, okay, three times a month I'll have living poets and I'll pay them something for their contribution and I'll use free poets who may actually also incidentally be much greater poets and will generate a discussion about them. And it's still not clear. I mean, I think he's quite worried about this since I've mentioned it, let me encourage all of you. If you just go onto the site and look at what's there, you'll be helping poetry on Slate because if there's a hit, just looking at the poem, you don't even have to read it. If you click on it, that counts. And I've been encouraging my students to do the same thing for it. Let me add just one other issue too. As she said, Boston Globe could go out of business. There is a school of thought and I'm not gonna fess up whether I subscribe to this or not, but you can probably guess. Newspapers for a long time pretty much ignored the internet. I mean, they kind of did the absolute minimum kind of thing that they could do. And they put very few resources into it. They also had this ad base for print ads that was wildly overinflated and based on this idea of a monopoly in a market. You can claim greater reach with a newspaper than anything else. So their way of dealing, one of the ways in which they have dealt with online is we'll say, oh, buy this really overinflated priced print ad and we'll throw in the online ad for next to nothing. Thereby establishing the value of the online ad as being really, really low. Now imagine that the, I won't say Boston because of, but imagine the Seattle Times now goes out of business after the post-intelligence series and there are predictions that within a year at least a couple of major American cities will be without a daily. I would suggest that if that goes away, the ad rate will climb in those communities, possibly to a point where it would be sustainable certainly to do more than is what is happening right now. But right now we're in this kind of period of artificial disinflation for ads. The other thing is, and this is sort of disheartening, is that when you look at how people click on ads, 8% of the audience out there clicks on 80% of the ads. So it's a very small group. And even though we can very specifically target where you are, both geographically and demographically now, unfortunately the people who come to news sites and you can conjecture all you want for the reasons for this, they click on ads at a significantly lower rate than they do on regular websites, on other websites. So people who are going someplace for news, they want that, they don't want to be interrupted by the ads so there is greater resistance. So the click through rate on ads on news sites is one tenth of one percent. That makes it a hard thing to sell. Great PC. And I was curious about the idea of, if you know of examples, I mean you talked about Poe writing his own reviews. You talked about active poets on Pinsky's column contributing, are there examples of artists, of creators, of dancers, of poets, creating content and then encouraging critical review and then engaging that and trying to build a community around the criticism of their work. Are you seeing that anywhere? I mean not engaging with fans, but actually trying to engage active criticism of themselves. I think there are, there have been examples of this. My guess is that some of my CMS students might have better examples than I know. But I seem to recall that Stephen King began to publish a book on the web and waited for responses, encouraged responses from his audience before he continued it. And I remember reading articles about this as if it was a really sort of a radical transformation. I think it didn't have that impact. That was the number of people who would buy, who would pay. Who would pay, is that what it would pay, right? So that's the fan base. It's a fan. That's the fan base, yes. So it's certainly a good idea, but I'm not aware of a lot of it. I think it's a good idea. I mean maybe Doug's aware of them. I haven't seen anything like what you're describing where someone is actively engaging with criticism of their own work online. Although I've seen bits and pieces of it when they've responded to comments, but I haven't seen, I don't know, maybe I haven't seen continuing critical conversations. There are actually a lot of sites out there like that. Go to e-harlequin.com. Harlequin romances, right? They've created this amazing community where you can upload pieces of your book. I mean everybody thinks they got a trashy novel in them, right? But it's a way of interacting, both getting criticism, but also you get to work with their writers and they tell you what's effective and what's not effective. Pitchfork has, in music, has a lot of sort of interaction. And there are lots of, you're gonna tell us about a couple more. Yeah, good, yeah. I've been waiting for floor. There are many, many places in which authors actually interact, not just with fans, but with other people. Mostly I think because there are more and more authors coming out of writing online, which I think is a fantastic thing as Professor Thurburn already knows. For instance, Naomi Novick, who writes a fairly popular, I mean this is mostly sci-fi and fancy authors, largely speaking, not necessarily interacting with fans though, but with everybody who is in a conversation about this. Because whenever you say sci-fi and fancy, people go, oh, those nutty fans at those conventions. Well, that's part of it, but not all. Who else? God, I can't even think of who I should say because there are so many people. E. Harlequin is a great