UPDATE: The discussion at Portland Arts Watch on this post is getting robust as well. You might want to have a look.

I just posted a version of this at Portland Arts Watch, and I’m thinking that I’ll extend it to these precincts as well, because I really do want to hear opinions about this topic. It’s something I’ve wondered about for a long time: How review-centric should newspaper/site coverage of the arts be? That boils down to a multitude of individual judgments, and I’d love to hear your thinking!

Everyone knows that this an era of shrinking resources at your local newsgathering operation (which we once called a “newspaper”). That means fewer staff members and less space in the paper for just about every section and department. And that in turn means a reconsideration of almost all of the coverage habits that have been developed over the decades.

The arts and culture department hasn’t been excluded from this, of course, either at The Oregonian or at other operations across the country (where the trimming often has been more radical in arts than other sections). We’re not going to go into all of that now, but a couple of posts we picked up on ArtsJournal do single out and discuss one of those coverage habits in the arts — the daily review, theater in this case, but by extension, all newspaper reviews.

The first move was made by Melodie Bahan, the director of communications at the Guthrie Theater (one of the country’s most important regional companies) writing on PlayList, a Minneapolis performing arts magazine and website. Her post is very critical of newspaper arts writing, at least as practiced by humans less astute than Frank Rich, her favorite theater critic (who stopped reviewing for the New York Times in 1993). And she must have known that it would aggravate the theater writers and editors in the area, especially on the biggest paper, the Star Tribune, which has two theater critics on staff. She was either very unhappy or very courageous.

Here is her argument. It starts from this observation: newspaper reviews aren’t very good — they are shallow, cursory, quickly written. Readers don’t read them (she somehow comes up with the number 97 percent), and the reviews don’t add to our overall understanding of the theater scene — either the individuals or the institutions inside it. Because reviews form the backbone of what critics do, they don’t have time to develop and tell these longer stories. Her solution: Stop reviewing and start reporting.

A key paragraph:

Does the average newspaper reader even skim – much less read – a review of the latest production from a small theater company she’s never heard of and has no intention of seeing? Probably not. But she might well read movie reviews and almost certainly reads feature stories about the movie industry, even if she sees only two or three movies a year. I believe it’s because, in part, newspapers provide stories about the film industry that explain and inform, yet provide little real coverage of the theater community in this town.

I would argue that there is no “average” newspaper reader. There are particular readers, each one with a set of interests that somehow intersects with what the newspaper writes about. And I would observe that reviews affect theater companies directly. A series of excellent reviews in The Oregonian, for example, helped Third Rail Repertory Theatre leap into the local major leagues in only a couple of years. Which means that somebody is reading them, and even acting on them.

But that doesn’t mean that the same readers also wouldn’t appreciate the sort of story that Bahan is suggesting — more behind-the-scenes, more “journalistic.” But for her, it’s not an also sort of deal.

This is how she says it:

I’m not against theater reviews; I’m against theater reviews that are poorly written, thumbs-up-or-down laundry lists of actors and designers that don’t do anything to illuminate the production or give readers a real sense of the experience. Maybe it’s not fair to compare our local critics to Frank Rich, but I think there’s a solution: Stop writing reviews and start writing news.

David Brauer, writing on MinnPost, a Minneapolis online news site, posted about Bahan’s rip, and then received a phone call from senior arts editor at the Tribune, Claude Peck. Which he posted.

Peck argued that in fact, reviews were a good thing, whether the reader was going to see the play or not.

…97 percent of people reading that review would not be attending that play. And for those people, we still want them to read that review. They just want to read an intelligent and insightful piece of analytical writing.

That’s a subtle misreading of what Bahan said. She said that 97 percent of the people wouldn’t bother to read the review at all. Which implies that the Tribune is investing a lot of its resources for reviews that get 3 percent of the potential audience for them. And I suspect that Peck is wrong, if Bahan is right: A positive review would motivate far more than 3 percent of the readers of the review to attend the show. In other words, the review has a big impact on a small number of readers, and by extension, a big impact on theater companies. (In Portland, a show that draws 5,000 or so during the course of its run is a big hit, except at Portland Center Stage, which has a house that’s more than double the size of any other theater in town). Which is why theater companies really want their shows reviewed, generally speaking. The newspaper is speaking directly to their (potential) audience.

Well, Mr. Peck, what about the “bad” reviews the Tribune runs?

“That’s going to have to be figured out between our editors, and our writers and our readers,” he said tersely.

I like Brauer’s “tersely” there. Gives it a bite without going over the top. And I like that Peck includes the readers, though I know from experience that involving readers directly in these sorts of discussions — about newspaper writing quality — is vanishingly rare. What’s the forum? What’s the standard? How do we get a significant enough sample to make it actionable?

Let’s dispense with Bahan’s Rich obsession. Ben Brantley, the current and primary New York Times critic, is really good, too. Graydon Royce at the Tribune isn’t bad either, at least in the small sample I just read. And I suspect he might be really good if he had the same amount of space that Brantley (and Rich) has — Brantley’s front-of-the-art -section takes often run more than 1,000 words. That would give him room to develop his observations more fully and gradually, over time, make his sensibility (I hesitate to call it aesthetic, which sounds so airy) more transparent.

But this is what Bahan is talking about really. She doesn’t care about the space limits at the newspaper. And she must think that the longer more feature-like takes would have more affect for her theater (and giving her the benefit of the doubt) the theater community in general, that they would reach into the 97 percent of non-readers and stir up more interest than the reviews.

Should Tribune theater-writing resources be scattered among dozens of theaters in stage-rich Minneapolis? Or should they be deployed on larger stories? That question still stands. And Peck really doesn’t answer it, except to say that the Tribune will continue to try to do both, which presumably it will do less and less well as resources continue to shrink. I understand his reluctance to engage the question; weirdly, at this moment, it’s proving difficult for newspapers to change their habits — their way of organizing themselves, reporting, writing (and for that matter selling themselves to advertisers and readers). You might think it would be easy, but it’s not for a variety of reasons (one of which is simply lack of confidence that a new approach might work better).

There’s a missing piece of information, as I’ve suggested.

It happens to be you. The audience for theater. The readers of the newspaper (and its website). Not to mention Art Scatter. You play the arts editor: How do you want your writers spending their time? What sort of writing do you want them to be doing? Criticism has been the backbone of newspaper arts writing since critics started appearing in large numbers on the payroll as staff writers, which didn’t come about really until the 1960s. Is it time to move past the review and embrace something more journalistic as Bahan suggests? Or is the system as it is (with improvements, of course) a responsible way to deal with arts in the community?

That, of course, is a special invitation to comment, if you want.