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HOWARD SHERMAN: The world of journalism is in a constant
state of evolution in this digital era and arts coverage is
no exception, as classic resources compete for attention
alongside Tweeters, bloggers and Facebookers.
Hello, I'm Howard Sherman. Executive Director of the
American Theatre Wing, and our guests today represent a range
of those bringing reportage and opinion to an audience
eager for information about the theatre. Joining us are
Chris Caggiano, Professor at the Boston Conservatory
and author of the blog, "Everything I know, I Learned
from Musicals". David Loehr, artist in residence at
River Run Theatre Company in Indiana and founder of the
website, "2AM Theatre". Scott Heller, Theatre and Book editor
of the New York Times. Jan Simpson, former arts editor of
Time Magazine, and adjunct faculty in cultural literacy at
the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, as well as the
author of the blog, "Broadway and Me." And Terry Teachout,
critic and columnist for the Wall Street Journal and author
of both the biography Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong and
the blog, "About Last Night." Whew, welcome to you all.
Let me start with a very simple question. I think we all came
of age in the era of old media and we've all had to learn
and adapt to all of the new media opportunities.
Do you find that to be an opportunity or a challenge
in what you're doing? And Scott, I'll start with you.
SCOTT HELLER: I mean it's obviously both an opportunity
and a challenge. It's an opportunity in that it opens
the variety of forms in which people can write and express
themselves. We have a chance to move much more quickly,
to break news, to stay on a subject and update news over
the course of the day through our blog, for example,
which we wouldn't have, you know, be able to do. I mean,
at a daily newspaper, often the arts report is, has earlier
deadlines than many other sections. And so we would
have to kind of end our news day at 5:00 pm, typically,
something like that. Now we can kind of update and
keep people informed all the way through. And that's
an opportunity, absolutely. It's also a challenge in
that people are often on and expected to be kind of keeping
an eye on what's going on beyond what would have been
the end of a deadline period before.
HOWARD SHERMAN: Well, I was gonna ask, I mean,
we talk about TV having become a 24 hour news cycle.
Is the print media now on a 24 hour news cycle as well?
SCOTT HELLER: I mean, it's definitely, in some quarters,
it is. I mean, thankfully in theatre, you know,
11:00 usually is as late as it's typically gonna go.
HOWARD SHERMAN: Because we all go to sleep.
SCOTT HELLER: That's right. But absolutely there is a
way in which people periodically are expected to be on the
news over the course of an evening if there's something
breaking and given what's happening on the West Coast,
we need to keep that in mind as well. Absolutely.
HOWARD SHERMAN: Chris? Opportunities, challenges?
CHRIS CAGGIANO: Well, for me clearly an opportunity.
I started as a business journalist, and have been --
well, fulltime writing about business for about 15 years.
And then in the last five years, you know, making the transition
into arts journalism. And my blog just started as kind of a
whim, because I was writing a business story on how small
business people can benefit from starting blogs and building what
they call "thought leadership". And I was like, "I gotta do
that." So I did. In 2006 and you know, it was almost accidental,
but it just -- I've been desperately devoted to theatre,
musical theatre in particular for about, you know,
more than 30 years. And this was an opportunity for me
to sort of, well -- I joke that I was boring my friends too
much with my emails about what they should and should
not see, that I decided rather than push I'm gonna pull.
And I'm gonna create the blog, and they can come and read
what they want and don't read it when they don't
want it. But it just snowballed.
HOWARD SHERMAN: Jan, from Art Center of Time
Magazine, to teaching journalism in this area, in this era,
and blogging. How, how's that going?
JAN SIMPSON: I think it's a total opportunity. Because it
broadens the conversation about theatre; and there has
always been this conversation about whether theatre is a
"dying invalid" or whatever. And this gives people all over,
not just the country, the world, it's sort of amazing,
when you start checking your stats and you find out people
in Japan or somewhere in the Middle East or something,
are reading your posts, and it allows, I think it's helped
to nurture and develop the audience for theatre,
so I think it's a good thing. I started blogging because
I had been editing for so long, that I think I'd forgotten
how to write and so it was just fun to just have this
little space where I could write about something that
had been a lifelong love.
HOWARD SHERMAN: Terry, you're writing in so many different
platforms. You have, within The Journal you have reviews
and you have your citings column. But you are also
writing opera, you're writing plays; You're writing
biographies. How do you balance between all of the
different opportunities?
TERRY TEACHOUT: Oh, the next deadline, you know.
HOWARD SHERMAN: But some of those deadlines are
self-imposed, because you've chosen to blog,
you've chosen to Tweet.
TERRY TEACHOUT: That's right.
HOWARD SHERMAN: Nobody's telling you to do those things.
TERRY TEACHOUT: And I've blogging for eight or nine
years. I mean, when I started blogging, there were maybe
a dozen art blogs. So for me, blogging has been almost
a pure opportunity, because the medium was unformed when
I started. And it does more things for you than I can
recount here. It puts you directly in touch with people,
you lose the interference, as sometimes it is, although
it never was when Jan was my editor, but the interference of
editors. You get to write what you want, when you want.
I mean, blogging is pure pleasure except for the fact
that you don't get any money for it. But for institutions, and
particularly for newspapers, it's pure challenge, because
newspapers, peculiar institutions, whose corporate
cultures are extremely hard to change and resistant
to change. Most newspapers have had enormous difficulty
coming to grips with what to do with the new media.
They're just not good at it, they're afraid of it, they
want it to go away, they want their careers to end before
the ceiling falls in. And you're really seeing a shakeout
between the institutions which, like the Times and
like the Journal, have really made a concerted effort to
come to grips with what the new media are and how
you use them; and the ones who just don't get it at all.
And especially, and this is the thing to be most afraid of,
who see it as an age struggle, where you have these hordes
of the young who are coming in to eat your job. If newspapers
and magazines could really see the new platforms as pure
opportunity, they'd do better with them.
