Want a little review with that play?
UPDATE: The discussion at Portland Arts Watch on this post is getting robust as well. You might want to have a look.
I just posted a version of this at Portland Arts Watch, and I’m thinking that I’ll extend it to these precincts as well, because I really do want to hear opinions about this topic. It’s something I’ve wondered about for a long time: How review-centric should newspaper/site coverage of the arts be? That boils down to a multitude of individual judgments, and I’d love to hear your thinking!
Everyone knows that this an era of shrinking resources at your local newsgathering operation (which we once called a “newspaper”). That means fewer staff members and less space in the paper for just about every section and department. And that in turn means a reconsideration of almost all of the coverage habits that have been developed over the decades.
The arts and culture department hasn’t been excluded from this, of course, either at The Oregonian or at other operations across the country (where the trimming often has been more radical in arts than other sections). We’re not going to go into all of that now, but a couple of posts we picked up on ArtsJournal do single out and discuss one of those coverage habits in the arts — the daily review, theater in this case, but by extension, all newspaper reviews.
The first move was made by Melodie Bahan, the director of communications at the Guthrie Theater (one of the country’s most important regional companies) writing on PlayList, a Minneapolis performing arts magazine and website. Her post is very critical of newspaper arts writing, at least as practiced by humans less astute than Frank Rich, her favorite theater critic (who stopped reviewing for the New York Times in 1993). And she must have known that it would aggravate the theater writers and editors in the area, especially on the biggest paper, the Star Tribune, which has two theater critics on staff. She was either very unhappy or very courageous.
Here is her argument. It starts from this observation: newspaper reviews aren’t very good — they are shallow, cursory, quickly written. Readers don’t read them (she somehow comes up with the number 97 percent), and the reviews don’t add to our overall understanding of the theater scene — either the individuals or the institutions inside it. Because reviews form the backbone of what critics do, they don’t have time to develop and tell these longer stories. Her solution: Stop reviewing and start reporting.
A key paragraph:
Does the average newspaper reader even skim - much less read - a review of the latest production from a small theater company she’s never heard of and has no intention of seeing? Probably not. But she might well read movie reviews and almost certainly reads feature stories about the movie industry, even if she sees only two or three movies a year. I believe it’s because, in part, newspapers provide stories about the film industry that explain and inform, yet provide little real coverage of the theater community in this town.
I would argue that there is no “average” newspaper reader. There are particular readers, each one with a set of interests that somehow intersects with what the newspaper writes about. And I would observe that reviews affect theater companies directly. A series of excellent reviews in The Oregonian, for example, helped Third Rail Repertory Theatre leap into the local major leagues in only a couple of years. Which means that somebody is reading them, and even acting on them.
But that doesn’t mean that the same readers also wouldn’t appreciate the sort of story that Bahan is suggesting — more behind-the-scenes, more “journalistic.” But for her, it’s not an also sort of deal.
This is how she says it:
I’m not against theater reviews; I’m against theater reviews that are poorly written, thumbs-up-or-down laundry lists of actors and designers that don’t do anything to illuminate the production or give readers a real sense of the experience. Maybe it’s not fair to compare our local critics to Frank Rich, but I think there’s a solution: Stop writing reviews and start writing news.
David Brauer, writing on MinnPost, a Minneapolis online news site, posted about Bahan’s rip, and then received a phone call from senior arts editor at the Tribune, Claude Peck. Which he posted.
Peck argued that in fact, reviews were a good thing, whether the reader was going to see the play or not.
…97 percent of people reading that review would not be attending that play. And for those people, we still want them to read that review. They just want to read an intelligent and insightful piece of analytical writing.
That’s a subtle misreading of what Bahan said. She said that 97 percent of the people wouldn’t bother to read the review at all. Which implies that the Tribune is investing a lot of its resources for reviews that get 3 percent of the potential audience for them. And I suspect that Peck is wrong, if Bahan is right: A positive review would motivate far more than 3 percent of the readers of the review to attend the show. In other words, the review has a big impact on a small number of readers, and by extension, a big impact on theater companies. (In Portland, a show that draws 5,000 or so during the course of its run is a big hit, except at Portland Center Stage, which has a house that’s more than double the size of any other theater in town). Which is why theater companies really want their shows reviewed, generally speaking. The newspaper is speaking directly to their (potential) audience.
