The Critics Say...: 57 Theater Reviewers in New York and Beyond Discuss Their Craft and Its Future (37 page)

Robert Feldberg:
About 20 years ago, I went to a couple of American Theatre Critics Association conventions. Even at that point, there were very few people who were full-time critics. There was a woman from Anchorage, Alaska who was also the police reporter. Other people taught. Some did it on a freelance basis. Some got paid and some didn’t.

MATT WINDMAN
: Can a new business model be created for theater criticism that will allow more critics to get paid for their work?

Gordon Cox:
We haven’t figured out how to create a model that is sustainable. It doesn’t seem like an impossible goal, but it’s a hard nut to crack.

Howard Shapiro:
I’ve often wondered about that. I don’t know what the model would be. I’m sure that one can be set up because people want to read critics.

Robert Faires:
If I knew where the money was coming from, I’d have a better way to answer the question. I see our paper struggling to find revenue for what we publish online, which is where so many people want to get information these days. Maybe it’s in creating your own media outlet, blog, or website and finding advertisers or some other way of bankrolling it.

Alexis Soloski:
I’m sure there’s someone who can organize it, but it’s not me. I never took a single economics class.

Ben Brantley:
I hope so, but don’t ask me what it is. If I solved it, I’d be doing it. But I can’t speculate about that. I have no business sense at all. The Web is still such a frontier, even though it’s becoming the dominant form of media. No one’s really worked out an efficient and sustained way to make money on the Web. It’s kind of unnerving, but also exciting.

David Rooney:
I recently moderated a panel for the Broadway Association, which is connected to Broadway in terms of businesses, restaurants, shops, hotels, and things like that. I prefaced my opening by talking about the financial results of the 2013–14 season, which grossed $1.27 billion. When I first started covering theater in 2004 in New York, that $1 billion threshold was a pipe dream. Every year, the box office would get close, but it would never crack $1 billion. Now, for the past four or five years, it’s cracked $1 billion every year. Attendance has not grown correspondingly, so obviously a lot of that is attributable to premium seating and staggered pricing. Everyone talks about Broadway as the “fabulous invalid,” and how we have to keep her on her feet, but Broadway is a very lucrative industry. No one ever talks that way about theater critics, who are quickly becoming the not-so-fabulous invalids.

I’m not saying we should be subsidized by the Broadway industry (although it’s a thought!) because we couldn’t possibly be objective that way, but I do think that someone needs to take a look at arts criticism as an endangered species, and find a way to foster it and help it grow.

Michael Portantiere:
I don’t know if a new economic model can be created specifically for theater criticism. People have made attempts to monetize content on the Web in one way or another in order to allow the people who contribute to websites to be paid. If efforts continue to be made, maybe new ideas for monetizing content will arrive.

Michael Schulman:
It really depends on the media in general. I don’t think theater criticism could do it in a bubble. Every newspaper and magazine is struggling financially, and how it all turns out in the end will determine how theater criticism is practiced.

Michael Sommers:
I haven’t been able to figure out a model for myself to make a better living at this. I don’t know what younger people are going to do unless they’re able to cultivate their own personal websites, or whatever a website will be in 20 years, and gain some sort of revenue from it. It was suggested at some point that I do something like that, but I just didn’t see myself being able to run that whole kind of operation. I’m Michael Sommers, not Elyse Sommer (who runs
CurtainUp.com
).

Robert Feldberg:
I don’t see how you can use criticism to make money, other than saying, “Look, we run editorial matter on theater, so this is a good place to advertise.” A lot of newspapers run fall and spring theater preview sections to draw advertising. In that sense, they’re using the work of critics to sell ads.

Jeremy Gerard:
I don’t think there’s any new economic model. Journalists have to make a living, just like everyone else, and they should be paid for what they do. Do I think there’s a possibility that journalism will be publicly or privately subsidized, in the way some other undertakings are? Maybe, but that’s not going to change the model, which is that people have to earn a living, and journalists are among those people.

Jesse Oxfeld:
The Internet isn’t an economic model. It’s just a venue. Is there a way to monetize it? If someone wants to endow something like the
Guardian
in London, which is a not-for-profit owned by a trust created by its founders, or a foundation that runs a publication with theater reviews, more power to them. If a producer like David Stone wants to do that with all of his
Wicked
money, that would be lovely, but it’s hard to see that happening. Perhaps I’m not a creative enough thinker.

Theater critic jobs have always existed within publications, and publications are now having a hard time figuring out how to make money. We’ll always have theater criticism in some form because there are some publications that believe theater criticism is integral to what they do. We’re talking about the
New York Times
,
New York
magazine, the
New Yorker
, and
Time Out New York
. When Linda Winer retires, do you think
Newsday
is going to hire a new full-time theater critic? I doubt it. Do you think
amNewYork
would ever turn its theater critic position into a full-time gig, where they’re paying someone a real salary to do it? I doubt it. That’s the reality of media economics today.

Leonard Jacobs:
I don’t think there’s any profit to be made just from criticism. Nowadays, consumers have such a tremendous variety of choices that I don’t know why they would pay for criticism. However, I do think that there is profit to be made from arts journalism. Reviews combined with other kinds of arts coverage could be valuable.
TheaterMania
, which I worked for many years ago, is a good example of an Internet product that deals only with live performance and has figured out how to generate a profit—not from reviews per se, but from club memberships, advertising, and marketing partnerships.

Robert Hurwitt:
I don’t think you could do it on the weekly newspaper model that’s supported by advertising. I’ve lived in the Bay Area since 1964. During those years, there have been many attempts to create a weekly or monthly arts paper, but every one of them has gone belly up. Not one of them was able to establish the advertising base to keep it going. Most of them never even had enough to be able to pay writers enough to allow them to scratch out a living, even by doing a lot of freelancing.

