Bill Keller, Editor of the NYT on dance coverage

[Leigh Witchel]

Thanks to Mindy Aloff in her Letter from New York for making this catch:

Bill Keller in the Los Angeles Times on arts coverage.  (My emphasis in bold)

"The daily culture section is understaffed and needs more space and has to be newsier," he says. "We need more coverage like those take-no-prisoner stories on the movie industry that Sharon Waxman has done for us recently.

"Howell was right to have identified this as a priority before he got stalled by the turmoil," Keller says. "Our cultural coverage is one of the reasons the national edition has been so successful, and it's an entry point for the younger readers we'd all like to attract, so we have to do it right.

"Our old Arts & Leisure section had become a series of niche publications for dance aficionados and longtime season-ticket holders of the New York Philharmonic," he says. "We have to retain those readers but also figure out how to attract others."

Wow. Is there any way to get through to him that the times not only reflects its readers, it leads them? The less coverage the arts has, the less "interesting" it is, and so on.

Subscribers to the paper might want to make their feelings known.

[Herman Stevens]

This is a global disease, surely. The new editor of the weekly I review fiction for proposed we'd change our tack and "only do items that are sure to be successful and attract a big audience". So I could only counter by saying, how can we be sure a book / show / whatever is going to be successful in advance? Plus aren't the media able to create and initiate success, by leading rather than following?

I believe he's still mulling this over.

[art076]

I don't see Keller's comments as a necessarily bad sign at all - he said that they need to retain those readers as well as move the Arts section into a position where it will attract others as well. He never said he was going to cut the dance or classical music coverage. He does seem to say that perhaps the paper's focus on those specific arts was becoming narrow to the point of alienating other readers or excluding coverage of other arts that the Times should also have the responsibility of covering - and that is okay as long as he remembers that he would also like to retain the readers the section had previously.

He's very right to say that the paper needs more hard hitting, and more expansive coverage of the arts - he mentions two "take-no-prisoner" stories about the movie business that were published recently - and hopefully that means that arts coverage will extend in the same way. We need more balanced and hard hitting coverage of the arts, not just features promotional feature on the performance aspect or lopsided coverage of financial situations.

[Alexandra]

They always SAY they want to retain readers. And then go do what they really want to do, which is, as Herman says, "only do items that are sure to be successful and attract a big audience." In Denmark, one major paper reduced its "arts" coverage to movies and pop music ONLY unless there were something cosmic enough to be worthy, for lack of a better word, of "Entertainment Tonight."

I have mixed feelings about the hard-hitting coverage. Sometimes I agree -- there are things that happen in the dance world that, if they happened anywhere else, would be major scandals (misuse of money: bad hiring choices at the directoral level, say, that require buying out the bad choice after a year. And how are artistic directors chosen, anyway?) But to be honest, I think it would result only in a different kind of spin.

In the 1950s, when newspapers did think of themselves as leaders of taste (I know, I know, I could go to hell for even thinking that) they actually covered the arts as arts. Instead of an interview with the choreographer of a new ballet, they might talk to the composer, or, if the composer were "difficult," the music critic would do a piece explaining him. When I was researching my book, I came across some very imaginative uses of the arts pages. For a new ballet that dealt with schizophrenia, a psychologist wrote a piece about schizophrenia. There was an effort to enrich the reader/viewer's experience, and also to try to tie the arts together, to assume that someone who attended theater also wanted to know what was going on in the world of opera and ballet.

I'm going to attempt to do something like old-style arts coverage this in DanceView Times for Lincoln Center's Ashton Festival. I'm writing thumbnail descriptions of the ballets, and invited several people to write short preview pieces talking about how to look at Ashton, or what they liked about Ashton, etc., from different points of view. Why? Because Ashton is unfamiliar to many New York balletgoers now. I saw something like this way way back, in the early 20th century when the Ballet Russe came to Washington. The Star, the big paper then, did a huge feature on them, with descriptions of the ballets and an explanation of exactly what ballet was and what to expect -- written for sentient beings too poor, perhaps, to make the Grand Tour.

[carbro]

He never said he was going to cut the dance or classical music coverage.

No, but his predecessors already did that for him.

For a new ballet that dealt with schizophrenia, a psychologist wrote a piece about schizophrenia. There was an effort to enrich the reader/viewer's experience, and also to try to tie the arts together, to assume that someone who attended theater also wanted to know what was going on in the world of opera and ballet.

I can't imagine that in this age of specialization, the reporter who covers mental health would be invited into the arts pages. Or even that the music critic would critique a new ballet score. What a loss!