 I think we can go ahead and get started at this point. I know we have, hopefully, lots and thousands of thousands of people live streaming at home. So welcome to the breakout session on new platforms for arts journalism. My name is Chris Weier and to briefly give you my bio, I spent 11 years on staff at Tide Out Chicago as theater editor and chief critic until being laid off about a year ago last, a year ago this week, actually. And I'm now full-time freelance, I review shows for the Chicago Suntimes, I'm a contributing critic and writer at Chicago Magazine, I've had pieces at Playbill, New York Times, American Theater and elsewhere and about six months ago I launched my own venture, a subscription email newsletter for Chicago Theater Reviews and News and Opinion and am now at about 500 subscribers on that, about a quarter of which are paying subscribers, which is great. Which is one new platform that we can talk about but I'm going to ask everybody else to introduce themselves and what brings them to this panel as well. Why don't we start with you, Mark. All right, I am Mark Lowry in Dallas, Texas. I used to be the theater critic at the Fort Worth Star Telegram for 10 years and I was laid off in 2008, that was sort of the beginning of all the mass layoffs from the newspapers and the culture writers and the entertainment writers were among the first to go. So with another critic in town we decided to start what we're calling a theater blog at the time. So we started, it's called Theater Jones, we named it after the great Margot Jones who was a regional theater pioneer, opened her first theater in Dallas in 1947. It was very influential in the regional theater movement. Initially it was, sorry, initially it was just theater and because I'd been in a newspaper in a features department that had a visual art critic and a dance critic and a classical music critic, we wanted to open up to other performing arts. So we soon started covering dance, classical music, opera and about three years later comedy. And later this year we're actually launching a new website to cover visual art. So we've been around for 10 years, it has grown, we tried to work off of the advertising model for the first nine and it just wasn't working. We weren't making a living wage, we tried to pay writers, it was tough. So last year we launched a new company called Metropolitan Arts Media which is a non-profit and Theater Jones works under the umbrella of that and the new visual art site will as well. And that's gone really well. So far we've actually gotten paid. We're on track to make a payroll for the first fiscal year which is exciting and it's allowed us to grow and think about other ideas in ways we can expand our conversation there. And it's become more important as the newspapers in the area have completely dropped arts coverage. So the Star Telegram who I still freelance for until about 2017 dropped its arts coverage. And this is Fort Worth, Texas which has really amazing groups like the Clyburn and the Kimbell Art Museum and several professional theaters. And then earlier this year the Dallas Morning News laid off what was left of its cultural staff and they had a full-time theater critic and she would have been the last full-time daily newspaper critic in the south, in Texas, in the southwest. She would have to go over to L.A. and maybe up to D.C. to find another one. So Theater Jones is going great and we're looking forward to expanding and growing as we figure out budget issues and navigate the new world of a non-profit. Regina? Yes. Hi, everybody. How are you? Good. Cool. Thank you for being here. My name is Regina Victor. I'm the founder and editor of Rescripted.org. And our mission essentially is to reprogram the way that we critique each other through an empathetic lens and to cultivate new voices in the field. So we have 10 writers. We pay all of them a competitive rate in Chicago. We have five of them are alumni of our training program. We have a youth critics training program called The Key. And when it comes to reviewing through an empathetic lens something that we really noticed in Chicago was that the criticism was very polarizing. There was not a lot of diving into what could be both good and bad about a piece, what could make a piece worthwhile, what an artist's intention was in delivering that piece and how well they executed it essentially. And artists just wanted to be seen. They wanted to know that the work was being met where they were making it. So we thought that we would employ artists to be able to see the intention and labor behind something that's being created and have the empathy and the love to talk about it straightforward the way that it is without being cruel, just being honest. So some of the ways that we do that, we always talk about our own lived experiences are valid and we can be an expert on the things that we know. We try to communicate that to the public through artist profiles and they might say preferences are game of thrones and magical realism. So you know if they go see a play that has a lot of effects they might love it. Also we have bias alerts so if you've ever collaborated with someone or even if you're going to review a musical and you know that you hate musicals you can disclose that so people aren't wondering why you're so cranky about Matilda. Yes, and the key was something that we started, we're two years old. The key was something we started in our first year of operation and that was because I realized that we had to grow the critics that we wanted to hire. It's a six-week training program, it's completely free as well as our website is completely free. There are students from all over age 16 to 24 all over Chicago both in university and not in high school and not. As I said five of them are now paid critics for us and they also, there are some of our alumni that write for the Chicago Reader and Scapey Magazine and HowlRound so we're trying to get those philosophies out into the greater world of criticism. Thanks. Dixia. Hi everyone. My name is Dixia Gore and I'm the co-founder and chief operating officer of a website called ShowScore.com. We're about four years old and currently we operate only in New York City but part of the reason I'm here is that we're hoping that this year we will expand to some other markets and ShowScore is an aggregator for theater. We're actually a discovery tool for theater fans. We are squarely focused on theater fans and helping them to discover theater and see more theater. The way we do that right now is that we list every single show with seven performances or more in New York City and the five boroughs of New York City. We list a description about the show, links to the website, links to the video shows can upload features and articles. We aggregate all reviews, critics reviews to the show and then we also allow members to write, audiences to write reviews in very structured ways, designed not in the sort of yelp fashion of thumbs up, thumbs down but actually to reveal if you didn't love it, who would like it and if you loved it, who maybe the show isn't for a different audience member and it's really tool towards, as I said, towards discovery and discovery across off-off Broadway, off-Broadway and Broadway and when we expand it will be tooled towards an entire theater ecosystem, not just one or two players. We, as I said, we're about four years old and in that time we have grown to about 270,000 members across the country. To be a member it's free, you sign up, you make an account and there are many ways that you can discover theater, you can browse the site, you'll see if you go on the site, there's sort of Netflix-like categories on the home page, you can follow people who share your taste, so when you write a review we help unearth people who have similar points of view, so you can follow them, so as they see more theater you can discover more theater. We also link out to every