HOWARD SHERMAN: I wanna use the word magazine to
talk about 2AM Theatre and it's not necessarily a phrase
that you've used, David. But 2AM Theatre, certainly
some could say, is simply a place where there's a bunch
of blogs about theatre, but it is discussion of theatre,
primarily from the viewpoints of people inside theatre,
talking about how and why they do it with constantly updated
content, all by a bunch of different bloggers. That's
clearly an opportunity, but why aggregate a bunch of people's
blogs, rather than simply put out your own opinion?
DAVID LOEHR: Well, partly because of the way it began on
Twitter, as a conversation, right? We didn't set out to do
a blog. We didn't set out, "Hey, let's see if anyone else is
listening." We were just talking amongst ourselves and one of
my collaborators, he's a designer in Chicago named
Nick Kennan, he said a really smart thing right
off the bat. "Sometimes I think 2AM Theatre is not something
we do, it's something that's happening to us." And it just,
it just mushroomed that way. And as more people were
interested in it and more people said, you know, "I'd like to
talk about this. Could I write about this?" We said, "Well,
okay." You know? And part of it is that it aggregates the
conversations, or not aggregates, but distills the
conversations that might crop up during the week on twitter.
But then we realized that we could also use it to spark
conversation. So it's, I mean, it's grown organically, right?
It wasn't me going, "I want to blog." You know? It was
more a reaction of, "Oh, I wrote this thing and people
are listening to this?" You know? And then to think,
okay, well, I might work at a certain level in theatre
and I might communicate with other theatres at my level,
but all of a sudden I'm talking with theatres at this level
and this level. And I'm talking with theatres in Australia
and Vancouver and London and Argentina and that's kind
of crazy. But there is it.
TERRY TEACHOUT: That's really the astonishing thing about
this medium. Is that it, you know, I cover regional theatre.
It creates a reality in which the word "regional" has no
meaning. We are all one big region. Off Broadway is a
region. We're grappling with the same kinds of problems and
to be able to grapple with them in the same space,
that's the best thing that could happen.
DAVID LOEHR: Right. I mean, it's kind of stunning
to me when I think about it now, two years ago, I knew
my region, I knew my immediate area. And now I have an
intimate knowledge of the theatre season in Ottawa,
Canada. I don't need this knowledge, I'm not
arguing with it but --
HOWARD SHERMAN: Well, but it's an interesting question
of what that has done to not necessarily a monolithic voice,
but the idea of certain people as experts. And then this
democratization of voice because these platforms, everyone is
essentially equal. Jan, certainly over the years, you
know, Time magazine was a place people would look for
cultural coverage. Do we think that those publications,
any weekly magazine, has the same stature now in the
cultural conversation or has it been replaced by an
awful lot more voices?
JAN SIMPSON: I think it's been a 50, 60 year evolution,
to be quite honest. When I took over the section in the
mid-90s, I went back and I looked at a whole lot of former,
you know, back issues of Time and I realized I didn't have
the job that those editors did. There was a time when
newspapers and publications really sort of set the agenda,
they educated their readers in a way that they said,
"This is what you should do. This is what you should know.
This is how you should approach this." By the mid-90s
we were already in a conversation. The readers
didn't want me to say, "This is good." They wanted me to
introduce them to it, to start a discussion about
it, to give them some information where they
could then go and talk to other people they knew
about it. They wanted to be part of it. And what the
internet and all of social media has done is to just sort of,
you know, put that on speed. I mean, everybody now can be
part of that conversation and it's, I think it's just the way
we communicate just in general. I mean, even if take it out
of theatre or out of the arts, if you look at all the ferment
that's going on in the Middle East, it's not been some great
idealog saying, "Okay, this is how we're going to have a
revolution." It's been people talking to one another and
figuring it out. And I think that's happening in the
arts too. People want to hear from artists, they wanna hear
from professional, legitimate critics, but they also wanna
be part of that conversation.
TERRY TEACHOUT: Another word whose meaning has changed
is amateur. It's actually reverting to an early
fundamental meaning. The real lovers who are the
people who ought to be writing about all of this,
and now they can. They can afford their own printing press.
CHRIS CAGGIANO: Everybody has an equal voice. As a
blogger, as a Tweeter, as a, you know, as someone,
as a commenter, but there is sort of, uh, culling process
that goes on with respect to the voices that stand out.
You know, just because you've got a blog doesn't
mean people are paying attention to you. You've gotta get
people to continue to come back. Tweet -- people on Twitter,
you know, are notoriously fickle and they'll, you know,
well, it's not un-friend, it's you know, whether they'll
follow or un-follow you. And you can sort of, I mean,
there are barometers of, if not necessarily quality,
the response that you're getting from your audience.
HOWARD SHERMAN: Well, one of the interesting things
is there are metrics. You know how many people have
gone to a certain article. You don't know if they've--
or blog -- you don't know if they've read it all the way
through, but they've at least gone to the page. In the issue
of setting an agenda, certainly the Times, historically, set in
arts agenda, now we see the Times actively soliciting
comment and conversation about both its coverage and
people's opinions of the things the Times covers. So how
does, how does that play into your thinking? Are you,
in looking for stories, assigning stories, are you
trying to do things which will spark conversation, as opposed
to be the definitive?
SCOTT HELLER: I mean, I think you're always trying to do
things that will spark conversation. I mean, you know,
the Times especially with theatre has a kind of a bit of
a, you know, a singular status, or has had a singular status.
And I do think that even with the democratization of
comment on theatre, you know, what the Times puts out
there still kind of guides a good bit of the conversation,
at least as it begins. And that may change over time,
but I still think that's true for the moment. What that
has meant is that we have an incredibly active, interested,
smart, passionate, diverse readership, not only in
New York, but everywhere else and they're quite opinionated,
they know a lot about what's going on, they do want to
express their own opinions, and so we've tried to make more
of an effort to bring them into the conversation and to have
our own kind of expert voices talking to each other more.
