On a Friday a couple of months ago, nineteen-year-old Devin Wallace did something extraordinary, something no demographics expert, cultural commentator, or media-industry analyst ever could have predicted.

He bought a newspaper.

The Sunday edition of the South Florida Sun Sentinel, published in Fort Lauderdale, was almost a week out of date. Whatever news it contained had long been digested, “shared,” and supplanted by newer news on the Internet. But when Wallace saw those colorful relics stacked by the counter of his neighborhood convenience store, waiting in poignant neglect like a display of hand-knit sweaters on a balmy spring day, something compelled him to pick one up. It cost a dollar. And Wallace—a Thespian alumnus of Nova High School, participant in the national Cappies program for student stage artists and critics, and aspiring performer—says he got his money’s worth.

“I read everything, literally, from the current news going on in my area such as [improvements to] nearby parks, to stories dealing with worldwide news, entertainment sections dealing with the latest Hollywood gossip… and a story about a twelve-year-old girl starring in a production at the local high school near my house. It was really interesting,” he sums up with a laugh.

“Usually I feel like online, they don’t give the full story,” adds Wallace, who’s the child of one faithful newspaper reader and “a computer guy” who got him out of the habit. “With newspapers, you can sit down and just read. I miss that… I don’t know why people stopped doing it.”

I don’t know, either. I used to work for a newspaper, back when more people used to read them. So this is partly a story about me and others who remember the way things used to be, before what New York Review of Books essayist Russell Baker called, in a recent piece about the once-proud Washington Post, “the great newspaper blight” of the post-millennial decade. The symptoms: rotting subscriber rolls and withering ad revenue. The principal causes: free content on the web and a lingering economic recession. Our thriving newsrooms shriveled with sickening speed, and specialists, including arts reporters like myself, were among the first to go.

If journalism is, as news people like to say, the first draft of history, then who’s scripting the rough cut when it comes to theatre? Does it matter if ranchers are dancing, salesmen are dying, and monkeys are flying on stages across the country and no one is faithfully documenting these events—events that might involve hundreds of people experiencing powerful emotions and are therefore at least as newsworthy as a traffic jam? A well-crafted review can save a good show or put a bad one out of its misery. Many of the great musicals might have failed if the creators had ignored—or never received—critical feedback from out-of-town tryouts. Entire regional theatre scenes, from Chicago to Seattle to Denver, might never have developed but for the consistent coverage, and occasional tough love, of critics. The books they write, the awards they give, the students they tutor in programs like The Cappies—the decline of print has put all this at risk.

Here’s how David Cote put it in a blog post forThe Guardian of London: “We critics, reviewers, consumer reporters—call us what you will—are the dung beetles of culture. We consume excrement, enriching the soil and protecting livestock from bacterial infection in the process. We are intrinsic to the theatre ecology. Eliminate us at your peril.”

A poetic argument. But not everyone buys it.

“Good riddance to all of you critics who have had nice jobs and health insurance policies spewing your supposed expertise in your easy chair while the art community struggles to even eat,” commented one listener to an NPR story last year on the shrinking arts desks at papers across the country. “We don’t need you—we never did.”

Granted, the relationship between artists and critics has been fraught ever since Solon, a magistrate of ancient Greece, banged his staff on the ground after a performance and accused the great Thespis himself of gross lies and rabble-rousing. That’s how Plutarch describes the scene, anyway. I know I’ve had my share of angry e-mails. Still, most theatre people value intelligent, rigorous criticism, and fear its loss in the mainstream press. 

“It is a sad state of affairs for us,” says Michael Price, director of Goodspeed Musicals in East Haddam, Connecticut. The Goodspeed Opera House is more than 120 miles from Manhattan, but for years the company could depend on regular reviews and feature stories in the New York papers and beyond. Not anymore. “It hurts us, because how do you get known?” That’s another important piece of this story.