critics review so that you, there's a little excerpt and a score but then you get to follow the critics that who resonate with you or who's writing you like and you get to build a relationship with the critic and yeah, that's what we do, we'll talk more. Where are you private funded, where are you private funded? We're privately funded, we're a for-profit company. Sean. Hi, so I'm Sean Daniels, I'm the artistic director at Arizona Theater Company, where the local paper printed one review this past year in Phoenix and I was the previous artistic director of Merrimack Repertory Theater in Lowell, Massachusetts where the Boston Globe printed zero reviews of our last year, but that's okay because what the thing that we've done is that we created a thing called the cohort club where we have 20 community members who are invited to be a part of the process and we invite them to every rehearsal to every production meeting, they get every email that goes out about the production, we practice radical transparency with them, inviting them in on exchange for them writing about their experience every time that they come in contact with the work. So if you can imagine that it's 20 people and they each come 10 times and then they write about it, the theater then has hundreds of preview pieces to be able to put out and even though our board and our staff used to really like it when we got great reviews in the Boston Globe, it actually didn't sell tickets for us in terms of what it is, but for example, a third of Lowell is Cambodian, so one of the things that we had targeted was getting young Cambodians to be a part of the cohort club and we had one young woman who would do Instagram stories as her way of talking about being in the building and she would review every show as she exited the building talking about what it was and she sold more tickets for us than traditional arts criticism ever did in terms of what it is. So like our key was to figure out how to amplify those voices because to be honest like you really shouldn't believe us, right? We say that everything is great, but when we have community members who come in and are a part of it, suddenly you believe her, right? And we even had community members who would read a script early on and say like I don't really find this funny and I'm not sure why they programmed this and then they would come to first read through and be like, oh my god, it's hilarious. I'm so glad they're doing this and you believe that person so much more than you ever would us or anybody else because it feels like you. It's in your language and we spent a lot of time talking about how we live in a certain postmodern society where everybody can spot marketing. We've all learned to read a website and actually have your eye removed the marketing as you go down, but four friends of yours tell you you should see something and you go right away. So how do we instead of focusing on more traditional models, how do we empower people to talk to their communities? We had somebody put their cohort letter in their church newsletter. We had someone who was a bartender who said they would tell people. We asked the mayor's chief of staff to go through it so that they would better understand why it costs what it costs. And so we've really found that to be able to as a new different way of talking about what the work is. So one of the main reasons that we are all here talking about new platforms is because we are losing our access to old platforms. Traditional media like Time Out For Myself, Mark, your Deses and Needs paper critic, I'm spotting several people in the audience here today who I know we're laid off as traditional media theater critics. And so we're all working to find new ways to to either get our own voices out there or to empower non-traditional voices, underrepresented voices, audience voices. I would love to hear each of you speak, which you sort of did just now, Sean, but like about the particular kinds of voices that you're looking to host and or to amplify. You know, Mark, I think you said that most of the folks writing for Theodore Jones come from a traditional journalism background. Is that fair to say? No, it started off that way. It started off as I would find journalists, people I had worked with who I knew, but also we found a few people from the colleges who were teaching in the various disciplines. And over time as we started finding new writers, we found more people from the arts community who had been artists. So our chief classical music critic was a composer, a conductor. He's a pianist. He understands every single era of classical music and knows how to write about every genre within that discipline. And our other our other music critics are also trained musicians. We have two vocal writers who write about choral music and art song and opera and they teach voice in town. We have all of our dance writers, our dance instructors at local colleges. We started off by hiring the former Dallas Morning News dance critic who had been laid off as well. So she was our chief dance critic for a long time, but we also built up these other core of dance writers who were dance teachers and had been part a part of other dance companies in other cities previously. Some of our theater writers had been actors and theater artists as well. But we've also pulled in a lot of what we do on the site that I really love is I didn't want it just to be about theater critics and art critics sort of telling people what they think of the scene. I wanted to have the arts community involved. So pretty soon we started trying to get people from the arts community to write monthly columns for us. So it started off with the Dallas Opera CEO actually pitched to us about writing a monthly opera column. And sometimes it got really, really into the weeds of of how to market opera audiences and about ticketing systems. But sometimes he would write about, you know, Puccini's greatest hits. And that sort of led to us asking other artists to do things. So we now have a dance writer who's also an independent arts maker who writes a monthly column that's sort of about that, about dance and being an independent theater maker and dance maker. There is a newish theater company in Dallas that's about two years old now. And I wanted them to chronicle the experience of what it's like to start a arts company, a theater company and write about it on a monthly basis of their journey of going through that. So they started off writing about how they why they decided to form and did they want to be nonprofit or not? And how did they put together a board? How did they program their first season? And they've been and we've skipped a couple of months, but they've been consistently writing about that. They're about to announce their third season. They become really popular. I had a writer in town who was a who ran a cultural center. She she retired. She was very politically outspoken. I wanted a column about the intersection of arts, art and local politics. And she would write about city funding issues and equity issues. And we got, you know, people loved it. Some people in the city hated it because we were calling out some some city government and funding issues. And so we've we've done things like that. And then I've had I'll have a choreographer sometimes interview a choreographer as a Q&A just as a feature or a director. Talk to a director or a playwright. Talk to another playwright. So and some of them are fairly big names. We have Regina Taylor, the playwright who is about to do an interview with Jonathan Norton, who's a local playwright who's having his world premiere at the Dallas Theatre Center of a play called Penny Candy. It's previews tonight. And Regina, who is a Dallas born playwright, I've known her. And I asked I've asked her to do this before. So she's she's done a couple of interviews for us with other playwrights as well. So I wanted to have all sides of