thing, but also elsewhere in the romance world, there's huge conversations, which is funny, because people say, oh, the romance novel world, they're so, they're genre, they're so the same thing, nobody really cares about what's in it. Well, yeah, they're genre, but people care about different things within that. They aren't trying to make high art. Anyway. And games, I mean, they're amazing sort of gaming. Well, we've said nothing about games although there are people in the audience who know a lot about it. And we've really said nothing about fan communities, which, although Flourish has been implying it. And of course, fan communities are an incredibly creative environment in which people are collaborating and creating all kinds of exciting things. And they're not necessarily purely, you know, sycophantic, what do you point out? Of course, no, okay, good. Talk into the mic, because you're not going to. In the live arts, dance, theater, music, it's more difficult because you're sort of going against what the, you know, live art. I mean, you're actually one step removed by projecting it on, you know, YouTube or whatever, unless you're live casting it, which is quite different, I think. Well, there are sites like The Winger, for instance, which is started by a New York City ballet dancer, and now has dancers from all over the world. And they interact and they talk about each other's work. But that's not, I mean, we are talking about critical discourse here. And as such, that does raise another problem. Where you're going to, when you're talking about, let's say theater performances or music or whatever, then often you can find, I guess, conversations between artists and with each other, artists with readers or contributors. But they tend to be very sort of bland and safe, and they tend not to have any real critical, evaluative, because everyone wants to keep, you know, no one wants, you know, no one wants to say anything that's going to be taken as being too critical. So I find them to be, you know, I mean, I find them often to be somewhat toothless rather than really getting to a critical conversation where people can be respectful, but can make real substantial critical points about an artist's work. And I find them awfully, they're very policed. And sometimes if they're sponsored by or have ads by very arts organizations that are, you know, then that immediately creates this sort of, you know, an ethical barrier and a financial, and a reluctance to really speak honestly, frankly, and, you know, critically. Hi, I'm Alicia Anstead, and I'm the editor of Inside Arts Magazine, and I also oversee this largely student-driven blog for the Office for the Arts at Harvard, and I teach arts journalism also at Harvard. And I'd like to respond to a number of things that you've said, first of all, we haven't really talked about the crisis that we're in. And I think that those of us who come out of traditional journalism have been going crazy trying to figure out how to make a living for the last five or so years. So the other thing I want to say is, Doug, thank you, and congratulations for the work that you do on Arts Journal. It's been a model for a lot of us and also a home base for a lot of us, and for the summit too. And I was one of the ones who tweeted that you look like Al Franken. And I would like to say evaluatively, you're better looking. So I apologize that that seemed to shake you up a little bit, but in response to what you were saying and what you were saying about artists and where are they in this conversation, I think that this is a real opportunity for those of us who have the skills to talk with artists who are used to being the arbiters and the mediators, that this is a place where our voice is still valuable and it may have to be at conferences, it may have to be in forums that are outside of what we're comfortable with, but I think that there is a place for the traditional arts journalist to take his or her skills and apply them in a new way out in the world. This blog that I'm running is one of those ways we're not trying to do arts criticism, we're trying to build an arts community. And inevitably there's some critical thought that goes into the work that we do. So I wanted to say that. To talk more about your site, I mean, if it's not criticism, what is it? How are you building the community? So I have five student bloggers, all of whom have some background just in their own lives. One is a musician, one seems to have incredible experience out in the world of the arts, one is a writer and one belongs to the Harvard music world and they simply go out into their worlds and they come back to me and this is why my role is, this is the only role that I can play for them is to say, let's do this, how can I support you in doing this? How can I give you the technology? They go out into the community of Harvard and beyond and they find the stories. They come back and they have, there are rules, they're not allowed to write over 200 words and they're encouraged to use every type of technology they can come up with and it's very new but we're developing it and we're always looking. So when they go out, it might be just a report on some new project, some new art project. It might just be a quote from a panel like this. Well, I'd be delighted to put it on the screen. I don't know, are you live? I don't know if you, I don't know if you, see if you're on the screen. The other thing is I jump in, office for the arts, you have to go to the office for the arts at Harvard. That's the entry point. I don't know, Doug. We won't