Sunday, April 14, 2013
Critics’ Love for Sale: Why Journalism’s Demise Is Bad for Theater
Howlround: While I was the theater critic for The Denver Post, I never quite understood the malicious glee so many seemed to be taking in the irreversible downward slide of the corporate newspaper industry, which went into a free-fall along with the global economy in 2008. But the end had really begun by our own hand back in 1996, when newspapers like ours started launching online web sites and giving their content away for free.
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4 comments:
While I agree that theaters paying critics for reviews is in the icky realm of freedom of speech, I do not understand why the empowerment of audience goers is bad for any reason except for critics worried about losing their jobs.
John Moore makes the point that theater goers will be lost, wandering looking for a single place to direct them towards the right show. Well first of all, shouldn't consumers be making evaluated and researched decisions about where to spend their obscenely high ticket costs? And have you ever heard of Google? Why go anywhere else? Critics might be worried about their jobs, but I think that this isn't a development that is going to move backwards. Perhaps we should consider better ways to monitor critiquing for pay or biased reviews.
I don't quite see eye to eye with this article. Yes, I agree that print journalism is becoming less and less common with the rise of technology and the internet. However, at this point in time, everything is more accessible to everyone. So then, everyone can find many, many opinions about all of the shows that are out there. I don't see why that would be a bad thing. There are no qualifications for having an opinion. Sure, a journalism degree might make one better at writing and reporting, bu that doesn't automatically make them the foremost authority on what good theatre is. I don't think the demise in journalism is bad for theatre, I think it's bad for journalists because the rise of technology gives more people a voice.
I agree with Ariel and Kassondra... I don't really agree with this article's argument. The whole article comes across as a former theatre critic being bitter about the rise of the Internet and amateur bloggers because his former job is no longer a viable career. I agree that it's sad that professional journalists can no longer make a career out of writing theatre reviews, but at the same time, the fact that what some might call "amateurs" have the chance to share their opinion and write about their experience at the theatre is a good one. Sure, the grammar may not be perfect, and sentence structure may suffer, but everyone is entitled to their opinion. And the idea that this development means that audiences can no longer find valuable theatre reviews online is silly. If you are someone who enjoys theatre and goes to see a lot of shows, odds are you have a few bloggers who review theatre that you have discovered have similar tastes to what you enjoy, and so you would come to trust their opinion. If you are someone who doesn't go to a lot of theatre and are sifting through reviews, you will most likely find varied opinions, and so you can choose who to believe based on their comments. Ok, there may be some bloggers who are paid by the theatre organization to write good reviews, but for every one of those, there are others who blog just to write down their thoughts, and have no other agenda besides being honest and giving their opinion about a show they saw. I think this gives potential audiences a much more varied view of theatre, and allows them to make their own decision more than if there were one or two "professional" theatre critics who expect that their opinions should be taken as law.
Mr. Moore is correctly honest to write this article with a full representation of his bias. No one could be more biased about the plight of the full-time print theater critic than an unemployed print theater critic. And while I generally shed a tear at the slow demise of the once great (and often awful) print media in the U.S., I find it hard to get too sappy about this particular section. The place of the professional critic in our business has always seemed highly suspect to me. If you work in the trades for any length of time, you begin to realize that almost every building inspector (the tradesman's critic, in a sense) you ever have to deal with is a failed contractor. Now I'm not saying that every critic is just a failed director or actor or stage designer or, God forbid, technician, but if they're not, if they truly are just another member of the audience, then I don't know why we should care about their opinions in the first place. While I am extremely interested in what a seasoned war correspondent, who has been to Somalia and Iraq, thinks about the security situation in Kabul, I'm not sure the critics opinion is any more interesting to me because he has seen 12 versions of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." My mom has seen a couple versions of that show too, and I respect her opinion just as well as anyone I might read in Pink Pages (SF Chronicle Entertainment Section). So if we are going to have guerrilla journalism anywhere, I have to disagree with Mr. Moore and say amateur theater criticism is fine with me.
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