Arts Journalism
Quiet Corner by Bradford Salamon
The National Arts Journalism Program (NAJP) held a National Summit on Arts Journalism on October 2, 2009 at the University of Southern California.
New models in arts journalism were asked to present projects for consideration; I and my web developer, Mike Jones, sent in a submission.
My website/platform did not present at the Summit. While disappointed, I learned a great deal about the current state of arts journalism – that the number of traditional outlets for art writing have dramatically diminished over the last half dozen years. Meanwhile, arts blogs - apparently 300,000 in existence today - are proliferating.
When NAJP announced that the five contest finalists were chosen, the judges wrote: "We had expected 30-40 submissions but then got 108, and it took much longer to thoroughly consider all the submissions.
"What we're looking for, therefore, is not so much a commercial business plan but some indications of long-term operational viability. The submissions are clarification that we still have some way to go to establish viable sustainable business models. Yet there are glimmers, and a number of projects have now sustained themselves for several years."
An article in the alternative weekly, Chicago Reader, wrote comprehensively about the NAJP Summit on September 3, quoting from Douglas McLennan who runs the website, Arts Journal, and is one of the leading people running the Summit.
"In the last two years, 50 percent of arts journalism jobs have been lost." The Reader article continues, "When the NAJP started in 1994, nearly 90 percent of the journalists who applied for its fellowships were staffers from big news institutions; only a small percentage were freelancers, McLennan says. By 2006 the percentages had flipped: applicants were 90 percent freelancers and only 10 percent staff…A lot of people are talking about the crisis in journalism. But I think it's a tremendously interesting time...What we have now is the opportunity for new approaches."
In the last four years, seven publications I have written for have stopped publishing; an eighth might be on its way out. Two others have either changed format or stopped hiring freelance writers.
I don’t have huge corporations backing me or foundations offering me money. I do have increasing knowledge of tools of the digital revolution. Admittedly, I’m dealing with a major paradigm shift as an arts journalist – one that’s forcing me to learn new skills in self-publishing, self-promotion and the economics of using the Internet to generate income.
Even more important, I’m learning to work with the vast Internet community through dialogue within my website/platform and recently through the vast opportunities in social networking.
Several videos from The National Summit on Art Journalism provide broad-ranging, intriguing perspectives on the multi-media, multi-sensory, even postmodern approach to the future of arts journalism and to the arts in a more general sense.
They make clear that future satisfaction and probably even monetary success in this field depend on stretching our perspectives, becoming more magnanimous and moving way beyond the old paradigm of writing and publishing.
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