Well, Mr. Peck, what about the “bad” reviews the Tribune runs?
“That’s going to have to be figured out between our editors, and our writers and our readers,” he said tersely.
I like Brauer’s “tersely” there. Gives it a bite without going over the top. And I like that Peck includes the readers, though I know from experience that involving readers directly in these sorts of discussions — about newspaper writing quality — is vanishingly rare. What’s the forum? What’s the standard? How do we get a significant enough sample to make it actionable?
Let’s dispense with Bahan’s Rich obsession. Ben Brantley, the current and primary New York Times critic, is really good, too. Graydon Royce at the Tribune isn’t bad either, at least in the small sample I just read. And I suspect he might be really good if he had the same amount of space that Brantley (and Rich) has — Brantley’s front-of-the-art -section takes often run more than 1,000 words. That would give him room to develop his observations more fully and gradually, over time, make his sensibility (I hesitate to call it aesthetic, which sounds so airy) more transparent.
But this is what Bahan is talking about really. She doesn’t care about the space limits at the newspaper. And she must think that the longer more feature-like takes would have more affect for her theater (and giving her the benefit of the doubt) the theater community in general, that they would reach into the 97 percent of non-readers and stir up more interest than the reviews.
Should Tribune theater-writing resources be scattered among dozens of theaters in stage-rich Minneapolis? Or should they be deployed on larger stories? That question still stands. And Peck really doesn’t answer it, except to say that the Tribune will continue to try to do both, which presumably it will do less and less well as resources continue to shrink. I understand his reluctance to engage the question; weirdly, at this moment, it’s proving difficult for newspapers to change their habits — their way of organizing themselves, reporting, writing (and for that matter selling themselves to advertisers and readers). You might think it would be easy, but it’s not for a variety of reasons (one of which is simply lack of confidence that a new approach might work better).
There’s a missing piece of information, as I’ve suggested.
It happens to be you. The audience for theater. The readers of the newspaper (and its website). Not to mention Art Scatter. You play the arts editor: How do you want your writers spending their time? What sort of writing do you want them to be doing? Criticism has been the backbone of newspaper arts writing since critics started appearing in large numbers on the payroll as staff writers, which didn’t come about really until the 1960s. Is it time to move past the review and embrace something more journalistic as Bahan suggests? Or is the system as it is (with improvements, of course) a responsible way to deal with arts in the community?
That, of course, is a special invitation to comment, if you want.
February 7th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
Criticism may be the backbone of newspaper arts writing, but criticism is not the same thing as reviewing. A critic, given enough space, can write an informed consideration of a play, a movie, a book, or of the process that leads to the finished piece. But most arts writers are given too little space, and they are asked to stick to description and evaluation — a thumbs or or thumbs down that is more a consumer review than it is an act of criticism. The arts are essential because they give us a chance to think deeply and critically; criticism is the act of doing that in public. I’m baffled by editors who think art should be reviewed like a new gadget or a car. Bahan is right to decry that. Ideally, newspapers will have room for real art criticism. But if they don’t, I’d rather read short, well-researched news stories about the arts and artists than “reviews” comprised of description and an opinion, thumbs up or thumbs down (or, worse, those report card grades that tell me one movie is a “D+” while another is a “B”).
February 7th, 2009 at 5:37 pm
Right, reviews aren’t necessarily the same thing as “criticism.” If newspapers used the space they have for cultural coverage on some longer pieces of criticism (which actually does involve research and reporting), would you favor that approach?
February 7th, 2009 at 7:37 pm
A good newspaper arts writer is many things: reviewer, critic, reporter, feature writer, business writer, essayist. Writing for a general audience, she or he is a generalist, which is not a dig — in a representative democracy, a smart generalist is a very good and important thing to be. You can call particular pieces that a newspaper reviewer writes criticism, and particular other pieces reviews, but if the writer’s good and smart and interesting, he or she develops a critical relationship with readers. Criticism, in the important sense of exploration and explanation, becomes a part of everything the writer writes, and thus the ongoing conversation becomes an act of criticism. Not academic criticism. General, public criticism, that responds to many needs.
