Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Oops: Lawsuit Reveals HBO Boss Instructing Staff To Twitter-Troll Critics
Part of the material includes texts from the network’s CEO Casey Bloys imploring lower-level staffers to create fake accounts on Twitter to respond to...
Remembering Robert Brustein
One of his hallmark offerings at Harvard was a class called Rep Ideal, in which he held forth on how a permanent company of...
How The Post-Pandemic Arts Recovery Is Going (Or Not)
“It appears that arts organizations are trying to manage programming in a way that fits within their revenue constraints. And that’s not just a...
America’s First Prima Ballerina Honored With A Quarter
The late Maria Tallchief — considered the country's first prima ballerina and one of the most notable Native American figures of the 20th century — was...
Fired Banff Center Board Chair Explains Conflict With Former CEO
"Once I had been advised by the general counsel that she was participating in the CEO succession process – which is a conflict of...
About Time: Justice Department Begins Investigation Of Live Nation Practices
The deals that Live Nation offers artists to land their events, and what restrictions those agreements might include, are among the practices the Justice...
Big Tech Argues That Proposed Regulation Would Send Innovation Elsewhere
"Using copies of copyright-protected material to train AI models doesn’t qualify as the kind of copying that violates copyright law. A statutory licensing scheme...
Louis Armstrong, Media Star
“He was also born at the right time to be a multimedia superstar. Louis was there for acoustic recordings in 1923. After accompanying silent...
Increasingly London Theatre-Goers Are Complaining About Rising Ticket Prices
“Theater is becoming very elitist. The minute there’s a well-known person in a play, it’s unaffordable.” - The New York Times
Why An Artist Acquired 6000 Copies Of “Da Vinci Code, Pulped And Turned Them...
It all began in 2017, when a thrift store in Wales, put a notice in its window imploring people to stop donating copies of “The...
How California Became A Hotbed Of New Music
Ara Guzelimian, who grew up in Los Angeles and now leads the Ojai Music Festival nearby, described California’s classical music culture as “the lingering...
How Did HGTV Come To Define Our House Aesthetic?
These bundled aesthetic commonalities aren’t just coincidences, and they can’t be entirely described as trends—at least not in the sense of bottom-up collective favor...
A North Carolina School District Removes Popular Sarah Maas Books
A favorite on TikTok’s “BookTok” community, the series has sold over 13 million copies worldwide, and been translated into 37 languages, according to Bloomsbury. A...
Britain’s Ruling Conservatives Seem To Have No Plan For The Wayward Arts Council
Conservatives used to be intelligent patrons of the arts. In the 1930s, you had the most sophisticated cultural operation of any political organisation in...
We Have Forgotten How To Disagree In The Arts
The list of such fundamental divisions is long, and it is synonymous with multicultural liberalism. For this, many democracies maintain two-party parliamentary systems. Goading...
Norman Lebrecht Goes To A Yuja Wang Concert And Sees The Future Of Music
That triggered a subversive thought: why can’t all solo recitals be like this? Why won’t Carnegie Hall enhance its pianists with works of Pissaro...
California Musicians Across The State Celebrate California
The 100-plus participating organizations, some large and wealthy, others neither, include professional orchestras, choruses, opera companies, youth orchestras, and educational institutions. - San Francisco...
How Revelations Of Buffy Ste. Marie’s Heritage Is Affecting Indigenous Culture
Suddenly, this story broke and everything we believed about her was called into question. There was no warning and no sensitivity to the impact...
An Initiative To Radically Change The Way Scientific Research Is Shared
It outlines a future “community-based” and “scholar-led” open-research communication system in which publishers are no longer gatekeepers that reject submitted work or determine first...
How Big-Publishing Consolidation Has Changed Fiction-Writing
In the conglomerate era, authors like Stephen King and Danielle Steel are pressured to become advertisements for themselves, even as much of the work...
News Consumption Trends — Mainstream Journalism Down, Opinion Channels Up
In the past 16 months, seven publishers crossed the one million subscriber mark to enter Press Gazette’s ranking for the first time – including...
Theatre’s Crisis Is Really A Demographic Issue
I have been told that staff, tasked to phone up lifelong supporters and subscribers who didn’t renew for the first time, had to be...
Should Theatre’s Performance Time Norm Be 6:30?
Six-thirty may not be a traditional starting time for theatre. But then in the 16th and early 17th-century, before the advent of the indoor...
How Story-Telling In Podcasts Is Different From Radio
The podcast market is increasingly interested only in those that take the listener on a journey from one episode to the next. Without a...
We Live In An Always-On World. What Does It Mean To Withdraw From It?...
Acts of disengagement are routinely met with scepticism, judgment and pushback in public discourse. What if we were to treat them instead as opportunities...
