In a time when nearly every classical music writer has a personal or publication blog, Parterre Box‘s James Jorden has started reviewing for The New York Post, an honest-to-goodness newspaper. His first review, of The Metropolitan Opera’s La Sonnambula, was printed on March 4, 2009. Click here for his next review, of Rusalka, also at The Met, and then here for his coverage of The Met’s 125th Anniversary Gala.
Having an extremely popular opera blogger write for a print paper – that we’ll just safely assume is in trouble – is shrewd. Jorden has a loyal online readership, a unique, recognizable voice and an established media outlet through which to promote his new gig. In short, he is an industry personality. The blog post in which Jorden directed Parterre Box readers to his first NY Post review received 94 congratulatory comments. His post sending readers to the Rusalka and gala reviews received 63 and 89 comments, respectively. The comments on his reviews can nearly all be found on the Parterre Box blog posts that link to the newspaper reviews, while the three pieces on the actual NY Post site collected 15, 0 and 0 comments. It seems Parterre Box followers are reading Jorden on the NY Post site and then going back to Parterre Box to comment. However, through these comments on his blog, we can tell that a chunk of people who probably wouldn’t have read the NY Post that or any other day visited its website to read Jorden. I certainly did. Similarly, Jorden received support from fellow bloggers, as Norman Lebrecht and others directed their own followers to the Sonnambula review.
Are his NY Post written in the same style as his blog posts? Of course not. Do they still have his style? Yes they do.
From the NY Post: The audience, unsure of what was happening onstage, tittered nervously.
Even the finale, with the entire company decked out in glitzy Swiss
costumes for a campy “Springtime for Hitler” production number, puzzled
more than it pleased.
From the blog: La Cieca never knows quite how far to go in repeating what she “is
told,” but since some of it seems to be leaking out anyway, well,
she’ll try to be tactful. Apparently sometimes opera companies choose
to use terminology like “laryngitis” and “knee injury” in order to
avoid having to say “exhibited bizarre behavior at rehearsals” or
“arrived obviously unprepared.”
I know which writers I like, and I seek out their work where it lives, be that on personal blogs, publication blogs, Twitter feeds, online versions of newspapers and magazines, or print versions of newspapers and magazines. A publication’s brand could not matter less to me; it’s the writer’s personal brand I’m after.
With that in mind, should newspapers make it a business priority to enhance their staff writers’ non-publication personas?
Look at Alex Ross’ blog, The Rest is Noise, which is personal but linked topic-wise to his “day” job at The New Yorker. I read his articles in The New Yorker before he launched the blog (in 2004, having been on staff at the magazine since 1996). When I did start following his blog (in 2005), I was already familiar with his style/tone/perspective from the magazine. That said, because he communicates with his blog readership differently than he does with his magazine readership (whether a lot of those readers are the same or not), I now read blog and magazine pieces with – at least what I think is – a more informed perspective on both. New Yorkers stack up unread in my apartment to embarrassing heights, but I’m always caught up on his pieces. And if ever Alex would leave the magazine, I would follow him. Would I unsubscribe to The New Yorker? No, but – would I buy my first-ever copy of Playboy if he started writing for them? Absolutely. I’m told people read Playboy for the articles all the time.
Anne Midgette, who has always had a distinct, powerful voice and very loyal readership without ever having blogged personally, just began writing a blog for The Washington Post, where she is on staff. The blog launched yesterday, is called The Classical Beat, and can be found here. Anne is another critic I would follow to Playboy, but I have to wonder: how will her blog entries on the Post website be different than her print articles for the Post? Will she communicate with blog readers differently – more casually, more specifically? If not, then how will this blog increase The Washington Post’s readership? Why not just have her write online-only content and call it just that? From a publicist’s perspective, I say the more places to pitch potential features and reviews the better, but from the newspaper’s perspective, I just don’t see how this will increase page views or, more(?)/less(?) importantly, newspaper print subscribers.
Alex Ross, Steve Smith (Time Out New York/New York Times) Marc Geelhoed (formerly from Time Out Chicago) and Sasha Frere-Jones (New Yorker) all have separate personal blogs in addition to their journalist responsibilities to prestigious publications. By showing their personalities, writing about topics of their own choosing (without editors), and connecting with different readers – geographically and subject-tively – in their personal blogs, these writers are essentially providing invaluable media coverage for the publications they get paid to write for. When Marc wrote for Time Out Chicago, I would read his magazine features when he linked to them from his blog. Why did I care what was coming to Chicago if I live in New York City? I didn’t, but I did care what he, personally, was covering. If I ran The Washington Post, which, spoiler alert, I do not, I would have called Anne into my office and said, “Anne, we need to you start a blog. Blog about whatever you want. Be yourself. Actually, be bigger than yourself. Get yourself on every blogroll in the blogosphere. Comment all over town. Ruffle some feathers. Link to your Washington Post articles, don’t link to your Washington Post articles – we don’t care. We’ll pay you for your time blogging. Oh, there’s just one thing: your blog can ostensibly have nothing to do with us.”
Anne would then blog “on her own”, develop a loyal and probably a much wider-reaching readership than the Post classical music section currently has, and then consistently direct these fresh followers to the her pieces on the Washington Post website. Readers would love her, readers would hate her, readers would read her. For months on this blog I’ve been saying the way for classical musicians to gain new fans and cultivate their current base is to really show their true personalities. The same should be applied to critics.
Now let’s say Anne’s Washington Post blog does in fact show her personality more than her print writing does; let’s say the tone of the blog is completely different than the tone of her reviews, that she’s encouraged to write about non-classical music topics, that her blog posts are edited only mildly or not at all. Unfortunately, it doesn’t actually matter, because despite what’s covered and how, readers simply won’t trust that a blog by a staff critic on her employer’s site will be providing a raw perspective. That masthead and URL keep readers at a distance, even if Anne posts the exact same content she would on a personal blog. Similarly, a blog on a newspaper site can’t help but feel like a reluctant, “if we must” gesture from the powers-that-be. Newspapers have viewed blogs and online content as a threat to their business models for too long to convince us they’re thrilled the way things are going now. (Exhibit A, every time a newspaper goes “online only” the perception is that they’re going out of business, rather than simply joining the 21st Century.) If we’re craving writers with both – for lack of a better word – “personal” personas and professional personas, their modes of expression cannot come from the same place.
Will we eventually learn to trust newspaper blogs? I don’t know; do we trust a blogger’s reviews for a newspaper?
“readers simply won’t trust that a blog by a staff critic on her employer’s site will be providing a raw perspective.”
I’m not sure that’s true–or even if it’s true now that it will remain true. For one thing, no blog provides “raw perspective”–everybody edits, crafts posts to meet the needs of the readership, adopts a particular stylistic persona, makes choices about what to blog about and what not to blog about, etc. A blog for a newspaper might be less likely to use profanity, but I bet classical blogs are less likely to use profanity than political blogs are–not because classical music people swear less but because classical bloggers restrain themselves in certain ways because of their audience. And even if it’s true that people are initially suspicious of newspaper blogs (and I agree that they often come with a whiff of “because we have to”) a good blog will become essential anyway and the prejudices will melt away. Paul Krugman’s blog at the Times is certainly essential reading for people who follow the politics of economics, for instance.