Yes, with shrinking space, that critical conversation is getting tougher to pull off. Much of it, if it survives, will be carried on on the newspapers’ Web sites. The Oregonian is moving toward short reviews in print and more extended ones online. The other day, for instance, I wrote a review of a gallery show that ran about four inches in the paper and maybe 30 inches — I didn’t measure, because there’s no need to — online. Whether it qualified as criticism, I’ll let someone else decide. But it was certainly much more in depth.
February 8th, 2009 at 9:57 am
I too loathe the report card scores employed by the Oregonian and others these days, and agree with all three comments. I have colleagues however who will not write feature and news stories because they feel they are then not critics, but publicists. And let’s face it, what the directors of arts institutions really want isn’t reviewing or criticism which might be negative (perish the thought) is positive strokes, not only to sell tickets but to include in grant applications. They want us to work for them, not the audience or our readers, all six of them. As for editorial or publisher shortening of review space, Dance Magazine used to publish something like six reviews an issue with a couple more on the web; now it’s two or three per issue, with maybe two more on the web and none is longer than 350 words unless it’s a season review. Pointe Magazine has fired its review editor and isn’t running any. And so it goes (away)
February 8th, 2009 at 11:51 am
What do you guys think that readers really want? I understand that this is just guess-work, but a good guess is all we’ve got at this point!
February 8th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
I am a reader and I want informed consideration of the choices made by artists and the historical context in which those choices are made; that is to say, critical writing. Whether long articles or short, I am NOT interested in the tastes of the writer. I really don’t care whether a particular movie or book or play or art show is liked or disliked, appealing or off-putting. The great waste of time in most papers today is this constant parading of taste…thumbs up or thumbs down.
February 8th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
Just a follow-up note to say that I have figured out how to spell my own name: “Stadler.”
February 8th, 2009 at 12:18 pm
That’s very good Mr Stadler! Getting the names right starts with our own…
Now, you are getting to the nub of things. Yes, context and artists choices. I would add close observation and effects, which tend to be personal (and that’s fine with me). Basically, a critic is trying to describe something in a useful way, in increasingly useful ways, to the reader. And for me, I would agree, the “taste” of the critic is low on my useful list. In the terms of this debate, Bahan finds the little review less than useful and Peck suggests that it is. Who’s doing the reading matters a LOT in this context.
As Bob pointed out, newspaper writers are generalists, more or less, so there are limits to their researches on any one topic. It’s hard to be useful to everyone across the board, especially when you’re writing about Boucher and Michael Brophy in the same week. A lot of the time you’re summarizing what the current position of those artists is and then tossing in your two cents. Which CAN be worth even less than two cents.
And that’s why web solutions offer so many possibilities — if there’s a print show at PAM about which no one at Art Scatter knows a blessed thing and can’t be bothered to research, then someone in the audience, for whom that print show is Ground Zero, might be able to help. That would be Open Source Art Scatter, which we would love to do, actually.
February 8th, 2009 at 9:57 pm
Good conversation here. Journalists of any kind are supposed to be serving the readers, not the artists (if there’s a conflict) or their own egos. I tend to follow John Cage’s advice that arts journalists should be introducers more than critics. First, we should give readers the info they need to decide whether to take a chance on a show / recording / film / whatever. Tell them what audience is likely to connect with a given work or performance.
Then there’s the judgment function that’s critical to raising a community’s artistic standards — how well does the work succeed, both on its own terms and in the larger context of other works?
Ideally, of course, we’d provide it all: informed previews, fair reviews, context-laden features and profiles, etc. The declining bandwith is forcing editors into hard choices. Previews seem to be winning the battle for shrinking news holes in one-time shows (that is, non-recurring performances) for obvious reasons, especially in weeklies, and so I sometimes find myself squeezing bits of a review of a previous performance into a preview of the next one. My major national market, the Wall Street Journal, seldom reviews music performances, generally limiting its occasional reviews to recurring events (theater productions and major art exhibitions) that some readers might actually have a chance of attending. So I generally write context laden features and profiles for the WSJ, sometimes working in a brief appraisal or description of a concert.
