This is going to do nothing but slightly slow the collapse of both of these newspapers:
In the Dallas and Fort Worth daily newspapers, there will no longer be separate reviews of many cultural organizations and events. The two city papers, the Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, have begun running the same review by the same writer. It’s the latest development in what has been a series of cutbacks affecting area arts reporting and reviewing. With newspapers across the country facing serous financial problems, maintaining an individual, local critic’s voice is no longer a priority, even when the arts in question are locally based.
Don’t they see? If the same reviews run in both papers, it makes both papers look worse. Without a distinct critical voice, they’re both just going to be AP reprint organs with (I’ll presume) slightly different editorial slants. And they will go out of business because they will both not matter equally.
either get more content ala postman on politics that makes you relevant, or go out of business. But don’t waste our time with psuedo-mergers that just delay the inevitable shuttering
Dallas used to be very very different from Fort Worth.
It’s sad to see this.
I miss the days when we used to play with fire ants outside my school in Arlington (they had this dumb program where you could read ahead of your grade level, so you ended up with tons of free time in middle school).
The reach of every newspaper is now national. The country can’t support a thousand full-time movie critics, in a thousand cities.
There might be enough demand to have a dozen full-time salary movie critics of Ebert-level fame. And any number of independent bloggers writing reviews for fitfty cents per thousand page views.
Ditto for books. And theater. As far as art is concerned, everybody is a critic, so there isn’t need for any one full time professional art critic.
@3:
Movies, and even books I can somewhat understand, since those particular media are national. But art galleries, live theatre, ballet/dance, opera et al are still primarily products of local origin and interest, and so not really subject to national coverage the way film is.
And just because anybody can criticize, it doesn’t follow their criticism will be informed by, say, having a grounding in that particular medium. Ideally, a critic should have some knowledge and experience about what they are covering, so that readers can have some expectation they know what they’re talking about, resulting in the reader being able to formulate an intelligent, informed decision about whether to see something or not.
Just throwing a bunch of bloggers into the fray doesn’t guarantee that, anymore than setting 100 monkeys at word processors will result in a “Hamlet”, or heck, even an “Odd Couple”.
Most mainstream dailies do a shit job of covering local music and arts anyway. Leave it to the free weeklies (a la The Stranger) to do this job. The “Lifestyle” section will not be missed.
In re: the Killers post just above this one, how come some posts of late don’t have comments enabled? There’s been one or two a day for the last few days.
I liked the Killers until I found out their front man was a magic underpants guy. I’m glad I never spent money on them.
@6 usually they link to another part of stranger usually line out or an article
No way, Will in Seattle! I’m a Texas Arlingtonite, too! Though…I never did play with fire ants. However, I do still feel like Dallas and Ft. Worth are very different. I feel like each one has different things to offer…even if those things no longer include local reviews. =/
Your headline brings to mind the supposed truism that bugs the shit out of me more than almost any other. Great minds don’t think alike. Part of what makes a mind great is that they think in a way that is unlike any other. Isaac Newton, Galileo, Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, Michael Faraday: these are people that didn’t think like their contemporaries, which is part of what made them great and have breakthroughs. It’s the mediocre that think the same. Mormons, Fundies, Islamic radicals, et al, ‘nuf said.
It’s disappointing too when Seattle papers cut people like classical critic Melinda Bargreen.
I *love* our daily papers for the local coverage of events, travel, film, arts, food & music. But if they cut this local coverage any more, they will lose the core of their value.
They will seal their own doom if they only exist to regurgitate wire stories — which we don’t need local papers for.
A similar thing happened a couple years back in the SF Bay Area, when 2 alt-weeklies (at that time, both owned by Village Voice Media) started running the same reviews. Then, to add insult to injury, started running *front page feature articles* a week apart. Luckily they sold off one of the two papers last year, and I don’t need to pick up the VVM paper to read Dan Savage any more 🙂