Village Voice cuts staff dance critic Deborah Jowitt

[sandik]

NYT on firing

She has been invited to contribute as a freelancer, but they will no longer have a staff position.

[carbro]

Wow! Things are worse -- even worse -- than I'd realized. Jowitt is an institution at the Voice and in the New York dance scene. I hope for her sake and ours that this is a short-lived economy measure, but I doubt it.

[papeetepatrick]

Weren't they talking about this over a year ago? Maybe way back in 2006 even.

But that paper is almost non-existent by now, it lost all of its trademark radicalism (even if you didn't agree with it, it had a tough obnoxiousness to it that you couldn't help admiring) by late 2004, and now its little more than a bunch of restaurant reviews and gross sex articles. They've fired most of the big names they had for decades, there's still Nat Hentoff and Wayne Barrett--although I don't know what he'll do now that Giuliani isn't a hot topic at the moment--and the gossip things. Yes, no 'short-lived economy measure'; things like this are never reversed.

[dirac]

It wasn't too long ago that Elizabeth Zimmer was offering space to Tobi Tobias after the latter's dismissal from New York magazine; then Zimmer was gone from the Voice, and now Jowitt is out of a job. Decline and fall.

No, it's not a short lived measure. Once the papers get away with eliminating the full time position, it never comes back.

[Dale]

Newspapers have been cutting across the board. It used to be a "dance just isn't that relevant" thing, now it's a "newspapers are dying" thing.

[sandik]

It wasn't too long ago that Elizabeth Zimmer was offering space to Tobi Tobias after the latter's dismissal from New York magazine; then Zimmer was gone from the Voice, and now Jowitt is out of a job. Decline and fall.

You can read both Tobi Tobias and Elizabeth Zimmer, as well as Apollinaire Scherr, on ArtsJournal. Blogging is not the same as print criticism, but it has its charms, and all three writers manage to take advantage of them.

Elizabeth Zimmer is Stage Write

Tobi Tobias is Seeing Things

And Apollinaire Scherr is Foot in Mouth

[Paul Parish]

With respect, IMHO what's happening at newspapers is simply that they're trying to "raise productivity' BY "DOWNSIZING labor costs" (i.e., paying writers less) by firing reporters of all kinds, with different excuses as needed -- NB the LA Times recently let go of their very senior and very important dance critic, the excellent Lewis Segal, -- which we all noticed -- but in fact they've gotten rid of a HUGE percentage of their pnews-gathering reporters of ALL kinds, because -- guess what? they got bought up by the Chicago Tribune, and Chicago thought LA was costing too much. The deeper story is that for over a decade "shareholder interest" has required higher profits at newspapers than used to be thought necessary. It first showed up 15 years ago when they started downsizing the "newshole" in proportion to the amount of space being given to paid advertising -- which meant that reporters like George Jackson were restricted to 8 inches (when he had had at least twice as much -- esp if it was a dance company never seen before, which requires more exposition just to give the background). Then it became "productivity" -- and these draconian cost/benefit theories have since justified firing lots of reporters everywhere, at almost EVERY paper, except the WSJ and NYT -- with the result that the papers have filled up with "soft news" features that could be run any day of the week (in SF, they've been features about why people jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, interviews with yet another homeless person or internet gambler or senior citizen taking a yoga class) while the NEWS has gone increasingly uncovered.

The canard that "people are not interested in dance" is a pious belief that's convenient for editors and publishers -- it's not true, it's NOt how the PUBLIC feels -- though if interviewed, the man in the street will admit that he hears less and less about dance (but that's just because "the papers" have stopped covering it).

But the man in the street watches Dancing with the Stars.

I'm making a gross generalization, of course, there are exceptions, but it's basically true: of the metro dailies and most of the "alternative papers" (e.g., the Voice). yes the dailies are getting less and less informative -- but they are still solvent. If they're not making money like their shareholders want, they didn't use to. But there's NO QUESTION that the current LA Times, and also the Voice, are not the great papers they used to be.

[dirac]

Newspapers have been cutting across the board. It used to be a "dance just isn't that relevant" thing, now it's a "newspapers are dying" thing.

I think that’s now a part of it, but at Newsweek recently, for example, foreign and national reporters were largely spared (it was a buyout) but among the ranks of the senior critics it was a massacre.

[whitelight]

I'm late to this discussion, but I just want to add how sorry I am to see Deborah Jowitt go. And say what you will about the Voice and what they've become, but I would have thought that they would be committed to arts coverage. The whole thing makes me deeply sad.