search for it now. Okay, I mean you'd have to search for it because it's a funny, it's a funny. But I jump in from time to time to, like for instance, on Saturday night, Frank Rich is interviewing Steven Sondheim at Sanders Theater and Frank Rich is a Harvard grad. So that's our angle and Frank Rich was kind enough to agree to do an interview either with a student or with me and it turns out I happen to do that one. But I jump in too and occasionally add a professional voice. Sometimes that leans a little bit more toward criticism. Sometimes it doesn't, you know, I gotta tell you, I got bored writing reviews. I wrote for 20 years for the Bangor Daily News in Maine contrary to, it's a very bad behavior recently. It's a great arts state and I got to see world-class acts there and write about them and it was very exciting. But you know what, I'm kind of interested in a different thing now. I'm interested in this chaotic world that we're in and one of my hats that I wear is very traditional as Doug knows, a very traditional magazine about the arts. It covers the arts industry and we're also seeing many arts people, arts administrators hiring, not many, I wish it were many, that was an overstatement and dream thinking, really looking to arts journalists to see if there are ways where they can join the organization and become part of building community around the arts and I think that may be the model. So let me just ask a couple, just my questions actually. I'm sorry to take up so much time. But Doug, I want to ask you what excites you about what's going on right now and Bill, I want to ask you, do you pay your writers and how do you pick your writers? How does your site pay for itself and are you interested in more diversity than we're seeing on this panel tonight? Thank you. Do you want to start? Let's, well I don't, most of the writers that are writing for arts are not getting paid at the moment, in other words, one reason that I've incorporated to become a nonprofit is because I've been feeling that I do want to pay my writers and so the attempt is to try to find some sort of model where I'm not going to become a millionaire overnight or in a week about to be able to pay writers something for what they do because I was a freelancer for a number of newspapers in the area for over 20 years and I would ordinarily, I would be paid for what I've done. So I ultimately, although people were doing things for free and they were doing good things for free because of the high quality writing, I felt that I wanted to pay them for it. So that's part of what the whole process of becoming a nonprofit and exploring that idea in terms of payment. So, and you just mentioned something about becoming tired as a critic. So let me just say that in the history of criticism, generally, particularly most of the really good critics were not critics for a long period of time. They did not just have a career where they were, they did it for 20, 30, whatever, number of decades. People like Shaw and other George Bernard Shaw were only a critic for four years. Kenneth Tynan also was not a critic for a very long period of time. So this could be, and I'm sort of arguing against myself here, this could be a profession where one can flame out after a series of years and you do become sort of tired of it because you do lose the freshness of approach that you have when you first come. So what excites me myself is the question that the student asked earlier and that is I am interested in ways in which one can take the values of the past and somehow bring them into the future, into the chaos that we find today and look for ways in which people can be reimbursed for writing evaluatively, critically about the arts because what, I mean, one other thing that you've mentioned that, and we've sort of touched on it and that is that for a lot of what's going on in terms of arts writing, you're saying well sometimes some critical thinking creeps in and sometimes not and sometimes they come back with a story and sometimes with a quotation. Well, that's sort of what was happening in the 80s and the 90s. I mentioned the New Yorker and the melding of feature writing and reviewing and that is those lines become blurred, right? And as they become blurred then the idea of what is evaluative writing becomes somewhat fade or weakened because an interview, a story is seen as a form of evaluation. I've done a review and I think that you do have to sort of, as you bring the past into the present, you do have to keep in mind that you do wanna try to keep that discriminate between those forms of looking and writing about the arts or at least make people aware of the fact that they're fusing them together and that they do have separate lives and separate histories. So just a couple of numbers. In the last three years 50% of all staff arts jobs have disappeared and they're not doing that. In newspapers, yeah. Yeah, but actually you could probably apply it. I mean, because most arts journalism jobs were in newspapers for a long time. But that's not something that's really new. It's just an acceleration, frankly. When the National Arts Journalism Program began back in 1994, about 90% of everybody who applied were staff writers and that was the norm. In fact, they didn't even think about taking freelancers back then. This is the Pew program in arts journalism. By the time the program closed in 2005, it had completely flipped around. 