So that it's not just kind of a single opinion handed down
from the mount, but to recognize that arts criticism is a kind
of beginning point for larger, cultural debate. And I think
we've been doing that slowly but I think we're
getting better at it.
HOWARD SHERMAN: What do you all look at?
Do you look at other coverage now that it's ever easier
to find, you don't have to go to a National News Stand
and find a newspaper?
SCOTT HELLER: Sure. Absolutely.
TERRY TEACHOUT: And as we all know, there are sites
that facilitate this.
JAN SIMPSON: There's Stage Grade.
TERRY TEACHOUT: Yeah, Broadway Stars -- I mean, you can
easily find out what everybody said, sitting at your desk
in the morning. And I want to know that. I mean, it's not
that it matters in some deep sense. I don't tremble because
I disagreed with everybody. But I'm curious. I wanna know
what the discourse is, where the conversation stands this
morning. And now I can find that out in New York,
I can also find it out in Chicago. I can find it out
anywhere I want. That's wonderful. I mean, there are
two, there are three great things that the web does.
It makes this possible. It enables the amateur's voice,
and I think this might, in the end, be the most important
one. It makes practitioner criticism possible. That's the
one where I'd like to see more development. But as far as
I'm concerned, artists ought to be writing about what
they do all the time.
HOWARD SHERMAN: Well, you referred to it as practitioner
criticism. And I mean, is it practitioner criticism, or is
it simply practitioners talking about their work?
Certainly that's part of what goes on at 2AM Theatre.
TERRY TEACHOUT: Yeah, one's just a phrase. I mean, it's the --
practitioners ought to explicate their work. They ought to
justify it if they feel they need to. They ought to comment
on what critics have to say about it. They ought to
write criticism, because practitioner criticism itself,
many of the very greatest critics in all of the arts,
have been distinguished practitioners of the art
form themselves.
SCOTT HELLER: Shaw.
TERRY TEACHOUT: Shaw is our great example. Virgil Thompson
in classical music.
JAN SIMPSON: Clurman?
TERRY TEACHOUT: Yeah, Harold Clurman especially.
Maybe more important than Shaw in a way. And the web
encourages people to do this. It privileges people who
write well, and it always will, but assuming that you
can write in a reasonably stylish and intelligible
way, it will allow you to get your point of view out there.
And there's -- I just think that's more important than
anything that I, as a critic, could
possibly have to say.
CHRIS CAGGIANO: And I think we're talking about
a larger definition of criticism here. And you know, there's
this perception that when you're talking about criticism
you're saying, "Oh, I didn't like this, I didn't like this."
But what Shaw did and what Clurman did and other
practitioners have done, is put their work in a larger context
and I think that's the job, the opportunity of the critic,
the practitioner, just anybody who wants to have a voice.
TERRY TEACHOUT: They are teachers. We are teachers.
That is the most important thing we can do. And I'm
construing that very broadly too.
HOWARD SHERMAN: Well, but since you say teachers, Chris,
you teach. Is the voice in which you teach different
than the voice in which you blog?
CHRIS CAGGIANO: Yes. But they're very -- there's --
in the Venn diagram of my two passions that are -- there's
a lot of intersection. And what I try to bring to my criticism
is a historical perspective. I mean, because I do focus
almost exclusively on musical theatre, and I also teach
musical theatre and I love musical theatre, so I've sort
of made it my job to -- I don't know -- defend it?
And to make it, you know, because it's -- in my many
years of loving musical theatre, people have dismissed,
"Oh, you like show tunes." It's like, "No, I love musical
theatre, and that's a big difference." And part of my
mission is to demonstrate the artistic value of it.
And I think there's a lot of overlap there, but I try to
bring- it's awkward, because... Scott and I were talking
before the cameras came on about Nick Adams who's a
Boston conservatory student who's in Priscilla which I
saw last night. Fortunately I didn't have -- well, fortunately
or unfortunately, I didn't have- Nick was slightly before my
time, but I'm starting to get to the point where my students are
in the shows I'm reviewing. And it becomes awkward.
And what I say to my students while I have them is,
"While you're in the school, you are off limits.
Once you graduate, no holds barred. I will be respectful
but I will also be honest." And I think that's in everybody's
best interest.
JAN SIMPSON: But you talk to them differently in the class?
I mean, your voice, in the classroom is different than your
voice on the screen?
CHRIS CAGGIANO: I don't know. I don't -- I mean, I'm not aware
of sort of changing it. I think I try to be, you know,
as we all do, when someone's right there you might be
a little bit more likely to soften things whereas you know,
sometimes, you know, I'm sure all critics have had this
experience. You're saying something and there's a snappy
turn of phrase and then you regret it later because it's
just maybe, just a little bit too -- you know, acidic?
TERRY TEACHOUT: Seduced by cleverness.
CHRIS CAGGIANO: That's it, that's it. And I think that's
a wonderful part of the overlap, is that as more of my
students become, are in the profession, I sort of, I put a
face on the actor and it reminds me that these are human beings.
I have a right to criticize, again, with the larger
connotation of criticism. But they also have a right to
have what I say come in a respectful and
constructive form.
HOWARD SHERMAN: On 2AM Theatre people are not writing
criticism, but it is practitioners writing.
Have you given them any guidelines of what they
should or shouldn't be thinking or writing about or is it really
you've just opened the doors?
DAVID LOEHR: We've taken a little bit of editorial
oversight. I mean, not in saying "Oh, don't do this."
Or, "Oh, I don't agree with what you wrote here."