But I wanted to begin with Devin Wallace—to thank him for kicking in a buck for print journalism the day before I happened to interview him for this article, and because his story is the one that matters. Whatever shapes theatre criticism and other kinds of cultural reporting take over the next decade or so, his generation will determine. And his generation, of artists and audiences, will have to live with the results.

 

‘It was a great adventure’

Let’s say you grow up wanting to be an actor. You’re good. You’re passionate. Adults recognize your talent and encourage you. You get into a top training program, work hard, and land a regular gig in a small city, performing for modest audiences who seem to appreciate what you do. You move up to a bigger stage, a bigger audience. You start earning a decent salary, enough to start a family. People in the entertainment capitals notice your work. You’re this close to making the big time.

And then theatres start shutting down. Maybe the bedbug epidemic finally reaches the mezzanine. Maybe there’s a revival of Colonial-era Puritanism (in many early American towns, you know, plays were banned). For whatever reason, seemingly overnight, live theatre as you know it ceases to exist except on a much smaller scale, in a few major cities. People say you can still be an actor—in commercials, video games, TV, or maybe movies, which in this trumped-up scenario pay less than stage work. And of course, with so many displaced stage actors now competing for those same few jobs in electronic media, the market value of that work falls even further.

Aside from how all this affects your mortgage, your daughter’s college fund, and your 401K, it also means that the experience of working in a theatre—the feel of it, the smell of it, the thrill and incomparable challenge of doing a live show night after night—is probably over for you. You’ll never again have that kind of direct connection with an audience, never again be surrounded by so many brilliant, funny, committed pros who are just as crazy about this work as you are. Forget the great roles, the epic soliloquies, the marathon performances; you’ll have to reduce your craft to the demands of a thirty-second take. You might still have a career, if you’re lucky, but it won’t be the same.

This is sort of what happened to me, except that my dream wasn’t to work in the theatre—it was to write about it. Not in academic journals or blogs (unimagined twenty years ago, when I entered college) or some other outlet catering to arts insiders; I wanted to write for newspapers, which everyone read. I knew most of those readers didn’t care much about theatre. I was born in Ohio and adopted into a family of beer-drinking sports fanatics, so it wasn’t like I grew up quoting Noël Coward at the breakfast table. I knew how to talk to regular people. I thought if I was really sharp and engaging, I might snag a few eyeballs on their way to the box scores or the bridge column, maybe turn some folks on to a little show in a little theatre they’d never heard of and change their lives.

Like I said, it was a dream. I pursued it for ten years, first at the South Bend Tribune in Indiana, where I covered all the arts as a reporter and critic, then at the much larger Charlotte Observer, in North Carolina, where I covered theatre full-time. In 2007 I was a finalist for an arts-reporting job at the Chicago Tribune, my dream of dreams. I had a thrilling day of interviews but didn’t get the job. And thank God: not long after that, the Tribune Company went into bankruptcy. I probably would have been laid off. Meanwhile, I began envying my senior critics whose careers had begun in the good old days.

“I try not to be one of those, you know, old fogies who tell you that you should have seen World War II,” says Linda Winer, of Newsday. The suburban New York paper is one of the country’s dozen largest, but Newsday had an embarrassing moment last January when a four-million-dollar redesign of its website drew only thirty-five paid subscribers, at a rate of five dollars per week, over three months of promotion.

I met Winer long before that, in 1994, when Newsday was healthy and Winer a rare (now more rare) female first-string drama critic at a major metropolitan daily. To me, a fresh J-school graduate/theatre major from Indiana University, Winer was living proof of the possibilities. She was kind enough to spend some time with me and my classmates on an end-of-term trip to New York organized by our arts journalism professor. Winer’s message to us at the time: go for it.    

“I was really lucky to have come into the profession during a window of opportunity that I didn’t know was going to close,” Winer tells me now. She started out in 1968, in Chicago, as an apprentice classical music critic at the Trib. “They were just beginning to hire women, and they were just beginning to hire young (critics)… It was such a time of expansion. There was a feeling that the arts were terrific and people really wanted to know about them. It was incredibly exhilarating.”