90% were freelancers and it's a trend that has gone for a long time. And if you look out there in other American cities, not the really major ones, but sort of the second tier, like Minneapolis and like Seattle, those newspaper jobs were pretty good gigs to get. And so what you saw was people would roost in them for decades. Long after they really had anything really significant to clock about. So, do you want to continue that one? In the not so old days, it used to be that the newspaper, the book reviewer or the movie reviewer on a newspaper was a guy who was too old to cover the police speed anymore, so they gave him the art speed. And that happened when I was a young reporter on the Newark News 45 years ago. So what excites me? I actually find this an incredibly exciting time. I think the periods where everything is static and you know if you do this thing and then that gets you to that thing and there's like these tubes that lead to success and you just sort of inch your way up the tubes. That's really, I mean it's a lot easier in a way but it's not very interesting. And I think we're in just this amazing period and I think we're coming upon the golden age of arts journalism, if you will. Partly because I do think that a lot of the ways in which we have discussed culture in this country has been really stunted. Public discourse on culture in this country, we haven't had much of that for 30, 40 years. You can say oh we have critics in newspapers but you know those are lone voices and sometimes they're not very good voices and you know watch every time there was any sort of culture story that was at least controversial it would get polarized really fast. We don't know how to talk about culture in very interesting ways. So I find it really, really interesting that people are diving in and wanting to talk about culture now. It also means that our definition of and the things that we're paying attention to in culture are diversifying in pretty amazing ways. I mean you know somebody, I guess it was you mentioned you know there's like three old white guys up here, right? This is not what culture is right now. You know the bold. Yes. Okay well I'll put myself in that. But the thing is that definition of what is good after post-modernism that's a really difficult thing to kind of wrap your arms around. The definition of standards it's really difficult thing to wrap your arms around these days. So suddenly to have all of this kind of activity bubbling up and this morass of information that we're just swamped by which everybody is intimidated by which everybody is trying to struggling trying to figure out how to cope with it. It's the age of the curator. We all have to find people whom we grow to trust who have authoritative voices and can put things into some sort of frameworks in which we understand. And hopefully in a better cultural kind of lens then we're used to talking about culture in this way because I don't think we've done this very well and I think that what's coming is just a lot more interesting. Do you think it will also be far more democratic and interactive than previous models? Oh, unquestionably. We know that for sure, in fact. I think you can easily predict. A lot of other things are very unpredictable. I would predict the interactivity will be a crucial part of where arts journalism is gonna go in the future. Definitely. Every few weeks there's something that happens that I go, oh God, that changes everything. Like right now, my whole world is shaken from what Twitter did last week. What Twitter did last week was that it allowed all of its users to make lists and that you can follow lists, right? Now, imagine this if you're a news organization. What if you were able, and they now geocode everything? So what if you were to define your geographical region and you were able to capture all of the Twitter accounts, right? And you could monitor in real time and you could assign by lists what various people are tweeting about. You could monitor in real time you'd see a bloom of tweets happening when something would happen and you could delve into these things. Instead of having a team of 30 reporters or 200 reporters, you've now got a team of 100,000 reporters who can do something. Okay, so I'm thinking, okay, as somebody who aggregates stories for a living, who goes out and looks at all of these things, you know, God, I'm pretty boring compared to most people, you know, to a lot of people out there. The aggregate number of people out there. So I have to really completely rethink what it means to be an aggregator or what it means to be a reporter or what it means in fact to cover an area in some way. And just this idea of having lists where you could add up everybody who's interesting on a topic and add in and add out and have people follow that, I think is a complete game changer for how we cover news because you could do it in multimedia now. How would you do it in the arts? Oh, I'm already working on that, which is, you know, find all the people who are talking about music in a really interesting way. Make it porous enough so that you can put people on and off the list in an easy fashion and then start running the feeds in various levels of curation. Do it for blogs. You could make it event specific too, couldn't you? Who's going to see this movie tonight? Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, this makes everybody out there a reporter. Doesn't make everybody an equal reporter. And that's ultimately in a sense where I think you need journalists who are making news judgments for what's important and what's not important. But that will be based more from being the center of a community rather than being at the top of a pyramid. Thank the audience.