Hello!
Dear Reader: Several updates to tell you about:
1. Our New Website
For a long time, the organizing idea about the stories we collected on ArtsJournal was my belief in the serendipity of stumbling across stories you didn’t know you needed to see. You might be primarily interested in dance, but here’s a great books story you ought to know about. But from looking at how our readers seek out stories, I’ve come to understand that most want to find what they’re looking for as efficiently as possible. So, the front page now organizes the stories we collect by topic. The topic pages themselves have been streamlined and are much easier to read – for example Ideas. So if you’re primarily interested in one art form, check out the new organization. Our AJBlogs also have a cool new home. If you still want to follow everything across all topics, you can find them here. Let me know what you think at mclennan@artsjournal.com. And when you find things on the site that don’t work as you think they should, I’d love to hear about it.
2. ArtsJournal Archives Now Online
2. ArtsJournal Archives – I’m very proud to announce that after a year of work (and the help of a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation), we’ve finally collected up all of the stories we’ve featured on ArtsJournal across the four platforms we’ve used since 1999 and put them in one giant archive. There are more than 150,000+ of them going back to September 1999. They span and document a remarkable period in American culture – from a somewhat stable model of cultural production that had existed since the 1960s to the dynamic era we’re in now – a story-by-story history of that transition. there’s also a nifty little feature at the bottom of the front page that pulls up random stories from across 2+decades. Very fun, I think. They’re free at ArtsJournal.org. Check them out, or read about the archive and how it was compiled.
3. Refreshed Newsletters
We’ve streamlined our Daily and Weekly newsletters so you find exactly what you’re looking for. You can choose to get only the story headlines (and their link) or get the premium version that also includes a short description of the story (useful when the story is behind a paywall) and a thumbnail from the story.
4. Our New Patreon Page
ArtsJournal is available free. Always has been and always will be. ArtsJournal has more than 30,000 free daily and weekly newsletter subscribers, and a total daily audience of about 50,000. We’ve also had a few thousand premium newsletter subscribers who pay $28 per year. We’ve decided to convert our old premium subscription model to a Patreon subscription model. Patreon takes care of all the background details and billing, and it should be a better streamlined experience. Premium subscribers can continue more or less at the same rate, when you current premium subscription runs out. If you would consider supporting ArtsJournal, we’d appreciate it at whatever level you can. Your membership will unlock our premium newsletters.
Thanks for reading. And thanks for your support.
Douglas McLennan
Editor, ArtsJournal