This was before computers, even before those clunky word processors. Winer remembers banging out her reviews on a manual typewriter, racing against an 11:30 p.m. deadline, tearing off the first page and yelling “Copy!,” handing sheets to copy boys who sprinted off to the typesetters while Winer banged out the next page, and then “Copy!” again, until her words were rolling off the presses and onto the trucks.

“It was a great adventure,” Winer says, adding that back then the Tribune had three competing papers, which had their own critics. “As newspapers around me died I realized how much less interesting the city became, and how much less interesting the job became, and how much pressure was on the few voices that were left. But the end of the print newspaper—that was science fiction to me. That was going to happen in someone else’s lifetime.”

 

Media and money

So what went wrong?

One of the many smart people who have attempted to answer this question is David Rubin, a professor in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. He always begins the first lecture of his introductory course by drawing a big dollar sign on the blackboard.

“You can’t understand the mass media until you understand the money,” he says, and the truth is, for the vast majority of American newspapers, having a lot of cultural reporters on staff was never a financially sound strategy.

“Ever since World War II, the market for advertising in newspapers and many magazines was so strong,” Rubin explains, “it was able to support the hiring of arts critics and journalists for whom there might not have been a large audience.”

Clearly Rubin doesn’t want to hurt my feelings, but let’s face it: grocery-store coupons and horoscopes drove a lot more newspaper subscriptions than my theatre reviews ever did. True, those comparatively few readers who valued high-quality cultural reporting in the paper really valued it. They tended to be more educated and affluent than the typical reader, and therefore more attractive to some advertisers—but they also tended to be older, which some marketers consider a negative.

At a lot of regional newspapers, a fully staffed arts desk was a point of pride, just as cities pride themselves on having at least one of every kind of museum, performing arts institution, and major league sports team. Covering culture was also part of newspapers’ public service tradition—again, coming out of the war years, before media ownership shifted, generally, from civic-minded families to publicly traded companies and conglomerates. Contemporary newsroom managers were able to indulge quaint notions of societal good back when stock returns were high enough (often 20 percent during the heated markets of the 1980s and ’90s) to keep investors happy. But those numbers were unrealistic long-term.

Then came the Internet.

At first the captains of the newspaper industry failed to grasp how fully digital our lives would become. They figured the best use of websites would be to strengthen their brands, build market share, and court young adults who weren’t subscribing anyway. Giving news away for free turns out to have been a bad idea.

“I don’t think they’re idiots,” Rubin insists—in fact, most newspaper owners wanted readership to shift online. Imagine the savings in printing costs, distribution, and so on, to say nothing of the environmental benefits, if the paper product could be phased out. Problem was, readers changed their habits faster than anyone predicted, and so far, most efforts to charge them for content, “to put the toothpaste back in the tube,” as Rubin puts it, have proven unsuccessful.      

 Newspapers’ advertisers, by contrast, were slow to embrace the new media, and remain unwilling to pay for online ads at anything like the high rates they once paid for print displays. Free sites like Craigslist killed the classifieds, while exploding options in web-based entertainment cut into readers’ time. We’re also struggling to emerge from the worst economy since the Depression of the 1930s, which has hurt advertising of all kinds and made newspaper subscriptions, relatively cheap as they are, seem like a luxury for working families. And a lot of newspapers had grown too fast in the 1980s and ’90s, Rubin says, which saddled them with too much real estate and too much debt. So even if they had ideas for making money via the Internet, they couldn’t afford the talent, technology, and time they’d need to experiment. 

“All these things came together, and they had to start making cuts. Well, where are you going to cut? Unfortunately, critics have been on the firing line,” Rubin says. “That’s how we got where we are now.”

 

‘History is shaped’

Not that the good old days, as Winer and I like to think of them, were all that great.

