"The New Playing Field"

The ways culture is produced, distributed and consumed are being radically transformed around us, and there’s probably never been as interesting or challenging a time to be an arts journalist. The amount and diversity of culture available is unprecedented, as old artforms struggle to regenerate and new artforms emerge to capture the imagination. Artists have greater control of their work and how it gets delivered. The nature of audiences is changing, and people want what they want whenever they want it. Popular artforms have matured and now are closely intertwined with what used to be called high culture. The loss of the modernist paradigm, which governed many artforms for about a century, is still recent, and the emerging pluralistic landscape is ripe with new voices and opportunities, as well as confusion about art’s overall value and direction. Add technology to the mix and the arts today appear in flux as never before.

Historically, it is at times of big cultural change that arts critics and journalists have had their greatest impact, helping to frame issues and make sense of cultural innovation.

This time, though, the cultural change has also swept up journalism itself, and technology and a glut of new creative product are forcing all media to reconsider how they cover the arts. Curiously, as the flood of culture rises and access to it improves, traditional critics have found their judgments and positions increasingly challenged. The rise of blogs has turned everyone into a critic with his or her own publication. Social software aggregators are the new tastemakers, replacing the appraisal of the lone human critic.

Whereas most critics and arts journalists traditionally have been employed on staff by publications, increasingly arts journalism is becoming a freelance occupation. Publications large and small are replacing staff critic positions with freelancers. Critics and journalists are finding new, independent outlets for their work, many of which they’re creating themselves.

This presents a range of ethical and practical issues that are still being worked out both by critics and by the editors and publications that hire them. At a time when staff critic jobs are disappearing, freelance pay is eroding. Technology has opened up a Pandora’s Box of ready opinions, and the traditional arts journalist is forced to reinvent.

Prevailing assumptions about how arts journalism is practiced – in city newsrooms, for print publications, by trained journalists who enjoy the loyalty and protection of their employers – are more and more at odds with the reality of a field increasingly dominated by independent contractors. In other words, the challenges that arts journalists face in a fast-changing cultural landscape are amplified by the significant and largely unexamined shifts within the profession itself.

Panels:

Saturday's conference offers three panels on the theme, “The New Playing Field.” This part of the conference will be held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Arts press from all local and regional Philadelphia publications will be invited to attend and participate as a way of involving them in national issues in the field. Also attending this day will be approximately 25 senior editors from major newspapers around the country, who will be in town for the editors’ conclave to be held Sunday.

Panel I

Panel I - The Artists
We seem to be in one of those periods of historic cultural change. As technology makes it easier for artists to have more control over the production and dissemination of their work, consumers are demanding more control over how they acquire and use that work. Meanwhile, arts organizations of every flavor are finding their traditional business models being disrupted, requiring reconsideration and reinvention of long-established practices. For every challenge in this new landscape, there are opportunities. Philadelphia has a long and proud cultural tradition, but in recent years has taken advantage of the opportunity to reinvent. We have invited a cross section of Philadelphia’s arts leaders to give us a snapshot of a city’s culture in transition. Many of the issues they are facing will be familiar to those of us covering culture in other cities across America.

Panel II – The Journalists
Traditional media are finding themselves challenged as never before for audiences. And as traditional media business models increasingly fail, pressure is being put on newsrooms to reinvent how they cover culture. Ironically, the threats to traditional newspapers, magazines, radio and TV are driven by cultural change. This change is what makes being a cultural observer so interesting right now. And yet it is the very challenge of that change that now threatens how arts journalists do their jobs. This panel examines how the field of cultural journalism is changing and looks at some of the new realities as well the opportunities. Among the issues – the shift from a largely staff-generated profession to a free-lance culture, the reinventing newsroom, a new ethical playing field, and personal-branding (as opposed to publication-branding) of cultural journalists.

Panel III – The Futurists
One prominent online news service proudly boasts that “no human editors were harmed in the making of this page”. A joke, sure, but the new social software movement promises to efficiently build new communities and subvert how we define news, where we get it and how we use it, turning upside down traditional notions of critical authority. The traditional role of the critic in this is evolving in front of us. Or is it? With more culture available in more ways than ever before, it’s easier and easier to be overwhelmed. If the traditional role of critic was to walk a perimeter and report back, there’s more need for this than ever. This panel brings together some leading innovators visionaries who are rethinking the ways our culture interacts with itself. Armed with disruptive technologies, they are luring and capturing elusive audiences by making culture accessible and usable in new and efficient ways.