Why be like the competition?

The real drawback for the arts, when it comes to the local-news-is-king business model that is coming to dominate the bigger dailies, is that it kills arts coverage.

Movies, TV, pop and classical music CDs, books -- all of that is, more or less corporate and nationwide. Ergo, in this scenario, unless there's sufficient local activity in those arts -- and frequently, there isn't -- then there's little reason for much of an arts staff or arts section.

The idea that, say, the local classical music critic might have something original to say about the latest Placido Domingo CD is not a consideration. Without enough of a local TV industry or theater community to bother with, those beats get killed or cobbled together under one arts writer-editor-critic or covered by wire stories.

As for the argument that people buy the NYTimes all over the country, and that's proof of Mr. Dvorak's thesis -- it's bullshit. Only people of a certain economic and educated kind buy the NYTimes all over the country. The Times deliberately set out to snare that audience, and the mantra used to be that the Times would sell basically within 5 miles (or 10 or whatever) of any place with a Saks store. In short, college-educated, upper-middle-class- to upper-class people are more alike from Florida to Oregon than they are like their blue-collar neighbors.

Many big dailies began to look alike because they were all striving to be the same thing -- the NYTimes. Mr. Dvorak would take it as evidence for his argument that, despite all the bewailing over the fate of newspapers, small-to-medium-sized dailies are generally doing very well, thank you. And he's right insofar as they stress local content.

But take a look at what those dailies do with arts coverage and see if that's anything you want to advocate.

Much of this discussion over the past several posts presupposes the average consumer is endlessly waiting for breaking news and is obsessed with that media which provides the best source.

I would submit that historically what most consumers wanted, in markets where there was more than one newspaper, was their favorite comic strips. I realize this is an unfamiliar concept to many people since newspapers have broken this important bond a long time ago for a variety of idiotic reasons, but I would like to cite a few examples.

Back in the 50's when the Washington Post bought out the Washington Herald which was a Joe McCarthy supporting newspaper, they kept the majority of their readers because they brought over all of their comics.

I forget the book where this was cited, but a long time later while in college when I stayed over at a friend's house, she insisted in the morning I get what was generally considered a journalistically inferior paper because of a certain comic strip. I was of course miffed a bit because of the journalism but mainly because I felt the comics in the other paper superior (due specifically to the previous citation) and finally, since I normally write about arts in my blog, this from the late Chicago arts critic Claudia Cassidy, apparently Gertrude Stein used to complain that she had to buy two copies of the International Herald Tribune because Picasso and his lover at the time both demanded to be the first one to read a strip called 'The Katzenjammer Kids".

I have heard other similar stories of much more recent vintage, but my point is that once upon a time not that long ago, most people read the front page and then dove for the comic strips. The papers as I mentioned started treating them like excess baggage and once it became a matter of getting just news newspapers lost to nearly everyone else.

By the way one of the problems with the so-called new media is that when people do searches they can gain a great deal of information about the subject for which they are looking, but what newspapers provided-back when they were written for those who were literate-was information you were looking for placed next to information you were not. You might search the paper for something in particular, but you then went on to read the rest of it and thereby gained information you didn't know you were interested in. The internet tends to work against this even while providing a great deal of depth and up-to the minute information on that which interests the individual searcher.