that. Regina Victor, not Taylor. Rescripted is largely artists writing about artists or about artists. Do you see artists as the audience for what you're doing there? Or do you do you see it as something for audiences for general readership? Who was who was rescripted aimed at in your estimation? Yeah, so I think, you know, I come at this from the perspective of an artist. I'm a director and a dramaturg in my everyday practice. As well as an audience engagement consultant. So I would say there's both sides to that. I think about how reviews serve us and and wanting to be seen and wanting an understanding of our work. But then I think about how I use those reviews. And it's usually to explain my work to everybody else. So whether that be like my family or a grant organization or just on my website, those reviews are getting shared by folks who just want to be able to have someone understand what they do. I think I don't feel like I was a legitimate actor till I was in the San Francisco Chronicle. Like that was just a moment in time that I could understand and send to people. So as we've cultivated this, we've tried to create that access again through the subjectivity, but also through sometimes we translate our pieces. A lot of times we talk about things like if you can use less than three syllable words, do that we can get very scholarly. I want to communicate the same big ideas with very small words. I would just love for anyone that comes on rescripted to be able to understand it. Our audience tends to be artists because of the way that we were formed. I think there was such a critical period in Chicago of people being very thirsty for new forms of journalism. But I also am surprised. I'm a dramaturg. I do talk backs around the city at the amount of audience members who will just say, I read this thing on your website. And I'm like, oh, hello, yes, let's talk about it. But it's nice to have that community accountability that I think inherently makes our audience reach a little bit wider. Yeah. Yeah. That's that's one thing that I think about a lot in terms of. Those of us who are trying to build new platforms in terms of my own venture storefront rebellion, the email newsletter. You know, I have yet to figure out, I think, how to reach folks who are not already out looking for theater coverage. That's that's the thing that I think we lose in when we lose that real estate in, you know, the daily newspapers and the general interest magazines is the people who are just flipping the pages and and have their eye caught by a great production photo or, you know, see a play about a historical figure that they're interested in. Deeksha Showskor seems to have a democratizing mission at its heart. How you talked about the great membership numbers that you found in New York City. Do you have like a marketing plan? How are is that all word of mouth? When we first launched, you know, we had a few we were very lucky. So when we first launched, we actually, prior to launch, we went to talk to the New York Times to let them know that we were going to be excerpting their reviews and, you know, hope that they wouldn't get mad and, you know, quite the contrary. They brought in their theater reporter and the day we launched, we got a little snippet in Arts Briefly, which was really lovely. We did do a little bit of social media marketing to sort of get going. But there has been a lot of word of mouth. And I think that for theater audiences, you know, especially really active fans, when we ask them, you know, why don't you go see more theater? Totally expecting them to say that it was price. What we actually heard was, well, it's hard to figure out what to see. You know, we know the shows with big marketing budgets, which also tend to attract reviewers. And then we, you know, so we know Broadway. We know a few big off Broadway. But beyond that, the ecosystem is vast. And, you know, we all know I used to be a marketing director before in a previous life. And we all know, you know, the ecosystem, the sort of journey of a limited run play. You do previews, it's hard to sort of build word of mouth. The critics reviews come out if there are still reviews happening. And if it's a rave, you're sold out, and then you have to shut down in two weeks. And if it's not, you're discounting, you know, through your nose and trying to get all your friends to come see it. And so there's just this problem, just in the timeline of how you can connect, you know, reviews and word of mouth and then ticket sales. So a lot of, you know, what we were hearing is we just want to, we want more information. We want to find the shows. And one of the things that we do, which is, you know, sometimes controversial is our members are allowed to share their thoughts on the show during previews because our philosophy is if you can, if you're paying for a ticket and you're talking about the show to your friends, you should be able to, you know, talk about it. And what we find is that our members are making their decisions earlier. Because if you have 20 reviews of a show and they're giving you, it's not even about scores. If they're giving you information about what the show is about, you don't have to wait as long. So that was very much, that's a little bit of a tangent, but that really helped us organically grow as well. Sean, I feel like all of us can at least anecdotally talk about how, you know, word of mouth or social media influencers, as you alluded to, or, you know, audience members who find a particular voice, whether it's a show score user or a writer for Theodore Jones or Rescripted, that seems to drive at their own point of view and can follow that. But you and I were talking a little bit earlier about, you know, obviously ticket sales are not the only function of reviews, but for funders, for instance, there seems to be a little more reluctance to give the same legitimacy to new platforms than they do to write-ups in, you know, The New York Times or, you know, even American Theater Magazine, like these known brands. How has that played out in your view? Yeah, so one of the things that we really focus on is making sure that the group of people that are the cohorts reflect the community that we live in and not necessarily the donor base that supports the theater. And there is always some internal tension there in terms of providing access for people that aren't donors. I think the one thing that has worked with that is that means that like it's really natural then when those people reach the communities we always want to be able to reach and we're able to grow those numbers. The flip side of it is what you're talking about is that when we go to funders, when we go to commercial producers or we go, you know, we put together our Schubert application, Instagram stories don't carry the same amount of weight in terms of like a great review was, even if it actually sold more tickets for us. So we have to like attempt to track it all the way through and be able to say that because they want something, they want numbers or something hard somewhere, right? So if we can say that like more young people or more people of color, more people attended for the first time because of that, that's the numbers that we can then pass on to people. But it is something that is lost in terms of what it is. Like we can have 20 cohorts write a great review and it sells a lot more tickets, but when it comes time for us to go before the NEA, we don't include any of those because we know that they won't be taken as though the work itself was thought of in a great way. So I think that is the challenge in terms of empowering our audience members is there are still larger institutions that we really rely on in terms of for funding or even just to get a producer on a train to come from New York out to Lowell to be able to see something. They want to know how it will translate to actual critics when it comes to New York City, not