But to see, again, see a conversation going on online
and to say, "Oh, you're talking about the problem of
highlighting female Latino playwrights. Would you like
to write about that? Come to the blog and write about it."
Or, you know, whatever the topic might be. And to say,
"Okay, you have a very strong point of view about it,
this is a subject near and dear to your heart, tell us why."
"And tell us, don't just say, 'Oh, no one's paying
any attention.' Blah, blah, blah. Tell us what you would do.
Tell us how we can change that? What would make it easier?"
So we sort of solicit posts that way, and then that's developed
into saying different series. Like I've got one artist in
Washington DC who's, it's very interesting, he's a playwright
by nature, and he's now working with a company doing devised
work. Which is, everybody goes in the room and plays,
and see what happens. And so he's documenting
this process.
HOWARD SHERMAN: And he's struggling with it.
DAVID LOEHR: And he is. And he is. Because, you know, the
way I described it last year, to someone, was that, you know,
well, it's devised work. You're just getting all the people in
the room that I have in my head, when I sit down to write
the play. I'm cutting out your middle man. So you know,
that's kind of his struggle is that he's in the room going,
"No, no, no, you wouldn't say that! That doesn't. Argh!"
So it's been interesting to sort of follow that. Or to have
someone who works in marketing describing, you know,
"Here are things that I see working in regional theatres
right now, and here are things that aren't working."
And so doing them in sort of an ongoing series
of posts. So...
HOWARD SHERMAN: I'd asked about how, whether you
look at other people's writing, does that affect what you
choose to write? Given that you have so much more access
to these other opinions?
TERRY TEACHOUT: Never. I mean, it's interesting, I want
to know it. But I mean, at the end of the day, I'm writing
about what I wanna write about, what I --
SCOTT HELLER: But if you read somebody else's review in
another part of the country that enticed you, you might-
TERRY TEACHOUT: Okay, that's different. Yeah, that might
get me to go see a company or go see a show or something
like that. You're coming at it from a different angle
and that's actually a very relevant angle. I mean, some
of the people watching this show may not know that I cover
theatre all over the United States. And that's something,
by the way, that I couldn't do without the web. The web makes
it -- it cuts down all the waste motion of gathering
information about what's happening at Theatre companies
in Alaska, say. But I'm always looking to answer the question,
ought I to go and see this company that I've never seen?
And their website, of course, is the first voice that speaks
to you. But beyond that, the theatre critic in that city,
if that city has a theatre critic, or people write me
email. This happens, and say, "Have you heard of this
company, because I think you might really be interested
in them." And I might go.
JAN SIMPSON: There are conversations that I do enter.
If you know, somebody is talking about Latina playwrights
on a site, it might get me thinking about, well, where are
these particular kind of voices? And I might want to
chime in to that part of the conversation. So it may
stimulate me to write something or think
something in that vein.
DAVID LOEHR: Right, a lot of times if I am affected by
reading anyone else, it is to react to it. Or to say,
"Here's an idea, here's how I'd amplify that idea. That's a
really good idea. And here's what else we could do with it."
JAN SIMPSON: Yeah.
CHRIS CAGGIANO: No matter what I write, I always try to,
I just, I have no patience for news or press releases.
It's like- trust me, you'll get that elsewhere. I just-
What can I bring that's uniquely me to this, you know?
Again, my historian's perspective, my own personal
sort of aesthetic, and if I can't add something then I
don't blog about it.
TERRY TEACHOUT: We've got nothing else to sell but
our consciousness.
HOWARD SHERMAN: Is journalism moving in the
direction of having to be dialogue at all times?
TERRY TEACHOUT: Not at all times, but I mean, simply
because of the fact that people can get in touch with
us directly now in a way that they couldn't 10 years ago,
we're aware of what people are saying and thinking and that's,
I think that's entirely a good thing. How could that be a bad
thing? I just don't see a downside to that. I mean, unless
you become totally responsive, you know, and then you
become like American Idol and you're determining what shows
you're gonna see based on, you know, emails sent to the --
CHRIS CAGGIANO: Terry, don't give them any ideas.
Someone out there will launch that blog.
TERRY TEACHOUT: Beyond that, you know, what is the
downside of being able to hear from the people who read you?
JAN SIMPSON: I think people look at it as a zero sum game.
It's either it's gonna be all just you know, from Mount
Olympus opinion or it's just going to be, you know, the
rabble, out there just throwing up any sort of opinion.
And I, it's not all one thing or the other. And that's why
I said at the beginning, I think it broadens not just
the conversation, but the kinds of conversations that
one can have. I mean, I think it was interesting that certainly
for the first three months, for example, of the Spiderman
previews, before the critics, the official critics went in,
there was a lot of conversation on the chat rooms, some
people blogging about it- then when the official critics came
in, it prompted a change. It prompted a different kind
of, it prompted, I think, the changes that we've seen happen
there. I think there's a room, there's room for everyone.
I think that the thing that, the mainstream established press
can do -- and I wish everyone could do more of in the
mainstream media -- is old fashioned reporting. We got a
lot of opinion. We got a lot of opinion, not just from bloggers,
we got a lot of opinion. I think some of what, you know,
Dave is doing, where people are talking about the process,
talking about what they're trying to do, obviously there's
reporting from the Times, and actually more reporting
form the Journal.
TERRY TEACHOUT: Yeah.
JAN SIMPSON: I'm seeing but -- so much of the, it seems
to me that the journalism, theatre journalism agenda
has been driven by Michael Riedel from the New York Post.
And I think that's primarily because there isn't a large
enough force of people out there just doing old fashioned,
shoe leather reporting.
TERRY TEACHOUT: And that is the weakness of the new media.