This is why local dailies still play such a, er, critical role. A timely review of a Friday concert in Saturday’s paper still gives audiences time to attend Sunday or Monday’s show, along with next week’s.
There’s just no substitute for a veteran critic who has historical perspective on the community’s art and a broader perspective on how that community’s art fits in the greater national and international context.
That’s why I lament the O’s dwindling arts coverage, but it still does a better job than most dailies I’m aware of, especially for a town this size. Any town would be lucky to have a David Stabler or Barry Johnson on its daily’s staff. Yet we’re seeing less and less arts criticism in Portland print. Given how many more readers are getting their news online, will O Live actually provide as much informed arts writing to Portlanders as a good local daily used to? Or maybe more?
At Willamette Week and other weeklies, more and more reviews appear online only. And they pay so little (or nothing) that many of us who depend on freelance income for a living can’t afford write them, preferring to spend our limited time on work that pays the bills. This is why I almost never write reviews these days, and it saddens me. But I’m not on staff, and I have bills to pay. (Why am I even writing this, in fact?) So if these trends continue, as the journalistic economic crunch forces more work to be outsourced to freelancers like me, I fear we’ll see fewer reviews, at least those tied to old line journalistic entities.
What’s disappointing is that this city -wide decline in print coverage of the arts is happening just at the moment when the Portland art scene is exploding. We’re passing the point where mere critical boosterism is needed to ensure that events are attended. The profusion of new work by new voices demands informed coverage that holds our many vanity productions to constructive critical standards. Artists would benefit from it as much as readers.
Admittedly, it’s also easy for long-time or insecure critics to identify so much with the artists that they lose perspective, which is why it’s often refreshing when a new, opinionated voice comes to town, whether in print or online.
Still, as much as I welcome new voices via the web, I wonder how often the virtual marketplace of ideas will ensure that well informed, fair minded writers will rise to the top. Not that they always did in newspapers, either.
Local independent websites like Northwest Reverb and PORT run some informed reviews with unlimited bandwith. Are they enough? The O lost Randy Gragg, but Portland has Randy’s excellent Portland Spaces in print and online, not to mention Brian LIbby’s Portland Architecture site. Are they adequate compensation? (I don’t know because Randy left the O just as I moved here.)
One of my other occasional markets, Classical Voice, is online only and regularly provides good-to-excellent coverage (reviews, previews, essays, features) of San Francisco area classical music performances. Unlike NW Reverb, it pays, and it attracts veteran critics, academics and performers. Their work is pitched to a slightly “niche-ier” audience than your average daily’s, but most of it is still readable by and interesting to music lovers of all levels. It’s still journalism. I don’t know its financial particulars, but it may provide a viable model, though for a somewhat specialized audience.
What other, similar sites are out there that actually focus on reviews and previews, not just essays and general opinion? Are they tied to daily or weekly print pubs, or independent web-only entities? What outlets are giving readers interested in the arts the info they need?
February 9th, 2009 at 8:36 am
Wow! Thanks, Brett. Just to jump to the end and the questions. I don’t know that many sites dedicated to reviewing at this point or aggregating other reviews — except in film and pop music, where there are plenty. Newspaper sites usually have a few more and a little longer reviews than they publish in print, but it’s not something they are “proud” of enough to publicize very much. The New York Times is the exception right now. Looking around our local sites, full-blown reviews pop up from time to time, but like covering a city council meeting, those are hard work, take lots of time and research, and it’s difficult to justify for a writer if there’s no pay involved. Having said that, PORT has a nice review of the Tacoma Biennial (with some Portland artists involved), and TJ Norris has a very interesting take on the Portland Art Museum show on his blog right now.
February 9th, 2009 at 8:50 am
I think Bahan is giving her audience too much credit. For your average casual theatergoer, the most erudite critical essay or illuminating preview is less of a motivation to see a show than an endorsement from someone they trust. Given the limitations I face at Willamette Week (covering theater is only a fraction of my job; I have no space for long critical essays and no time to thoroughly report thoughtful preview pieces that would be anything more than blind publicity), all I hope to provide to my readers is a consistent voice. They know what sort of things I like, and can decide for themselves whether I’m trustworthy.