just blogs. And so that's a challenge we face. Regina, since you and I are both from Chicago, we were talking a bit over lunch about, there are actually a surprisingly large number of sort of self-directed or self-funded outlets, blogs that all seem to have a real core competency among their writers and pretty strong output. Have you encountered any resistance when you were first launching Rescripted? Did you get any resistance from theaters being like, who are you? Why should we give you comps? What are you going to do for us? Yeah, that's so true. But Chicago is pretty receptive. There was some hesitation to just say like, indications people had maybe been burned before. So saying like, please make sure you actually publish the review. We'd love to have you come. And I do think that there was a lot of faith extended because of my artistic relationship to the community as well. And the fact that when we started it was just me. So I wrote by myself for like the first six months, also my co-founder, Catherine O'Keefe. We were actually covering the Bay Area and Chicago at the same time in the beginning of our founding. And it wasn't until we picked up funding by friends of Chicago's neighborhood theaters that we started focusing specifically on Chicago that was in 2017, or excuse me, 2018. But yeah, so in terms of talking about resistance to quality control, trying to understand quality control and what you're going to bring to the review and that exchange, I think has grown as our reputation has grown. But hearing other folks through the conference talk about how do you surmise a blogger's quality? I think that's something that Rescripted has really tried to identify as like a style guide, but also an ethical guide of like, how do you go to a show? Like, how do you check in? How do you, you know, just that basic stuff. What is your protocol? Don't talk about the show in the lobby. Like just very basic, you know, but you have to say it, right? Like, otherwise, how do you know? So trying to set the culture of critiquing and also reshaping the critical relationship to the community, because I don't know about you, but like, it can be really awkward sometimes. You go to a show, you know everybody, and then the opening party happens, and they're like, oh yeah, you can stay. It's a little bit awkward if every critic stays. But, and I'm like, what is that? Should we not be able to all break bread literally together? I just hope that can kind of mesh through this critical reprogramming. It's funny, I can think of some long-established critics in Chicago who could learn that etiquette about not talking about the show in the lobby. Yeah, yeah. Don't do it. I'm not sure how many of you were in the other session this morning about new funding for journalism. I think there is so much overlap between what we're talking about here and what was talked about there that we almost could have done in just one session. Yeah. I was interested in hearing what way and the other panelists were saying there about working within established platforms like Art Burst Miami sort of syndicating content to legacy publications or, I believe a way of us talking about similar model with the Andy Starr and the Houston Chronicle. You know, are we doing too much by all trying to build up new platforms from scratch? Is there something to partnering with established brands that we could be doing more with? I'll just jump in really quickly. Now I do think there can be more collaboration among outlets in general. Like I think it's been interesting to try to bridge the different places that I work for and freelance for as well. There's a new project called ThreeView that's coming out and I'm hoping we're gonna collaborate on being a Chicago point person and they asked me like does that conflict with rescripted and I was like no, if we're trying to figure out how to reprogram the way we critique something and to do so with empathy and to redefine expertise, then we're doing the same thing. So I would like to see more collaboration and I think this conference is inspiring a lot of it so I'm grateful for the space. Yeah I'd like to add that I mean you know show score is essentially an aggregator so we're sort of adding a lot of voices to the conversation we're certainly attempting to. And I really think that there are so many sources that people go to and there's such a different definition or focus on what we want our audiences to be. And so I just think you know when I hear about ThreeViews and I hear about criticism that's more in conversation like as a cultural commentary and at the same time the traditional criticism which has a very important place in our ecosystem. I just think the more the better. The more people we can get to have that moment of connection to say oh this is something I'm interested in whether it is content or what is the content of the play, whether it's a judgment, whether it's someone you love, I'll take it all. Yeah I mean I guess for us it's like a printed review still moves more than anything else that we could do. I guess we're just bracing, I'm trying to think ahead like if they're essentially like fossil fuels like we can call them freedom reviews or whatever we want if we're gonna change the name of it but we would love to be a part of it but I think in two different theaters I'm looking at one print review over two seasons so we can collaborate but should we not be thinking ahead for if in our lifetime that completely goes away what have we been putting in place to be able to get the word out about the work that we're doing. So I'm all for collaborating but we're kind of creating systems out of a need because we have less options than we had before so we're trying to be aggressive in terms of coming up with what it is so I would be happy to collaborate because God knows we get that one print review and you're right people come across it that don't normally do. Suddenly it feels like your local neighborhood newspaper where you're just reading about things that you might not have and you discover something new. So I think that that's what we're always trying to fight against. Yeah I mean I am for the collaboration and working with those institutions we're because we're now a nonprofit we're trying to have some discussions with legacy media similar to what art versus doing although they're funded differently than we are they're funded through the city and the arts council and we're doing sponsorships from the arts groups but also going after the traditional forms of funding that the arts organizations would like seeking donors and starting our individual giving campaign something I've never done and let me tell you it's fun, really fun. And that sort of brings up the issue because so far we're funded by sponsorships from the arts organizations and it's basically advertising and we did the advertising model before so there is that question of objectivity that comes with that. It's certainly not from our side we know we're being objective but we even have it in our contracts for sponsorship and for advertising. Being a sponsor of metropolitan arts media doesn't mean you're gonna get any coverage or any kind of coverage and they're correct and there are a ton there are a lot of groups that do not sponsor and we cover them and we, I've always been adamant about covering the entire scene of the different budget sizes and the length of time and I wanna give a lot of ink to emerging artists as we do the big multi-million dollar companies but I do worry about that audience perception when they're reading a review and there's an ad for it. That theater next to it, hopefully if they see that it's a bad review or a more negative review that's not a factor in it but it is a concern for us and so our goal for the future would be to try to figure out how to get the thing funded through strictly through foundation money, grant money and individual donors rather than sponsors