Christopher Rawson, retired theatre writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and president of the American Theatre Critics Association, joined the group back in 1984. He says he went to his first ATCA conference expecting to meet a lot of educated, experienced, thoughtful theatre critics who might inspire him in his own work.

“I discovered—no,” he recalls, laughing. “In many a case, the arts desks at the regional newspapers were the bastard stepchildren. You had former cops-beat reporters writing theatre reviews because they were used to staying up late.” While researching a book on August Wilson, Rawson recalls, “I read at least a hundred reviews of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. I couldn’t believe the drivel.” In any generation, he concludes, there might be “a couple of names out of a hundred” whose critical writing endures.

Rubin goes further.

“A lot of newspapers are in trouble because the general level of reporting and writing was lousy,” the Syracuse University professor says—and not only that, but a lot of symphonies, theatre groups, and opera and dance companies could put up dull material season after season and still count on fawning coverage: “The complacency of the critics was matched by the complacency of the arts organizations.”

Turn the clock back a century or two, and you’ll see an even more checkered picture. In discouraging times, it often helps to talk to a historian.

“Theatre criticism means many different things. It’s gone through a process over time. There was a time when it was all puff pieces,” says Jeffrey Eric Jenkins, editor of the venerable Best Plays Theater Yearbook and director of theatre studies at New York University. (He also edited Under the Copper Beech: Conversations With American Theater Critics, which presents a vivid national picture of the profession beginning with the 1930s. If Jeffrey Sweet’s interview of Otis L. Guernsey, Jr., doesn’t make you wish you could have been a copy boy at the New York Herald Tribune in 1941, living on $15 a week and sharing a dingy one-room apartment on 14th Street, then consider your veins inkless.)

The earliest American newspapers were political organs, Jenkins points out—and whatever cultural commentary they contained was political, too. Reviews often took the form of letters to the editor. The writers hid behind pseudonyms like Criticus, Philadelphus, A Friend to the Drama, and (my personal favorite) Captain Fish. “They wrote reviews of the way people behaved in the theatre,” Jenkins says. When they addressed what was actually on stage, their arguments tended to be moral rather than aesthetic. And they worked for free.

“They sound like bloggers,” I say.

“You could probably make that argument and get away with it, I think,” Jenkins replies. “They were amateurs, in the true sense of the word.”

The advent of the penny press in the 1830s opened up theatre criticism to a mass audience for the first time—and producers were quick to take advantage. “The theatre managers were essentially bribing the theatre writers” to get favorable notices, Jenkins says. “One had a room set up backstage with food and drink, so the theatre critics could come and sit and have drinks while they wrote their reviews.” Talk about the good old days! But those chummy relationships didn’t always last.

“There were brawls,” Jenkins says. There were lawsuits. Producers assaulted critics in bars. Rival critics berated each other. James Gordon Bennett, the pioneering editor of the New York Herald, was horsewhipped by one disgruntled actor-manager. All the while, plays were cheered or condemned; careers were made or unmade.

“Not a lot of people pay a whole lot of attention to the history of theatre criticism,” Jenkins admits. “But history is shaped. There is a narrative, which we usually can’t see until we’re looking back at it.

“Criticism has had an impact on the theatre. It still does today. It’s different than it once was,” he says, and that’s not necessarily a disaster. “We have to step back and say, ‘What’s important?’ What’s important is that there is continuing written coverage.”

 

Where are we now?

So far, written coverage of live theatre has continued. In a way.

“We’re in the middle of the upheaval,” Rawson says. Everyone’s scrambling. No one knows which “brands” will survive, on what platforms. Some newspapers have folded, others have discontinued their print editions, many more are likely to do so over the next few years. Arts journalists are adapting, doing their best to keep theatre’s narrative alive without being upstaged by the countless “volunteer” critics of the blogosphere.

“Substance is being lost, and what’s replacing it is ubiquity,” Rawson laments. Facebook? Twitter? He’s not a fan.

Others are warming up to the new channels, by choice or necessity.