I think what most arts presenters would like is for us to write enthusiastic preview pieces without having seen the work in question. How does that serve our audiences? Theater is an expensive art form to produce and patronize, and all it takes is one positive preview of a stinker to put readers off our writing (or, worse, theater in general) for good.
What we should be doing, granted plentiful time and money, is writing about the people and institutions behind the art in interesting, thoroughly reported news stories, while offering in-depth, well considered criticism. I see no problem with the old formula——we just need the time and money to do it correctly.
Perhaps Bahan thinks the reviewing of plays should be turned over to the audiences at large, depriving elitist theater critics of our exclusive punditry. That’s all well and good, in theory. But newspaper writers are at least constrained in our writing by the limits of grammar and taste. I think one look at Followspot might change her mind about the merits of crowd-sourced criticism.
February 9th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
Ben, thanks for commenting on this. I think the time and money issues are what’s putting the squeeze on everyone. And even if you have them now, you wonder about the future and whether you will still have them down the road. I though Bahan’s position was going to get more support than it has, but both here and at Portland Arts Watch, the review is being defended with vigor (and some excellent writing, I might add). The theater people want reviews, too, even though that means they can sometimes get negative ones, primarily, I think, because they understand the importance of informed (relatively) and free-flowing debate and the outside opinion.
There IS a vast imbalance here, of course. I read a play, maybe talk to a director, do a few hours of research perhaps, see the performance, come back and write for a few hours, and then I’m done! To put on a play, whether it’s good or not, is so much more complex and time-consuming, so much more is invested, than in a typical review for a newspaper or website.
February 10th, 2009 at 11:19 am
Thanks, Barry. I guess we’ll find out soon whether these new, independent sites can become sustainable. It’s all pretty much unfolding in front of us. The promise of instantaneous response and unlimited news hole has been beckoning like Odysseus’s sirens for a decade now but, as much as I like the various ArtsJournal blogs (and I’ve discussed this at length with Doug McLennan) and other local variants, I’m not sure the state of arts journalism has improved for most readers in the past few years. Maybe we’re just in a transitional moment on the way to universal web access and in a few years, the economics will follow the technology so that we wind up with more and better arts journalism online than we had in print.
One more point I should have made earlier: the space crunch imposes a bias in favor of positivity. That is, with fewer column inches available, I tend to use what’s left to draw readers’ attention to shows they should see, rather than spending those dwindling inches dissing , er, constructing an informed critique of performances that didn’t work or artists who are, in my judgment, on the wrong track. That’s generally not a problem, as I tend to figure that if something has an audience and I don’t like it, it’s probably some gap in my own tastes. But it raises a couple of problems. First, if a show is excluded, will readers assume that we’re leaving it out because it sucks and there’s no room to chronicle suckage, or that we left it out because there were just too many really great shows happening to include a merely good one, or one that might be better than others we did include but that we had to omit because we already previewed/reviewed too many shows in that genre already, or … fill in whatever other reason for exclusion beyond suckage you can imagine.
The other problem is that, once you get past the sophomoric yet undeniable pleasures of writing a deliciously vicious review of some deserving target (it’s a rite of passage for young alt press writers), there can be value in constructive negative criticism. Assuming good intentions all around, a truly well informed critic can do artists and audiences a real service by pointing out what she considers to be their lapses and misjudgments. In fact, that sort of critique might be precisely what Portland needs more of at this point in its artistic evolution. Yet the space crunch means we’re seeing less of it than we should.
BTW, one reason I’m productive time writing this for free is that I feel an obligation to the organizations that sponsored me on a couple of national arts writing fellowships in LA and NYC. They wanted us to bring the insights we gleaned there back to our own communities, and this is partial repayment of that obligation. (I actually pitched a story on this to the O a couple years ago.) So maybe the mere fact that it’s appearing here instead says something about what’s happening in local arts journalism. But don’t let that stop you from cutting me a check anyway….
February 10th, 2009 at 11:46 am
Brett, We will cut you in for a full share of today’s advertising proceeds! But seriously, thanks for the extended consideration of the problem at hand.