from the arts groups but they wanna support what we're doing because they believe in the future of arts journalism and they're advertising on a site that is seen by a lot of people but they're also supporting the future of this thing we're all grappling with. I just wanted to add one more thing to that too. I think something that's really key to remember is that we're all so different too. Like all of these platforms are very unique to our voices just like even writers that are still in print are very unique. Like I need both the root and very smart brothers. I want more than just one type of black person coverage you know what I mean for culture and arts but even thinking about the way that we started the key the Young Critics Training Program is a bunch of us kind of had a similar idea at the same time in Chicago and we all emailed M. Joy Gavino of the Chicago Inclusion Project and she was like whoa let's just all have dinner and so we all got together and Oliver Sava who is the co-founder of the key with me happened to be there and instead of all three of us creating our own offshoot programs we collaborated and we all work on the key now together so I do think like collaboration when people are invested in the future local journalists were also really supportive. Chris has come in to talk to the students at the key as well as Carrie Reed who I also have to name and Katie Sullivan those folks really promoted us and we're really really strong advocates of both rescripted and the key and those collaborations were huge in our founding. Yeah. Can I add something? Yeah. On the diversity of the sites what I'm really excited about with this new future of arts journalism and I'm a member of the American Theater Critics Association I'm the membership co-chair and we're you know that's an organization that has gone through a lot of change because critics have lost their jobs over the past 10 years and so we've tried and there used to be the rules of you know you had to be a paid critic to be a member which you know it doesn't happen anymore so we had to figure out a way to keep that organization growing and we're trying to identify critics and journalists who are using so many different platforms there are podcast and audio platforms and video reviews which is still fairly new but I see it every once in a while and all of that is very exciting to me about the conversation that we're having you know in theater is it gonna pick up you know millions of subscribers like a newspaper? Not now but I think we'll all get there. So we've been talking a lot about reviews but obviously there's a lot more to arts journalism than just individual show reviews and so Sean I'm curious with the cohort for instance have you experimented at all with with cohort members doing say interviews or roundtables or you know video or audio content? Yeah so the cohorts have to write or share with their community every time that they're in the building so actually the majority of it is before the show opens right? The majority of times they come in contact with it is in rehearsal. They get free tickets to all the previews so they can see how a show changes over the preview process and then opening and then that's it so actually the majority of things they create is kind of based on today they tried to you know stumble through for the first time and I think my fear at the very beginning was that people wouldn't understand what they were watching and of course that my audience is so much smarter than I give them credit for it. Like they're actually thrilled that people who met each other six days ago are stumbling about pretending to be father and daughter having an emotional moment so and the thing we found is that we all know you work on a show you kind of drink the Kool-Aid you root for it you want it to work and so what happens to these people is the same thing that they kind of they're amazed that after six days that these people can do it and then they're also amazed that when it comes time to do a two person show it takes 36 people during tech to put on a two person show which they wouldn't have got before so like that's the type of articles that they write and so I think because that comes from a very they're coming from a place also of not knowing the lingo and not knowing what they're supposed to know so they talk about it in a way that I think the average person who comes across it it's very easy for them to digest it's very easy for them to understand what's excited about it and that I think allows the average person to suddenly get excited about it and then follow this person through the process as they go so by the time they get to opening it's not thumbs up or thumbs down did you like it but it's like oh my friend Lauren had a show and I've been following these three people who have been through the process and they've all had different things and now I wanna go see what it is Yeah, yeah that's one thing I hear a lot from theaters from publicists and from artists and administrators is they can feel like they're losing the value of preview coverage we're talking so much about reviews and responses and reactions to shows after they've opened but we're really losing space I think for features, for profiles, for artists to watch for that kind of coverage that can be really valuable far ahead of the show's opening so Mark you've talked about some of the interviews and Q and A's and those sorts of things that you've run artist to artist do you do a lot of reported features on theater Jones? Yeah, so part of taking up the mantle of the arts journalism outlet in town was to also report on all those things I would have written about as a newspaper arts writer so a new artistic director the closing of an arts organization talking about funding issues in the city but one big change one big scary thing for us is that about two years ago we broke a major Me Too story if you read the story about the Dallas Theater Center guy, the Me Too stories had started happening in 2017 and one of our writers who writes essays for us she asked me if we should start asking the community about Me Too stories and let's try to put some essays and stories together related to that just to be in that conversation and so we started getting and she asked for people to send her tips through Facebook or via email we got a lot of tips there were rumors about this one person in the community for a while and we got more about him and we started following that story so there were three writers I had a journalism degree, you know, 20 years ago so I had studied journalism law and all that but it was 20 years ago, a different era we weren't non-profit at the time so we did not have money for a lawyer so I asked lawyer friends of mine I consulted with a professor of media law at SMU as we were getting closer and closer to breaking the story and I think even to this day we're the only media outlet that's not a big newspaper that has broken a theater Me Too story and it certainly got us, you know we got picked up nationally we continued that conversation when we ran another series of essays by some of the victims who did not wanna speak in the story but later felt compelled to tell their story and so we ran their essays about it the Dallas Morning News did a big feature about five months later an interview with this person sort of like his career was ruined and this is what happened and it was, you know, a really long feature story there was a lot of people in the community upset about that because it felt like it was too soon we had people writing essays in response to that as well so that was so far the only big like investigative piece we've done and it was really, you know, frightening for me Yeah, that's the kind of reporting that is really difficult to do as a small organization without that infrastructure of, as you say, lots of editors and lawyers and, you know, the money to back it up if needed I