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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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TT: You, too, can be a critic

November 12, 2005 by Terry Teachout

Today in “Sightings,” my Wall Street Journal column about the arts in America, I write about how blogging is affecting arts journalism:

Sometimes the conventional wisdom turns out to be true–only with a twist. Most newspapers, for instance, really are devoting less space to the fine arts, but that’s because newspapers themselves are growing smaller and smaller. Relatively speaking, says Columbia University’s National Arts Journalism Program (NAJP), American newspapers allocate the same percentage of their space to the arts today that they did five years ago. The problem isn’t the slice of the pie but the quality of the filling. Outside of a half-dozen or so major American cities, newspaper arts criticism has always been dismayingly uneven….


How to break these viciously interlocking circles? Since 2004, the NAJP has been running a series of two-week “institutes” for critics and writers from regional newspapers and other publications. I’ve taught at two of these institutes (the most recent of which took place last month in New York City), and though my students have varied widely in experience, they’ve worked impressively hard to strengthen their grasp of the art forms they’d been assigned to cover. I expect all of them to go home and do good things.


That’s one approach. Another is to start a blog, a Web-based journal that can be read by anyone with a computer and access to the Internet. A couple of hundred bloggers now write about the arts on a fairly regular basis. I’ve been following their work since I started my own “artblog,” “About Last Night,” in the summer of 2003, and I believe the same technological revolution that has already transformed political journalism is about to have a similarly galvanizing effect on regional arts journalism….

Read the whole thing here. As was the case with Friday’s drama column, the entire Online Journal is free all this week, the idea being that once you’ve tried it, you’ll want to subscribe (which I recommend).

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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