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Archives for April 2009

More Valuable – The Ticket Buyer Or The Donor?

April 30, 2009 by Douglas McLennan 3 Comments

Give an arts organization $1000 and they'll put your name in the program. Buy $1000 worth of tickets and they'll tell you that the cost of your ticket only covered 55 percent (or 40 percent or 30 percent) of the cost of you being there. Then a few months later, long after the performance, they try to hit you up for more money. Gee thanks.Maybe this is backwards. Who's the more valuable member of … [Read more...]

Power Law – Why Arts Organizations Need To Reinvent

April 29, 2009 by Douglas McLennan 2 Comments

Newspaper publishers have been lashing out at Google for aggregating headlines and selling ads on the news feeds. The criticisms are controversial (my thoughts here). Google directs huge rivers of traffic to news stories, and publications like that. But aggregation has in some ways come to compete with the news organizations themselves. Most newspapers have thought of themselves as producers of … [Read more...]

"T" Is For Torture. Period. Just Say It

April 28, 2009 by Douglas McLennan Leave a Comment

One of the big failings of traditional media is its fetishization of "objectivity" in the face of facts. At its best, objectivity is an attempt at fairness to present opposing views. But too often it reflexively reduces issues to non-sensical polarized he said/she said arguments without the journalistic application of facts. If I say the sky is green, is it the reporter's job to report the story … [Read more...]

Pianist Rejects American Military From the Stage

April 27, 2009 by Douglas McLennan Leave a Comment

Krystian Zimerman is one of the world's best pianists. Sunday night he was making his debut at LA's Disney Hall. And then:Before playing the final work on his recital, Karol Szymanowski's "Variations on a Polish Folk Theme," Zimerman sat silently at the piano for a moment, almost began to play, but then turned to the audience. In a quiet but angry voice that did not project well, he indicated that … [Read more...]

Do we need Institutions To Make Art?

April 26, 2009 by Douglas McLennan 4 Comments

In the early '00's, the movie industry looked on as the music industry's business model was cannibalized by file sharing services. Bandwidth issues bought Hollywood a few extra years to figure out how to adapt to the digital threat. Eventually iTunes proved a viable model to sell music over the web, even as the recording industry devolved into smaller pieces. The movie industry did indeed benefit … [Read more...]

Wanted: The Steve Jobs Of Journalism

April 24, 2009 by Douglas McLennan Leave a Comment

The genius of Steve Jobs is not that he has great ideas. Many people have great ideas. It's not that he can hire people with great ideas, or even that he can recognize a great idea when he hears it. The genius of Steve Jobs is that he has the ability to look at a great idea and figure out whether there's a business model to support it. There is no shortage of people who seem to have figured out … [Read more...]

Theatre, Celeb Journalism, And Journalism

April 22, 2009 by Douglas McLennan Leave a Comment

Two articles over on the ARTicles blog at the National Arts Journalism Program. First, Laura Collins-Hughes has a take on this year's Pulitzer for theatre and why it's important that the finalists are all women:...women playwrights are vastly underrepresented on our stages. Because "diversity" isn't just a buzzword. The Pulitzer isn't important in itself; it matters because of its ripple effect. … [Read more...]

Short Attention Span Theatre

April 20, 2009 by Douglas McLennan Leave a Comment

Mark Ravenhill argues that endless choice has shortened our attention spans, to the detriment of all art.Maybe we should blame the invention of the TV remote control: people often do. At some point around 30 years ago, it became possible to hop aimlessly between channels. Programme-makers became convinced that they had to make a pitch for their show in its opening few seconds, and then keep on … [Read more...]

A Plan To Help Newspapers That Will Hasten Their Demise?

April 17, 2009 by Douglas McLennan 2 Comments

The high-profile launch this week of an effort to create a paid pass to access news content got a lot of attention because of the principals involved. JournalismOnline is the idea of veteran media execs Steven Brill, Gordon Crovitz, and Leo Hindery. Their venture aims to supply publishers with ready-made tools to charge Internet fees, an idea that has gained currency as advertising revenue … [Read more...]

Creative Destruction And The Critics

April 16, 2009 by Douglas McLennan 2 Comments

A shameless plug for a piece on All Things Considered by Laura Sydell on what's happening with arts journalism as newspapers drop arts coverage. As I say in the piece, IMHO what's happening is not the destruction of arts journalism, but the reinvention of it. Arts journalism has often had an uneasy home in newspapers, and arts coverage was relegated to the "soft" sections. In recent years, the … [Read more...]

Art of the Magazine

April 15, 2009 by Douglas McLennan Leave a Comment

I love this - art made from the distinctive spine patterns of the first 15 years of Wired magazine. Question: is there a discernible pattern or plan to the way Wired planned this out over the years? A code, a DNA map, or the weaving of an issue-by-issue genome perhaps? … [Read more...]

Be the Driver, Don't be the Car

April 15, 2009 by Douglas McLennan Leave a Comment

People want things how they want them. In Japan, "five of last year's top ten best-selling novels started life as mobile phone - or keitai - novels." There was a time when mobile phones were used simply to communicate. In high-speed Japan, where more than 100 million people own mobile phones, they are not only a platform for novelists, but for all forms of artistic expression. The last time I … [Read more...]

Atlanta Journal-Constitution Offloads Its Arts Critics

April 14, 2009 by Douglas McLennan 1 Comment

It's hard to accept the premise that newspapers are worth saving when they cut away the reasons to buy them. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has pretty much declared it's out of the culture coverage business by getting rid of its arts staff, including a few critics who have had national prominence. Art critic Catherine Fox has been a bright light nationally, covering antiquities. Arts journalism … [Read more...]

Vote for your favorite artist of the 20th Century

April 13, 2009 by Douglas McLennan Leave a Comment

The Times of London is running a poll to pick the favorite artist of the 20th Century. "Readers and visitors were asked to nominate their favourite artists working since 1900 from a list including some of the most influential painters, sculptors, photographers, video and installation artists of the period. After 1 million+ votes cast, the leading 300 artists are now listed below in alphabetical … [Read more...]

Newspapers – Is Print Readership Still Bigger Than Online?

April 13, 2009 by Douglas McLennan Leave a Comment

Poynter's Martin Langeveld says our assumptions that the online audience for newspapers is much bigger than the print audience are flat out wrong. All generally accepted truths notwithstanding, more than 96 percent of newspaper reading is still done in the print editions, and the online share of the newspaper audience attention is only a bit more than 3 percent. That's my conclusion after I got … [Read more...]

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Douglas McLennan

I’m the founder and editor of ArtsJournal, which was founded in September 1999 and aggregates arts and culture news from all over the internet. The site is also home to some 60 arts bloggers. I’m a … [Read More...]

About diacritical

Our culture is undergoing profound changes. Our expectations for what culture can (or should) do for us are changing. Relationships between those who make and distribute culture and those who consume it are changing. And our definitions of what artists are, how they work, and how we access them and their work are changing. So... [Read more]

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Recent Posts

  • What If Disruption Was Just A Tech Con Game?
  • Classical Music’s #MeToo Stories Are Just A First Step
  • How a Beethoven Tweet Broke Our Twitter Feed (And Other Lessons About Social Media Today)
  • Five Story Highlights From The Past Week 02.19.17: Trapped By PACs, New WTC As Cautionary Tale, Exploiting Humanities Workers
  • Join Us Today For A Livestream: Artistic Leadership In A Border City

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