Is that what -- the thing that newspapers and magazines
uniquely have been able to do, is so to speak, to subsidize
shoe leather reporting. Because you really can't do that as
an amateur, as an individual. You don't have the standing to
get through the door, you don't have the time, you've gotta
day job. When it is your day job to report on the arts,
you can do something that other people can't, and I mean,
clearly we are in a transition phase to some new journalism
structure that integrates all of these things. And in this
transitional phase, reporting is getting short shrift.
And that's just inevitable. I mean, this will change.
HOWARD SHERMAN: Because reporting's expensive.
TERRY TEACHOUT: Because reporting costs money.
HOWARD SHERMAN: Well, reporting costs money. And there's also
the question of the amount of space, the economics of
traditional journalism.
SCOTT HELLER: I mean, not only just reporting costs money,
but professional criticism, as it's been structured up to this
point, costs money as well. I mean, if it's gonna stay a
credentialed field that someone can earn a living doing,
someone has to pay for it. And in this transition, we may
be heading to a moment where it loses that status which would
be kind of worrisome for people.
TERRY TEACHOUT: And where it's really visible where that's
happening is out in the regions.
SCOTT HELLER: Right.
TERRY TEACHOUT: Because you have newspapers all over
the United States that are cutting back their arts holes
drastically. That are firing chief critics, who are
themselves finding new solutions. Setting up blogs
of their own. I mean, I just ran across a site in
South Florida called The South Florida Classical Review.
It's about classical museum. It was started by the former
chief critic of a newspaper who was downsized, lost
his job. And now, it is the primary medium for classical
music reviewing in South Florida. I mean, the other
side of this coin, by the way, is that often regional fine
arts criticism has been very provincial. Not always, some
of the most brilliant critics in this country have been in the
regional's, but there have been newspapers that don't
put enough emphasis on it. Don't know how to find
somebody good. Or maybe they don't have enough
activity in the area to sustain fulltime employment for
somebody good. Very often in a regional city, the smartest
commentary that you're gonna get is not going to be from
the newspaper, it's gonna be from the bloggers.
CHRIS CAGGIANO: Right.
HOWARD SHERMAN: The issue of credentials is an interesting
one, and Jan, since you're teaching at the CUNY Journalism
School, I worry about kids who say they want to be journalists
or arts journalists because the question is, what will that job
be five, ten years from now? Is that part of what you grapple
with in your work or something that the students are
thinking about?
JAN SIMPSON: People always ask me that question. The numbers
of young people coming to journalism schools, not just
ours, ours has grown, but around the country has just risen
tremendously. It's really, it's really interesting. And the
number of students within our school who are interested
in arts journalism is also on the rise.
TERRY TEACHOUT: What do you tell them?
JAN SIMPSON: I focus more on the preparing them to do the work.
CHRIS CAGGIANO: That's sort of like what we do at
the conservatory?
JAN SIMPSON: You know, we're very rigorous about it.
But it's sort of interesting because the numbers of people
going to arts schools is also on the rise. You have more
people wanting to perform. You have more people wanting
to comment about and critique the performance. Now what
we need to do is develop more people who want to read and
pay for it. You know, we're sort of working our way around of
the table. They seem ... they don't seem daunted at all.
And I think the thing that's interesting about the students,
at least that we're turning out, is that they are equipped
to talk in -- they're sort of medium neutral. If you know,
if they got a job working for Scott, they'd be delighted and
thrilled and they can do newspaper journalism, old
fashioned newspaper journalism. But they can also do all kinds
of social media and blogging and pod casts and they're
interested in communicating and they don't care, really,
what the medium is. They do care about being able to make
a living. But they don't care about the medium. And they're
also thinking in just a very entrepreneurial way.
I think when we talk about being in transition, in the
medium, in the media, they -- we have a department in
entrepreneurial journalism, at the school, and a lot of
them come out thinking they are going to create their own
ventures and they're gonna find a way to do the work that
they wanna do.
TERRY TEACHOUT: That's the best thing I've heard all week, Jan.
JAN SIMPSON: And you know.
TERRY TEACHOUT: That's wonderful.
JAN SIMPSON: And I think we say to them, "You guys are
going to be the people who solve this problem."
And they believe it. They believe it. So it's --
CHRIS CAGGIANO: Very similar dynamic at the
Conservatory. We're in the process of reviewing the whole
program and one of the things that's coming out of our
discussions is entrepreneurship within the
performance context.
JAN SIMPSON: Uh huh.
CHRIS CAGGIANO: And how musicians, dancers, and
musical theatre performers, which are the three divisions
at the conservatory - have always needed to have an
entrepreneurial kind of bent to them to be successful.
But now, I mean, we have-- there was a young woman,
one of my first students who was in a web series
called The Battery's Down and now she's touring the country
and In The Heights. And other kids who've created their
own dance companies. And a young woman
by the name of --
HOWARD SHERMAN: Did one thing lead to the other in that
case, do you think?
CHRIS CAGGIANO: I'm pretty-- yes, oh yes, absolutely.
Absolutely. She gained exposure as a result of that series
and but this next example, a wonderful student by the
name of Carly Sakolove created a video that some of you might
have seen where she sang Send in the Clowns impersonating
a number of different performers and it went viral,
and she started getting all these calls and
I've been collecting those examples to create --
JAN SIMPSON: I didn't know that was one of your students.
CHRIS CAGGIANO: To create just an entrepreneurship
program at the Conservatory. So I think it's an interesting
dynamic that both the commenters and the performers
are sort of reaching this point where they're just like,
"Well, we need to create our own opportunities." And the
new media help in that process.
TERRY TEACHOUT: Let me tell you about something
in another field that's entirely relevant. I was having a --
it was at a gathering of book publishers. And you know,
of course, the brick and mortar book sales are in
convulsion and it looks like the end of the world.