“The world is not so much changing as it has already changed,” says Leonard Jacobs. A critic/author who used to work exclusively in print—“I remember the smell of ink”—he now edits the online Clyde Fitch Report, among other ventures.

Wendy Rosenfield freelances for the Philadelphia Inquirer and writes the Drama Queen blog, which is featured on ArtsJournal.com. “I’m a Twitter fanatic. I’m on Facebook all the time. The stuff I’m doing for free kind of draws people to my paid work,” she says, which adds up to about ten grand a year, part-time. No one’s getting rich doing this stuff.

Andy Propst founded one of the first online outlets for stage news, AmericanTheatreWeb.com, and edited it for eleven years before moving on to other websites, freelance print gigs, and radio. He puts in a lot of hours and makes a reasonable living.

“My cobbling together a career in New York is not a lot different than someone trying to make a living as an actor,” Propst points out, and he likes the connection that implies. “Among artists, there is an appreciation of the fact that I’m working as hard for my art as they are for theirs.”

The old walls between critics and artists, once as towering and solid as our newspaper buildings, are coming down. I think that’s healthy. We’ll learn more from each other if we can step out of our roles now and then and interact as human beings. Still, I initially hesitated to “friend” actors, directors, and playwrights on Facebook; now their posts are my primary source for theatre news. Ironic though it might be, I couldn’t have written this story without social media—might never have heard, for instance, about the Kansas State Board of Education’s recent decision to cut vocational funds for high school journalism programs. (They cited poor job prospects in the field.) But I also had to step away from my computer, away from the parroting that passes for too much online reporting, and speak to sources in person, dip into critics’ physical libraries, pick up actual newspapers. In J-school they called it “shoe leather.” It takes money and time. 

Each journalist has to find his own balance on the ever-shifting digital stage, says Michael Phillips. A longtime theatre critic now covering film for the Chicago Tribune, Phillips also appeared with New York Times critic A.O. Scott on At the Movies, the syndicated TV series that began with Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, and which Disney-ABC supported fitfully and finally canceled this summer after twenty-four seasons.

Arts reporters should plug into social media to catch buzz and to promote themselves, Phillips says. He especially enjoys Twitter: “It’s like gag writing.” (Here’s how he reviewed last summer’s Tom Cruise movie in tweet form: “‘Knight and Day.’ You aren’t the one.”) Theatre journalists could do a lot more, he adds, to enhance our written coverage with video and sound, and to use interactive features to foster lively debate among readers—but there’s a danger in letting the new tools take up all of your time. Facebook can be an attractive alternative, Phillips admits, to actual reporting, research, and writing.

 

The next thing

Everyone I spoke to agrees that theatre criticism has a future in the digital era. They just have no idea what it will be.

“If dramatic criticism is of use, it will survive in one form or another,” says Dan Sullivan, head of the National Critics Institute at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center, a well-known “boot camp” for theatre writers. He’s actually feeling better now about the future of arts journalism than he was a few summers ago, when applications to NCI slowed to a trickle. The program has shrunk from four weeks to two, for affordability, and is drawing more students and far fewer working journalists than it did when I attended a decade ago. But Sullivan still believes in the basic training NCI provides—“Good writing is good writing,” he says—and he has seen some promising young critics come through in recent years. 

 “I do think journalists now are going to have to be much more versatile,” Sullivan says. “You do have to find a road for yourself that will not be, maybe, as predetermined for you as in the old days, but that can be a good thing.”

“Of course criticism will always exist, because people like arguing about what they care about,” allows Rawson. “It’s just the professionalism of criticism that’s at risk, [including] the idea that you can make a living at it.”

Phillips thinks the best, most enterprising young arts journalists will find new ways to establish themselves, hone their skills, and perhaps—if anyone ever figures out how to make online communication pay—support themselves. “It’s never been that practical,” he points out, to be a theatre critic. “There have never been many full-time jobs.”

