Short (200 words)
Doug McLennan is the founder and editor of ArtsJournal, which he launched in 1999. ArtsJournal has never been a news source — it’s a curated conversation: 26 years of gathering the most significant writing about culture and putting it in dialogue with itself. He is also the co-founder and editor of Post Alley, a Seattle-based writers’ collective and experiment in pluralist civic journalism.
McLennan’s current work centers on how AI is reshaping creativity, authorship, and the policy frameworks that govern them. He directs the US RAO AI & Creativity Policy Observatory, tracking legislation, litigation, and institutional response across the creative sector, and consults with arts organizations on business model evolution at a moment when the structures built to support creative work are badly out of sync with current conditions.
Before founding ArtsJournal, he worked as a music critic and arts journalist, contributing to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Los Angeles Times, among other publications, and later served as Acting Director of the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University. He trained as a pianist and holds a master’s degree from the Juilliard School.
Longer (400 words)
Doug McLennan is the founder and editor of ArtsJournal, which he launched in 1999. ArtsJournal is a long-running curated conversation: 26 years of gathering the significant writing about culture and putting it in dialogue with itself. He is also the co-founder and editor of Post Alley, a Seattle-based writers’ collective and experiment in pluralist civic journalism. Both projects reflect a commitment to decentralized, human-curated media at a moment when algorithmic feeds have reshaped how information moves.
McLennan’s current work centers on how AI is reshaping creativity, authorship, and the policy frameworks that govern them. He directs the US RAO AI & Creativity Policy Observatory, tracking legislation, litigation, and institutional response across the creative sector, and consults with arts organizations on business model evolution in a period when the structures built to support creative work are badly out of sync with current conditions. He has been part of producing and strategy teams for projects including the Spring For Music orchestra festival at Carnegie Hall and the Ojai Music Festival — work that keeps his analysis grounded in how things actually get made.
Before founding ArtsJournal, McLennan worked as a music critic and arts journalist — as arts columnist and music critic for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and a contributor to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications. He later served as Acting Director of the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University. That background in criticism and reporting shapes his approach: asking what’s actually happening, not just what institutions say is happening.
McLennan trained as a pianist and holds a master’s degree from the Juilliard School; early in his career he was artist-in-residence at the Central Conservatory in Beijing. He has taught in the arts journalism program at USC Annenberg and the arts management MBA program at Claremont Graduate University, and has spoken at conferences throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas on AI and creativity, the economics of cultural infrastructure, and what viable models for the future might look like.