But of course, what is really happening, people are still
reading books, they're just acquiring them in a different
way. And what the publishers are saying is, they're waiting
for somebody to solve the problem of what is the new
media equivalent of what you do when you go into a book
store and browse? And they say the person who solves
this problem is going to become a millionaire and
win the Nobel Prize for publishing. It's exactly the
same in theatre. Change will happen. The underlying desires
won't change. People will have the same needs.
They will simply be satisfied through different platforms
that work in different ways and we have to find different
ways of answering the same questions. "What show do I
want to see?" I think often people go to shows and their
feelings about them are in code afterwards. And one of the
reasons why they read criticism is to try to put the experience
in some sort of perspective. They're always going to want
to do that. But they are not going to look to newspapers
that are printed on paper in order to have these
experiences. So we all have to find new ways, new platforms,
of fulfilling the fundamental needs.
JAN SIMPSON: Very few of my students actually
read a print paper.
TERRY TEACHOUT: I don't. I don't remember the last
time I -- well, the last time I did was actually this
morning in the dressing room, when somebody pulled out
a copy of the Wall Street Journal. I don't read my
own paper on paper.
HOWARD SHERMAN: I showed you your newspaper.
TERRY TEACHOUT: I didn't even know we'd had a redesign
on my page. You know? Which is funny, but which is also
relevant because it's not that I'm not reading the Journal,
and it's that I'm relating to it through a different platform
and therefore my experience of it is different. I don't think
in terms of what page am I on. I don't think in terms of
what else is on the page with me. It's a whole different
thing, and we have to think about how people interact
through the new platforms. They're different. And there's
a big age gap here. We all -- especially those of us, who like
me, are over 50, we must always be aware of the fact
that the world we grew up in does not exist anymore.
DAVID LOEHR: We always think in terms of what's above
the fold, or what's on page three. And now it's well,
what's on the first screen?
HOWARD SHERMAN: Right.
DAVID LOEHR: But even there, everybody's screen is different.
Maybe you're reading it on an iPhone or an iPad or maybe
you're reading it on a giant monitor. Maybe you have the
whole page. Maybe you have a little tiny -- you know?
JAN SIMPSON: And it's also what portal you came through.
DAVID LOEHR: Right, maybe you're reading it through
Google Reader, and it's just a single format that doesn't
have ads and it doesn't have your formatting or
your block quotes. It just has the text.
TERRY TEACHOUT: I have a feeling that maybe, most people
now, do not read most newspaper articles by going to the
newspaper's website first. They're going through
aggregators, they're going through --
JAN SIMPSON: Exactly.
TERRY TEACHOUT: And so the whole experience is different.
And if we, and as I was saying earlier, newspapers are
peculiarly conservative change resistant corporate cultures.
HOWARD SHERMAN: Well, that keeps getting said,
so I wanna ask Scott --
TERRY TEACHOUT: He's the voice of resistance.
HOWARD SHERMAN: No, but I wanna-
TERRY TEACHOUT: Oh, so somebody else is the conservative-
HOWARD SHERMAN: On the one hand, you still have to put
out copy for a print newspaper every day. But you also have
to put it out for the website, for the, you know, there's
blogs, there's Twitter feeds. How much conversation is
happening, and I'm not asking you to reveal secrets,
but how much do you spend time talking about how you do or
don't need to migrate to utilization of these
different platforms?
SCOTT HELLER: I mean, this is changing, absolutely, as we
speak. I mean, it used to be -- this is kind of administrative,
but it's telling. We used to meet in the morning to talk
about what would be in the next day's paper. Now we
meet also in the afternoon, to talk about what we're
aiming for the website for that morning with the hope
that we can get -- still thinking homepage, in that case,
but thinking about what of our material could go on to
the web early and get homepage play, which astronomically
is where the, you know, where the big readers,
the big numbers are early on. We have web producers who
are absolutely instantly sending our stuff out as soon as --
first of all we're publishing on the web before things
appear in print now.
HOWARD SHERMAN: And in fact I often see your stuff on Twitter
before it's appeared on the web page.
SCOTT HELLER: Before it's on the web, right.
TERRY TEACHOUT: And I Tweet my reviews before the Journal
does. Because they usually go up on the site around three or
four o' clock and I know this through my Google feed,
when I'm up. I know it before I know it from the Journal.
And then I put it on my website, I Tweet it directly, and usually
about an hour or two later, the Journal does its own Tweet
and then you know, years later, the next morning,
the paper comes out.
SCOTT HELLER: Right, right, same for us. I mean, that --
and we're strategizing more about that. We're not --
we're trying not for that to be just haphazard, but figure
out the kind of material that is gonna reach somebody at
8:00 in the morning and compete or attract somebody who
doesn't only wanna read about international news but also
might want to know about what's happening in New York.
JAN SIMPSON: But the other thing is that on the Times site,
the variety of news that I can find about the theatre
has really expanded. I can see slide shows that are giving me
behind the scenes at a show. I can see you know, you working
sort of a video about how they're creating the costumes
at a show. I can get interviews. All of this. I can hear music.
SCOTT HELLER: Absolutely -- The infographic, "Where's Bono
now?" in the Spiderman press- I really appreciated that.
That's good to know what happened.
JAN SIMPSON: Great, great all different kinds of things.
SCOTT HELLER: I appreciate that.
JAN SIMPSON: And that becomes the thing, that becomes the
kind of thing that if you love a particular thing,
as we all love theatre, difficult for individual
bloggers to do. And it becomes sort of like,
you know, sometimes you want to just have a little meal
at your neighborhood café, and sometimes you wanna go
to a more full service restaurant.
TERRY TEACHOUT: That is the added value that keeps
newspapers alive.
JAN SIMPSON: Yeah. All these wonderful, different
kinds of things.
SCOTT HELLER: What it also is is an opportunity for
your students. Because we have, I mean, we have a dedicated,
fulltime web theatre producer who produces just the kind
of material you're talking about. And so I do think
whether they're coming out of an entrepreneurial program
or just out of typical arts journalism, to be able to do
that kind of other kind of multimedia producing is
just a necessity.