Rubin, at Syracuse, considers the field wide open. 

“I tell my students, you’re lucky to be alive now. The old patterns have broken up. There’s room for new ideas. There’s no one telling you what the orthodoxy is,” Rubin says. “We tell them there’s a million things they can do. But don’t assume that’s the full-time job,” he adds, partly because of what’s happened to newspapers, but also because “the nature of work in this country is changing.” Actors aren’t the only people with day jobs these days. 

“People who are your age and older,” Rubin tells me, “you grew up with it the way it was. You will not figure out how it’s going to end. You’re too old. You’re just going to have to fasten your seatbelt and hang on.”

 

And then?

The great newspaper blight didn’t kill me. I left the Charlotte Observer in June 2008, during the first of several buyout rounds, and moved back home to Cincinnati and to the Educational Theatre Association. I like to say I’ve landed the last secure job in arts journalism—and if you, dear Dramatics reader, have stuck with me this far, that might be true. I’m happy here. But I miss working in a newsroom. I miss the friends I made there. I worry that many of them won’t be as lucky finding new jobs as I was. (Michael Phillips, still safe for now at the Chicago Tribune, assures me I’m not alone in my survivor’s guilt and nostalgia.) 

My bigger worry: what does their situation, the fact that so many gifted thinkers, reporters, and storytellers are suddenly homeless in the digital marketplace, say about our culture at large?

“There has been a deep shift. A dramatic shift,” says Peter Jacobi, my arts journalism professor at Indiana, the one who took our class to New York in 1994 to meet Linda Winer and others who told us to go for it. Semi-retired and not traveling as much as he used to, Jacobi still teaches, still writes reviews for the Bloomington paper. But he fears that arts critics have lost more than space, more than jobs over the last few years. He fears we’ve lost our audience.

“There is less propensity to seek out any depth in reading, in writing, in discussing,” Jacobi says. “People don’t want to think. They want something to be thrown at them; they want something to wash over them. They don’t want to be tested. They don’t want to be argued with. That’s dangerous. This is where the arts can be so useful. They can be provocative. They do arouse questions. A great play has the capacity to force thinking.”

So maybe the tide will turn. Maybe the more we live virtually, the more we’ll crave actual experiences, like theatre—and the more we’ll want to seek out and share intelligent opinions about it. Maybe the iPad and other reader-friendly mobile gadgets will spark a new digital revolution, one in which the Incredible Shrinking Attention Span is no longer assumed to be an unavoidable condition of modern life. Just last year the National Endowment for the Arts reported that after two decades of decline, literary reading (fiction, short stories, poems, and plays) was suddenly on the rise, with young adults reporting the sharpest increases (21 percent more reading since 2002).

Maybe nonprofits like the Poynter Institute or ProPublica (a $9 million co-op of sorts for investigative journalists, which won a Pulitzer Prize this year) will step in to support criticism as well. Maybe entire newspapers will go nonprofit themselves. Maybe more individual donors will follow the exampleof Louis Corrigan, in Atlanta, who just gave ninety thousand dollars toward independent, local arts reporting online. Maybe arts institutions themselves will pool their funds toward similar efforts, out of self-preservation. Maybe enough people on Facebook will decide they “Like” professional arts journalism enough to fight for it, or at least to pay for it: “If the whole social networking thing is about community,” Linda Winer says, “I’d like to believe there will be a movement in the community to care about what we’re losing.”

There are all kinds of upbeat scenarios. I throw out a few to my old mentor. “I used to think that positively,” Jacobi says. “I’m not that sure anymore.”

Print refugees with most of our working years still ahead of us, though, have to find hope somewhere. Like in the fact that at least once this fall, in Florida, a theatre-loving teen-ager sat down with a newspaper and read the whole damn thing.

“Everyone needs criticism,” Devin Wallace says. “It helps you hone your skills… It helps you understand how everything came to be and how it evolved to where we are now.

“Trust me,” he says. “I want to learn as much as I can.”