think, yeah, I'd like to open up the floor to questions if we have any I see somebody right back there Jordan, you want me to take the mic? Oh, thank you Thanks so much Yeah, maybe take the whole thing Hi, so as a young person I was just kind of wondering from what you were just talking about do you think that the future of theater arts journalism is going to be including more pieces about the context around the artwork and kind of holding each other accountable as not like in pieces like West Side Story, for example of kind of the social, political and historical context that we need to acknowledge around that do you think that there is a space in theater arts journalism to not just include reviews and criticisms but really hold ourselves accountable to different contexts around if that makes sense Yeah, I absolutely do think that's necessary I think in terms of current events and the things that are happening in the world like every time we produce a show we should be asking ourselves why this story right now and there have been some moments in Rescripted we had one recently where I had a critic Lucas Garcia who's brilliant who wrote a review of a show called Language Rooms, an absurdist play Lucas is a person of color but this show is for people of Manasa heritage right, Middle Eastern and North Africa and South Asian so when this piece came out they wrote a review that was pretty glowing and praised the piece but then on Facebook they saw folks from this community talking about how it was not representing them correctly how it was causing harm and they were like well what do I do do I rewrite the piece and I said no I think actually we should run two pieces I think you should publish the review as it stood and how you actually felt because that's who you are and your wonderful soul, right and then you should also publish something challenging your own ideals and why you received it this way and how these folks changed your minds because that has to be just as much a part of the conversation about the work if we just say that it's bad then that doesn't help that company grow it doesn't help anyone grow if we're just being reflexive and being dismissive but if we can say this is how I interrogated my biases and this is how I'm being accountable to my community I think it creates a different level of trust between critics and audience that is going to be really necessary for the field to survive I would just say I think that the opportunity for that kind of reconsideration or just a second take on one's own first take is one of the actually great opportunities that we have by not being restricted by print schedules and paid space Mark, I see you had something to say Yeah, absolutely so we've tried to do that and I want you to do it more so a couple of years ago there was a musical theater in town that did a world premiere called Kwanah it was about the Comanche Chief Kwanah Parker from the Comanche tribe on the border of Texas and Oklahoma and Larry Gatlin wrote the music for that and they cast as Kwanah Parker a popular Christian singer, a white man and so when that casting and announcement was made there was of course a lot of talk about it on social media and I thought we just, we can't ignore this so one of our writers did a really great essay about it and referenced I want to say deep trends Miss Saigon's story and talked a lot about representation and we didn't, we actually did not review it I felt strongly enough about it that I did not want to give an opinion from a critic as a review because we had written the essay about it we've also started, I talked about our monthly column so we have a monthly podcast now done by two young theater artists who run a new LGBTQIA company but they're also dedicated to covering underrepresented voices and so every month they're talking they're interviewing other artists in town talking about issues of race and representation and sexuality so they've done a piece on non-binary actors they've done a piece on Asian actors they recently did a piece on mental health in which is a track at this conference and so I love having those kind of conversations and I want to do more of that and yes I think we're absolutely responsible to do that and those are the kind of things we never would have done in the newspaper Thank you I also wanted to say that in addition to just contextualizing works that may be received differently I'm actually really compelled by reviews or articles, forms of journalism which really reflect a personal place that the writer is coming from and I want to mention Jose Solis who I just think is doing really beautiful things with reviews or responses to artwork and you know he wrote this great piece about what the Constitution means to me that was from the point of view of taking a young woman to see a family member and I think about that I think about Laura Collins Hughes' piece about Big River where she talked about what it meant to her as a woman and I think that for me personally as a fan having someone who can reflect my experience back to me in the review, in the response is something that's incredibly powerful and it doesn't need to be part of an objective yay or nay, it's actually really like how would I feel sitting in the room and so that's something that I think will become and I'm hopeful and I think will become more a part of the conversation. Yeah, I would just add to that. I've had conversations with critical colleagues over the years, some of whom have expressed the opinion that they think there should not be first person in reviews that I think it's a sort of traditionalist a stance that you should be writing from a place of authority and I think that that authority is really largely imagined and that I think we have an opportunity now that we are all sort of coming into our individual voices more to be able to reflect that that we've never really been objective. All criticism is subjective as Wesley Morris was talking about in the plenary this morning. You know, we're, I think we have an opportunity to admit to ourselves that we are not here to be right. We're here to be ourselves. Another question, perhaps? Absolutely. How do you deal with issues of quality in the work you're publishing since, you know, most of you, well, you know, most people are bad writers and Regina, you talked about you're doing this, you're training people. So, and I imagine you're all stretched thin and doing a zillion things and so how do you deal with quality? You know, the quality of the piece, so somebody's not rambling on for 2,000 words or it's all about them or there's no idea or, you know, all the problem issues that you get with writing and the time that you have. Sounds like you're asking me about. The writing itself and, you know, sort of the discipline to sort of figure out what you wanna say and how to say it in whatever, whether it's a review or a preview or any kind of a piece. I would love to hear more about your process with the key and with the critics because I only came in at the end when I was in the process. Yeah, so the way we approach it with the key at least is that I mentioned before it's a six-week program so those sessions are three-hour sessions every other week, on their off week they see a show and then we come back together and we workshop those pieces individually. It's four to six students so we workshop their pieces individually for about an hour and a half and then we have about a half-hour discussion of a topic that we think that is relevant to the field they should know about and then we have a guest artist for the last hour to expose them to what exactly a director does, a lighting designer, a marketing director so they understand the roles of everyone that they're reviewing. In terms of quality control of the writing, I have to shout out this amazing organization that I feel like never gets love which is her campus. It is a collegiate magazine that is nationwide and