TERRY TEACHOUT: Do you think, this is what I think,
and I'd be curious to know how you feel about it --
the concept of today's paper is about to vanish?
SCOTT HELLER: I think it's, it's ... it's evaporating.
I wouldn't say, I don't know if it's about to vanish yet,
but we certainly think about it quite differently,
yeah, quite differently.
TERRY TEACHOUT: I mean when my review, that appears in
today's paper, actually goes up on the web at 3:00PM
the preceding day, the concept of what today is in journalism
has lost its meaning.
SCOTT HELLER: Yes, absolutely. Right, that's absolutely true.
HOWARD SHERMAN: When we talk about the value added,
what we're talking about is multimedia. A lot of this
conversation has been about writing so far. Your background
is, as a traditional print journalism, it is about the
written word. You're now an editor who has to think not
only about the written word, but about media. Are we moving
in the direction of that even the written word isn't
necessarily the vehicle. For all of you who blog,
we don't, right now we're not, you're not reading your blogs
to us, you're not, we're not watching you do that. Are we
going to reach a point where we have to deliver what's
written in video form and does what we used to think
of as television and print, merge, because of
how people want to consume?
TERRY TEACHOUT: No, because reading something is, in
certain ways, the most efficient way of consuming it.
You're not time-bound. It doesn't necessarily take you
30 minutes to experience the experience. There is always
going to be a place for words on a screen, but there is also
going to be, there will be simultaneously other places for
other kinds of experiences. The ones that, like a play itself,
play out through time. But there will always be a place for
people reading, because the experience of reading, in which
you control the time-slot, is not one that any other
medium can provide.
HOWARD SHERMAN: But by the same token, people don't necessarily
know who Chris is or who David is. Would you guys consider
making yourself more visible so people understand, to some
degree, the person who it's coming from?
DAVID LOEHR: Oh, absolutely. One of the things that's also
been interesting about the 2AM experience is just that,
you know, at first when we realized, "Oh, well, now we're
editing. Now we're a journal of some sort. Well, okay, well,
call David the editor." But now, you know, I'm just like,
"Okay, sure." And but the interesting thing is because
most of the people who do this don't have any journalistic
experience. I mean, it's not coming out of that tradition.
I mean, I have a very, very, very little, way, way back and I
quickly went, "Okay, this is not for me." But they're all
creative people. And you get creative people together,
and they're gonna start being creative.
JAN SIMPSON: Yeah.
DAVID LOEHR: So all of a sudden now it's, we're kind of shifting
to artistic director because we're coming up with audio
plays and a play that we're gonna write on Twitter with
several playwrights collaborating and interacting,
you know, knowing the endpoint, and knowing the characters,
but then improvising to keep the interaction fresh,
like it would be on Twitter.
TERRY TEACHOUT: You remember how stiff all the early web
magazines looked? It was because they were being created by
people who were thinking, "We're gonna transplant the print
media experience on to the web." And it was pointless. Because
you could already have that.
HOWARD SHERMAN: And not every writer is a visual
personality. Right?
TERRY TEACHOUT: But now, I mean, now we have the first
such form was the blog. Which arise organically from the
inherent properties of the medium and we have things
like what you are doing. And that's, that's how the problems
are gonna be solved, by people who aren't locked into the
way that it's always been done.
DAVID LOEHR: Right, and the beauty of it is because,
by doing the creative work, and then spreading that through
this strange consortium of people around the world,
which again, you know, it's like, we do radio plays with an
actor in Austin, Texas, and an actor in Queensland, Australia
and an actor in Vancouver, and we edit it together.
But by doing that, we get to see their work, we don't just
get to see, "Oh, this is a playwright talking about what
playwrights do." Well, here's something they did.
JAN SIMPSON: I think there's also the tone of the
conversation and it's also begun to sneak its way into
the Times. On the blogs, I know about Terry's wife,
Mrs. T. and I know about Chris' dog, and they know about my
husband and we, you know, because we talk in this
conversational way. And now I see occasionally, in reviews,
either Brantley or Isherwood will be talking about the
person they were sitting with and what their friend thought.
So the people who are reading have more of a relationship.
You know, I've actually met people who will, I refer to my
husband by initial in the blog and people think that's
what I call him. So when they see me they say, "How's K?"
DAVID LOEHR: Yes, I never go home and say, "Hi, Mrs. T."
I always get, "So how's the nine year old doing?"
"Well, he's good."
JAN SIMPSON: Yeah, so people become very involved in
your life. And I recently wrote something about a friend who's
an actor who died, and Chris commented, but I also got
another lovely comment from this person I don't even know
who knew this guy and sort of felt as though he could,
you know, grieve with me. And I think people start forming
those kinds of personal relationships.
CHRIS CAGGIANO: You mentioned my dog a few years ago --
he's a cocker spaniel. He's Oliver. And he got really sick,
dangerously sick.
He was, you know, I thought he was gonna die. And I just
stopped blogging and just focused on Oliver. And then I
did a post about what had happened, and there was this
outpouring of support and affection from my readers that
was just, you know, it feels like a community. And you
know, with respect to things like, you know, podcasts
or vlogs or other things like that, I mean, those are
branding opportunities. Those are, you know, to put a face
on your words, to create a connection with the reader
or viewer, or listener, as it were. And you know, it's a
question of time and the fact that, again, we don't get paid
for this. So it's how much of your resources you want to
devote to that. But I think it's a wonderful, those are
wonderful opportunities to sort of expand.
TERRY TEACHOUT: This also reflects a larger
transformation going on in the world of news coverage.