Terry Teachout:
The whole model of newspaper writing is broken beyond repair. We’re lurching through a transitional period into a very new kind of newspaper journalism with a different model, different modes of distribution, and different kinds of content, which will arise organically from the ways in which those institutions are being shaped. Theater criticism will evolve as the nature of professional journalism evolves. The whole business is going to look very different 10 years from now.

When I first started blogging, which was more than a decade ago, many people thought it would be possible for bloggers to develop income streams to support themselves as writers, but that hasn’t happened. Only very few bloggers who write about specific subjects of extremely wide interest can support themselves. I don’t see independent theater critics being able to launch websites that bring in revenues sufficient to allow them to run their sites full-time.

You can’t look at theater criticism in isolation. You have to look at the problem of what newspapers will be like in five or 10 years. Will they be supported by billionaires (like how the
Washington Post
was bought), who will run them as a way of providing ancillary advantage to their larger enterprises? I don’t know. We still have major newspapers in every city. I wonder if that’ll be true in five or six years. Most of us in the business have been looking at certain cities (Detroit is the most obvious example) where the city will no longer be able to economically support a daily newspaper.

The next biggest change will be the move away from print. Over the next decade, I think we will see major newspapers shut down or curtail their print sides. They will be distributed only electronically, but that’s a problem. The electronic model has not been as productive in providing revenue from advertising.

Jason Zinoman:
If there is a model, it’s clearly online. There needs to be an online business model that will both get a huge amount of traffic and do serious work. There’s a lot of creative work being done right now in new online journalistic models—places like
Vox
,
Grantland
, and
Slate
. There’s a huge opportunity to build a kind of
Politico
for theater.

You would need a few big investors, but I think there’s room for optimism. Theater in New York is built on huge investments in shows that will likely lose money, but people invest money anyway because they think it’s important or because it’s fun. There are people in the city who give millions of dollars every year to support the arts. Magazines like the
New Republic
and the
Nation
have lost a lot of money. They’ve been run by people who care about ideas and politics and influencing the culture. What you need is somebody who understands this art and believes that it should be covered with all the principles that make for good journalism. It would not be easy, but it would be less hard than it seems. I think it’ll happen in the next 10 years. Someone will build a really dynamic online site for theater criticism. That’s the solution. That’s the future.

Don Aucoin:
Newspapers have taken steps toward a solution, with paywalls on websites and whatnot. I hope the next step is to find sustainable livelihoods for talented writers who are currently expected to work for free. Writing is hard work, and people shouldn’t be expected to do it for free. But writing is also about self-expression, and I understand the impulse to write and publish and be heard.

Andy Propst:
We’ve entered an era in which an arts journalist needs to be as shrewd a self-promoter and entrepreneur as any working artist and keep his or her fingers on the pulse of what the newest technologies are. In that regard, I think that an arts journalist can attract a career that will keep a roof over his or her head. It won’t look like the career of a critic or arts journalist from 50 years ago, where someone was hired by a paper and that was a term for life. But I do think that we are at a juncture where inventiveness combined with talent, respect, and taste can allow an arts journalist to excel and earn a living. At this juncture, there are very few critics who earn their living as critics. In many regards, critics are becoming more like those artists that have to keep a day job in order to do what they love by night.

Charles Isherwood:
I recently heard about an experiment being undertaken in Los Angeles. A plan was to put out for a website where the theaters would have to pay in order to have critics from the website review their shows. The critics would be paid a certain fee, and the website would keep a percentage of the money. I find it startling that there are so few publications running reviews in Los Angeles that theaters would be willing to pay to have their shows covered, even with no guarantee of getting a good review on this website. That idea is problematic on a number of levels. The major theaters would probably not be interested in engaging in that because their shows are already going to be reviewed. It would only be the small-fry theaters that would pay to have their shows reviewed, and that wouldn’t necessarily draw a lot of readership to the website.

I don’t know of any other models being proposed. I know many websites with reviews have been established. Some have been going on for many years, but I don’t know if they’ve provided a living wage to many, or any, theater critics.

Michael Musto:
Maybe someone can start a site where they hire different kinds of critics and give them all a home in one place. They can all review the same show and offer different points of view. I don’t know where they’d get the money, but there’s a lot of advertising money from Broadway.

Peter Marks:
I imagine there’s an audience for something between
BroadwayWorld.com
and the
New York Times
—something a little more high-tone that also has a consumer component. Maybe a reviewing website can be created that has all the performing arts and isn’t just about aggregating content. It’s got to feel like a long-term investment. What if five of the best-known theater critics, from the
Times
to the
New Yorker
, created a website in which their reviews on the same shows were posted side by side? Would it find an audience, or would it just die out?

Jesse Green:
I suppose we could convince producers to pay critics directly for positive reviews, and then we’d all be rich! Short of that, I don’t know. I’m not much of a futurist. I have heard people say that criticism, in its current form, will disappear and completely atomize into the kinds of discussions and bits of information you find in chat rooms, blogs, and things like that. I guess I’m too old to really believe that.

I think we’ll stabilize at some point. There will be different kinds of buyers’ spheres offering different kinds of criticism. In any case, there’s not going to be a lot of money in it for writers. Of course, there’s never been a lot of money in criticism for writers. We’re basing our sad ideas of where theater journalism stands today on an imagined golden age of Walter Kerr living in an eight-bedroom house in the suburbs that may not have ever existed. I’m not sure if these reviewing jobs ever provided a middle-class income.