Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Regulating Social Media: Like Cigarettes? Or Like Junk Food?
History suggests that our collective approach to social media may be approaching a fork in the road. These laws are more like junk-food regulations...
Cameroon Opens A Spectacular New Museum
Housing over 10,000 objects, it offers more than 600 years of history in its display of the treasures of the Bamoun kingdom, one of the...
Five Years After COVID: How Australia’s Theatres Are Doing
While it would be misleading to take the dollar figures in isolation as the only measure of these companies’ ‘post-COVID’ build-backs, their financial statements...
Can You Really Fit Plays Into 45-minute Cookie-Cutter Slots?
The problem is that while Radio 4 does indeed feature drama, no regular slot there allows for anything other than a play lasting 45...
The Winning Strategy For A Successful Bookstore: Be Nice To Customers
In this challenging retail environment, my local bookshop has hit on an incredible strategy: simply being nice to anyone who walks in. - The...
David Schneiderman, Village Voice Editor and Publisher, 77
After being named editor in chief in 1978, Mr. Schneiderman elevated The Voice’s journalistic game, diversified a newsroom that was nearly all white and...
Why Sad Posts On Social Media Get Such Big Audiences
The internet is flooded with what some call 'sadbait'. It gets far less attention, but some of today's most successful online content is melancholy...
Consumers Highly Value Reviews. Problem is, Most Are Fake
Survey participants placed the value of online reviews above price, free shipping, brand, and recommendations from family and friends. The survey found 94 percent...
Remembering Actor Joan Plowright, 95
Plowright was “perhaps the greatest Anglophone actor of the 20th century”, in Variety’s words. She was certainly a leading pioneer in post-war British theatre’s modernisation –...
What’s The Real Difference Between Fiction And Non-Fiction?
What is fiction in the first place? Despite common usage, philosophers agree that we can’t equate ‘fiction’ with ‘false content’. On the one hand,...
What Publishers Are Expecting In The Second Trump Administration
While threats to funding for arts and humanities organizations are one big worry, the primary ethical concern for most in the book business is...
Restore Musical Instruments Or Conserve Them? (A Debate)
How much reworking is too much? Should the instrument be made playable or simply maintained in its present condition? And in the case of...
Data’s In: The State Of The Music Business In Canada In 2024
The findings paint a picture of an industry in transformation: streaming numbers are soaring, physical formats are showing surprising resilience, and superfans are reshaping...
Among Trump’s Day One Executive Orders: Canceling Biden’s Arts Initiative
Among Trump's executive orders on the first day: canceling Biden's Executive Order 14084 of September 30, 2022 (Promoting the Arts, the Humanities, and Museum...
Founder Of IMDb To Step Down As CEO After 35 Years
Col Needham started building the database that later became IMDb in 1990. He remained CEO even after selling the website to Amazon in 1998, overseeing...
For Musicians, How Old Is Too Old?
Since the elimination of mandatory retirement in symphony orchestras and with union protections making it difficult to fire older players, many orchestras include members...
We’ve Always Been Worried About Distraction (So What’s The Crisis?)
Haven’t critics freaked out about the brain-scrambling power of everything from pianofortes to brightly colored posters? Isn’t there, in fact, a long section in...
CEO Of Music AI Company: Making Music The Traditional Way Sucks
“It’s not really enjoyable to make music now. It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get...
Warning: Hollywood Screen Music Production Is Endangered
Los Angeles is facing a loss of artists, producers and executives ranging from sound to visual effects. Musicians, and the players behind them, are a...
Is Netflix Deliberately Dumbing Down TV For The Internet Generation?
Is it inherently bad to cater to people who may prefer their viewing on the more casual side? Is it snobbery to believe that...
Classical Music’s Identity Crisis: Political Music Under Biden
Classical music has long been wandering in the desert of its own identity crisis, and 2016 was an unexpected checkpoint. Overnight, it seemed that...
Data’s In: What And How We Read Last Year
About 63 percent of us read at least one book last year, an improvement from the 54 percent we saw in 2023.Other sources don’t...
Study: LLM AI’s Aren’t Very Good At History Yet
“The main takeaway from this study is that LLMs, while impressive, still lack the depth of understanding required for advanced history. They’re great for...
Is The TikTok Battle A Chance To Reimagine How The Internet Works?
Broadly, Project Liberty is part of the movement toward a decentralized social Internet, where no single network controls users’ data and users can instead...
On Social Media, Disasters Are Now Merely Consumable Content
Like every major platform in 2025, X has become more like TikTok, prioritizing recommended content from accounts from people users follow. You can still follow people on X,...