you can start a chapter at any university. I was the founding managing editor of that university, of my university chapter at Santa Clara so in terms of publishing schedules and style guides and things like that, all of those traditional journalism practices I already knew from doing that for four years and in addition to that, I've been working in dramatic criticism and as a dramaturg in the writing skills that come from working in that scholarship so that is essentially what I teach, we just teach MLA but it is important for me to say I strongly also believe in English being flexible to people as long as you understand it, I really have problems adhering to grammar in the strict sense that I feel like it can be colonizing sometimes, it can really just oppress people's ability to understand something and so if a sentence maybe is not structured exactly correctly and it's easier to understand than if it were structured correctly, I'm more likely to publish the vernacular. There are pieces that I choose to write in a more vernacular and approachable style because I want them to talk to a specific audience so the quality control varies very much but in terms of the content and what they're writing about and what they're focusing on, the basic principles of criticism like what are they trying to do, did they do it well and then what do you think about it which Bill brought up in another conference, we teach those sorts of things but we really try to let them employ their own voice and find out what professionalism sounds like in their voice rather than having a style guide forced upon them if that makes sense. I really quickly like to add to that. I mean, I really would like to challenge the question of what is quality and what are you aiming to do? I mean, if you're trying to write a scholarly evaluation that's going to grantors or funders, your goal is very different but if you're trying to reach an audience and particularly a new audience to connect with your work it may not look like a traditional review and it's very easy to use a broad word like quality or objectivity or authority to prevent new voices or new responses which I think is very dangerous for the field. I want to defend myself a little bit. I don't mean like everybody has to write like a traditional newspaper review or a traditionally scholarly article. And I taught writing at University of Miami for several semesters. I just, you know, I see so much on social media that things like, oh, it was so great. Oh, it was so cool. Or that people are often not used to articulating ideas or figuring out what they want to say. I don't mean about using vernacular or adhering to traditional or formal language or any of that but it's really hard to articulate an idea or to have a point or an angle or something that you're trying to, yeah, a structure. I've seen stories in professional platforms where people like, it feels like the whole story, the profile is they just transcribe the person's resume. And that's not a story even if it's written in nice senses. Yeah, just to jump back to the idea of voice for a moment. I mean, I can say, as a full-time freelancer now writing for half a dozen different publications, I have to retool my own writing voice like three times a day because writing for the New York Times is very different from writing for, you know, Chicago Magazine or for my own newsletter where I am much more free and loose and informal. And that's something that I learned from 10 years of time out which cultivated a very irreverent voice. But in my time as an editor there, I developed a lot of writers, all of whom sort of came in with an interest in theater and were not necessarily, I brought in a lot of folks who had no formal reviewing experience. And I was lucky that I had great editors because I was not a journalism major. I was a theater major. I learned all of this on the job myself. So I had great editors who just through trial and error, I think really, just through repetition and practice taught me a lot about how to convey ideas and emotions and feelings. I look back now, I was telling this to Regina over lunch, if I look back at reviews I had published in 2005, 2006, I'm like, thank God that's not on the internet anymore. So I don't want my name attached to it. Yeah, I guess I would round that out by saying, you know, I feel like my job is just to help people find their expertise and what that is. That's why I talk about lived experiences. Like an example is Lene Hickman, a student I have who went through the key, who's a student at DePaul and is still writing for us professionally now, she wanted to review Matilda. And I was like, great, well, if you want to review this musical, like why are you so passionate about it? And she was like, listen, I've read the book, I've seen the movie, I've seen the original musical, I want to do a contrasting piece talking about what this Matilda is doing differently and the things that I think it could approach. And I was like, this 19 year old is a scholar on Matilda. And like just asking that question, you know, spurs an expertise that we may not have thought that person had. And so discovering what you really know and being able to live in and enjoy that, I think your expertise comes out naturally, right? And your quality control comes out naturally. But practically, something I did when I started that I will just give out this for free is I would always literally write set, three adjectives, lighting, three adjectives, sound, three adjectives, so that I knew I had something to say about everything, you know, because it just makes you pay attention in a slightly different way. So that's one of the ways that we can get past like it was entertaining, like what did it do to you? How did it make you feel? Oh, it was great. Yeah, right. Yeah, I guess. Oh, yeah. And then there's one in the back who's been waiting for a while too. Like I ever needed microphone. I'm gonna stumble around here. There is clearly a need for diverse voices, diverse backgrounds, non-traditional approaches, et cetera. And most of you know I'm the chairman of the American Theater Critics Association. I started out as a dead tree legacy media person and now I'm completely online. And it's important and ATCA is very conscious of the fact that we need to be far more understanding of how there are more venues, there are more approaches, okay? That's important because I'm about to sound like I'm gonna contradict myself. But when she talked about quality, I believe deeply that there is a difference between venting, having an opinion, and actually being someone who has critical analysis skills, which you have to develop by learning how to do things. But the fact that somebody's got an opinion and can put five sentences together or shoot an Instagram picture as they walk out the door, in and of itself the fact that it's original is cool, but that doesn't necessarily mean automatically that that's quality. The fact that somebody has a unique way of approaching and expressing themselves does not mean that there is inherent an analytical skill and critical skill. And I think maybe I'm showing my age. I think I'm very open to more voices. I'm more open to people learning how to do what they're doing because none of us, none of us started out having any idea what the hell we were doing. But I think I'd like to see the world acknowledge that there's a difference between people who love theater and talk about it and people who know how to look at it and put context and history and analysis in there. I'm gonna tell you one quick story. There was a chat room on the internet back when CompuServe was still there. And I remember very well, there was this theater lover 14 and he wrote, this is going back 35 years or more. The greatest musical of all time is Les Miserables and the second greatest musical of all time was something similar. And I thought, okay, those are great musicals but