Jay Rosen talks about how traditional news coverage
is the news from nowhere, written by people who claim
to have no point of view. And that essentially the web
has made this news from nowhere concept obsolescent because
we all know that everybody has a point of view, and increasingly,
we're willing to, and maybe even we desire to see it put
into the coverage so that we really know the point of view
from which people are writing. Now you might think that a
critic is always putting his point of view out there, but in
fact, traditional criticism, you've been encouraged to
suppress the "I". And I must say, I think the experience is
more transparent and more honest when it's clear that
the critic is a person who has a life and who has a larger
point of view and that this may help you understand what
he or she thinks.
HOWARD SHERMAN: Well, you understand the critic,
but there's also the question of, since the critic is more
available to the practitioners, and to the audience,
has that created a fully more personalized experience and
does it ultimately is it changing the way arts
coverage has to be considered?
TERRY TEACHOUT: I think so.
DAVID LOEHR: It was interesting just the other day on Twitter,
I mean, we haven't even done this on the site, but a
conversation popped up saying, "What do you think about
becoming Facebook friends with a critic?" You know?
"How does that affect their view of your work?" And then
people were chiming in, saying, "Well, I'm friends with them
but they recuse themselves, they send someone else to judge my
work." Or some of them say, "Oh, I don't, I'm not going to be
friends. I will not accept the friend requests or whatever
it is." And I don't know. I mean, how does that affect you?
TERRY TEACHOUT: You know what? The Journal doesn't seem
to care about this. They do care that I not write about people
with whom I have friendly relations. I don't really have
friends in the world of New York Theatre because, you know,
it would be very difficult for me to do that. But I don't
think in principle that it's a bad thing. I think, in fact,
I think the opposite. I think that the best critic is the one
who is most fully integrated into the life of the theatre
community but who is completely transparent about this.
JAN SIMPSON: Transparency, yes.
TERRY TEACHOUT: As long as you are transparent,
and people know what you're dealing with -- I mean,
I think the best critics are the ones who, as Wilfred Sheed
said in Max Jamison, the novel he wrote about a drama critic,
the ones who understand the miracle of getting the
curtain up, because they've actually had to do it.
And then when that happens then your reviews are no
longer counsels of perfection but they actually engage with
the reality of what happens in the theatre. So I mean,
I think eventually these notions about how a critic should or
should not be detached from the world that he writes about
will come to be perceived as old fashioned and outmoded.
JAN SIMPSON: I think the other thing it does is for the you
know, the average person, the average theatre goer, or
the average non-theatre goer- a lot of people thinking,
"I'm not as smart as that Terry Teachout." "I don't know
if I can go see that play." But when you get a lot of voices
talking about it, it says, "Well, you know, maybe I can.
Maybe it is for me." Or you get, I think the general consensus
is that the Addams Family was not a critical favorite.
But there were a lot of people-
TERRY TEACHOUT: Tactfully put.
JAN SIMPSON: Thank you. There were a lot of people out
there who were talking to one another and some in chat rooms,
some on websites, blogs, and people who were interested
in that kind of entertainment could find out whether or
not it was going to be done well for them. Do you know what
I mean? It just opens it up and it says --
TERRY TEACHOUT: And those are questions that can be better
answered by people perhaps other than the ones at this table.
JAN SIMPSON: Yeah.
HOWARD SHERMAN: Well, but let me -- to finish, ask Scott,
is success now for an article in the Times based solely on
whether it's good journalism? Or do you literally look at the
number of comments and/or look at responses because
it used to be you would only know responses based on what
you heard at a party or what a friend said and you were within
a small sphere. Now you can judge it in a larger way.
SCOTT HELLER: I mean, the honest truth is that you pay attention
to it. I don't know that it guides your choices. But we
have a weekly web only or it used to be web only, uh,
theatre commentary piece that Ben and Charles are doing.
And I definitely am interested as I've been following it,
to see which ones click with readers, and which ones don't.
When I've researched it, what you've found out as much as
anything is it's when it's actually posted in the course
of the day it runs. And so some of this has to do with issues
that really don't have a bearing on how good the journalism
is or what the topic is. And so-
HOWARD SHERMAN: It's a different version of above the fold.
SCOTT HELLER: In a way, yeah.
TERRY TEACHOUT: Well, there's also the famous piece of
conventional wisdom -- people are much more likely to write
you a letter if they don't like what you wrote.
SCOTT HELLER: That's definitely right too.
HOWARD SHERMAN: Interesting.
DAVID LOEHR: And we've figured out that, you know,
10:30 in the morning, that's when you wanna do a post.
1:30 in the afternoon. We would put, maybe Tweet something
that came out at 9:55 at night, nobody read it.
HOWARD SHERMAN: Well, we're all finding our way.
SCOTT HELLER: That's absolutely correct.
HOWARD SHERMAN: I think we are all finding our way.
This is fascinating. I think things are moving fast enough
that probably two years from now this conversation will
be outmoded but for the moment-
TERRY TEACHOUT: You mean 20 minutes from now?
HOWARD SHERMAN: For the moment it's --
SCOTT HELLER: We're gonna summarize it in a Tweet though.
HOWARD SHERMAN: If I could put this in 140 characters, that
would be pretty brilliant. But I need to say thank you for being
with us today. This has been absolutely fascinating.
And thank you for joining us.
These programs are brought to you from the Graduate Center
of the City University of New York in partnership with our
friends at CUNY TV. On behalf of the American Theatre Wing,
I'm Howard Sherman, and thanks for joining us for another
edition of Working in the Theatre.
TED CHAPIN: I'm Ted Chapin, chairman of the American
Theatre Wing. The Wing has played a vital role in
New York's theatrical life for more than 60 years. Best known
for creating the Tony Awards, we stand for excellence.
But we also support education in the theatre, and our work
reaches beyond Broadway and New York. The Working
in the Theatre television programs, which are supported
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Thanks for your interest in the Wing, and thanks for watching.
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