they're not the greatest musicals of all time. Of course it turned out that his name was Theater Lever 14 because he was 14. And you didn't know that. And his experience level was extremely limited. So I just wanna put out an ability to make a differentiation between someone who has an interestingly expressed opinion as opposed to someone who's doing a critical analysis. I don't wanna babble on too much about this because we don't have too much time. But no, no, you're good. But something that I wanna address too because I get accused of this a lot is what is venting, right? And is it about receiving something that is not in a tone that is usually written in? Because for example, something that I do really intentionally have a series called Dear White Critics. And I write it, literally it is responsive. It is usually when something atrocious has happened. So for example, we had a critic print the N-word in Chicago and I wrote Dear White Critics, please stop saying the N-word, right? And I write a critical analysis. I actually sit there and I highlight blocks of text. I highlight blocks of text and I write a response and I highlight a block of text and I write a response. And I always open with something that will make anyone who's reading it know that I am holding them and seeing them and that they are safe and that this dialect is something that they can understand. Essentially, I refuse to code switch in writing. And I think that a lot of times that humor and that sharpness can be perceived as ill-will when really it is like when people of color are upset they use humor to talk about something and it can often be perceived as being angry when really like I'm laughing to keep from crying kind of a thing. So I just want to introduce that also into the conversation. I guess I would say I doubt that anyone is mistaking Theater Fan 14 for a professional critic. I don't think that, I think there is room for, you know, Instagram influencers and fans on chat boards and, you know, professional analysis all to live alongside each other and all to reach their own different audiences and, boy, what we need is to reach audiences that we're not already reaching. I guess I understand what you're saying but I wonder if that type of thinking is what has led people to think that it's an elitist art form that only people with a certain level of understanding should be able to come into. Like, not the same with brain, but yeah, so I guess just, you know, I worry that you tell a 14 year old that his opinions aren't valid because he doesn't have a full understanding and that 14 year old then chooses a different art form with which to be able to be a part of. All the ones that are successful right now, right? Like your phone, your phone tells you that your photographer and your laptop tells you that you can like mix music, right? Any art form that can figure out how to make you be an active participant is succeeding where art forms that tell you you're not smart enough, you're not this enough, you're not that enough, why would you not go somewhere else with it? So I hear what you're saying but I worry that that overall attitude encourages people to leave the art form altogether. And actually, sorry, can I just add? I also, I've spent my whole career obsessing about audiences. I was a marketing director and now I run a website that's really only about audiences. Do I feel that there is a place for analytical intellectual criticism? As a sort of, we've talked about this in a previous session as a sort of historical record, as documentation, as scholarship, absolutely. Do I feel that it can engage a conversation with an audience either before or after a work that is literary and in a way art for art's sake, absolutely, but I think that sometimes we make it very hard for audiences to figure out the answer when they want a simple answer. And to either, what should I see? How do I engage with theater? Where should I go? And frankly, if a young woman who tells an Instagram story right out of the theater can sell tickets and get new audiences in, that is a totally different goal and that is a goal that I'm passionate about. And so I absolutely, there's a place for both, but if we're talking about the future of criticism and responding to work, which is essentially I think what we're talking about here, I think that we maybe need to play with what the balance is there. Sorry. We are pretty much out of time, but I know there's one person who has had his hand up in the back there if we can just quickly do one more question. Yeah, this was just, hi, I'm Jason Parrish with Florida Repertory Theater. Just going back to that quality question, it sounds to me like those of you who run organizations, you have a way of making sure that the people you are sending out to respond to these things have the knowledge and the know how to do it. The frustrating thing for at least me in my area is that there are newspapers that are sending people out to do these reviews who in my opinion could be better at that job. And then we also have this Broadway world is sending out regional people. And I think they're volunteers, but I'm not exactly sure. And so the quality of the review of the critical response varies from region to region. And in Fort Myers Naples, she is very enthusiastic. And that's where it ends. They become these book reports that say I liked it, it was good. And then, and so that's problematic for us because when we wanna use that review, it comes with the tag Broadwayworld.com. So I wish that there was a way to train those people that Broadwayworld would take it upon themselves or is there a way for us to help them with that? Those sorts of things. I mean, it would be wonderful if Broadwayworld had the budget to hire editors for every city that they cover. But yeah, like you say, they are basically volunteers. I'm not sure if there's a good answer to that. To the first part of your question though about newspaper folks who might be, you think might be able to do a better job. I mean, I know John Moore right here talked to this morning about how he started it as a sports writer. So I think that to a certain degree, all of us, all of our lives are learning on the job. And those of us who have a passion and can learn the skill like are the ones who are gonna keep at it really quickly, Mark. So yeah, we realize that that is a need. And we do have trained people from the journalism side, from the arts side as a nonprofit part of our budget going forward is to bring in a training element as well. And also to write about issues that we're not covering like arts and education and the intersection of art and science and art and medicine and audiences who are differently abled in working with artists and audiences and those kind of things. And I also wanna say real quickly, it's very important and we have done this to find writers of color, not just to write about the work, the culturally specific work that matches their color, but to write about everything in every form on the site. And we've been doing that and plan to grow that as well. Also, community accountability, please write a letter to your editor and ask for better coverage. That's a very good point. I will say one thing that we did with the cohorts when we were in Rochester is that we invited the local critics to be a part of it in exchange for not reviewing the shows that they could be inside. And actually the amazing thing that came out of it is at the end they were like, oh my God, you can't review previews. You know what I mean? Which is like, should be a breakthrough but it's like, if they don't know what it is. And I lived in Atlanta when they moved the food critic over to the theater critic. So I understand that if we can do some level of educating them, then it's a benefit to all of us. I think we really do have to call it there. We're about five over. But thank you so much everyone for being here. Thanks to our panel.