Changing, writing, wishing
Potentials for arts journalism in Australia

Recently I received some information about Colombia University's National Arts Journalism Program. It left me wishing for something more. Why haven't local arts journalists and journalism received a similar level of resourcing, value and priority? Arts-focused writing is a prevalent, if not a necessary, part of the arts sector. There is a small arts publishing and broadcasting sector. When I say 'journalism', I mean it as a visceral, connected type of writing, communicative, 'writerly' and inquiring; writing that embraces everything that writing about art can be.

Like much art, this kind of writing is concerned with both creating artefacts (texts) and communicating ideas or information. As an arts writer, I see a need for new and diverse approaches to this practice, for new and hybrid forms. I tender a kind of 'wishlist' as I observe developments in this field. With so much focus on 'promoting the value of the arts' and increasing audiences, it seems timely to focus on arts journalism as an expanding and specialist field.

ONE

In a year long project of the NAJP, Reporting the Arts, the arts content of the dailies in ten US metropolitan areas was quantitatively analysised. The authors observe that while "arts and entertainment are booming in America ... featurized print journalistic coverage of arts, culture and entertainment - especially packages that mix the various sub-categories of those fields - is thriving. By some measures, arts journalism is the beneficiary of that trend. And yet, on closer examination, the place of arts news and criticism within those packages is insecure and uneven."

In Australia, the Saatchi & Saatchi report, Australians and the Arts provides the current baseline for analysis of arts-media relations. Even though a comprehensive study of relations between the arts and the media was not conducted as part of the report, the media was identified as having a role to play in realising higher profile for the arts and developing audiences. The report states that "relations with the media should be one of the key areas of activity in the proposed strategy. This will require considerable dedicated effort, which goes beyond the scope of this report." This is a focus area of the Australia Council's Promoting the Value of the Arts Strategy. Australians and the Arts outlined a 'best practice' approach for arts organisations seeking coverage in the media.

Clearly, the respective emphases of these two important documents differ. While the NAJP reports on the performance of the print media, Australians and the Arts reports on the performance of the arts. In this report the commercial media is described as, "a business which derives its profit from attracting specific consumers who are of interest to advertisers. Consequently, dealing with the media requires an understanding of how each media outlet segments its market and then shaping information and story angles accordingly. While this might appear obvious, it appears that many practitioners within the arts sector lose sight of this imperative." The main ways in which this 'loss of sight' occurs is through: arts industry focus only on arts sections of the media; and a perceived philosophical opposition between parts of the media and the arts. Included in the report is a 'representative' commentary from a journalist: "unfortunately, I find that there is a huge sense of entitlement out there ... I don't really get a sense they (the arts sector) understand that, while they are a part of the fabric, they're not the whole story. That there is something out there called an Australian culture. I always thought that companies should have been worried about that and should have wanted to make the arts valuable and to make them count. That doesn't mean just selling tickets and surviving from year to year. It means understanding the environment in which they're working and the culture in which they're working, so they can make themselves relevant and so absolutely important to the country and the culture that no one will let them go out of business."

It's useful to position Saatchi and Saatchi's findings with the NAJP study findings. In part, the observations and inclusions in Australians and the Arts could be incidentally countered in the following key findings from Reporting the Arts:

. Major expanded weekend supplements showcase arts and entertainment. Features and reviews are more common than arts news. The daily section frequently contains little more than television-plus.
. The arts beat is bigger and more heterogeneous than we anticipated. Newspapers like to mix the high arts with mass culture and lifestyle coverage such as fashion and design.
. Mechanically generated content - listings - constitutes close to 50% of arts and entertainment coverage.
. In-house staffing and resources have not been increased to match an explosion of arts activity.
. Newspapers adopt disparate policies for supplementing their staffers' work with local freelancers and national syndicates.
. Big city newspapers cover the arts in more detail and in greater diversity than those in smaller cities.
. Local museums and major civic not-for-profit institutions that have mastered the technique of the blockbuster presentation win prominent coverage, even in competition with the entertainment industry's publicity machine.
. The visual arts, architecture, dance and radio get only cursory coverage. The visual arts are rarely covered by a full-time staffer. By contrast, television, movies, music and books are usually heavily covered.
. The daily Arts & Living section lags behind both business and sports as a priority on almost every newspaper, both in its allotment of pages and of staff.
. Network television arts journalism is concentrated in their morning programs, not their nightly newscasts or their prime time magazines. Publishing is the most frequently covered medium, and the book-tour interview with the author is the dominant format.
. There are indications that public radio and local alternative weekly newspapers sometimes take the arts more seriously than metropolitan daily newspapers.

Of course, the American media and arts landscape can't be readily mapped onto the local cultural landscape. Australians and the Arts seems to propose that the arts industry should change its ways of seeking press coverage and that marketing is the solution for the arts' woes. It somehow perpetuates the idea that artists and the arts present problems, need to become more user-friendly and comply with the edicts of institutions outside of them/it. NAJP suggests that there is room for change in the media. Obviously, both sectors are constrained by their own economic and philosophical parameters. Even so, it's necessary for changes to occur across both sectors. However, engineering that is another issue. It could be suggested that arts journalists - their education and work experiences - play a role in bridging the alleged divide between the media and the arts.

TWO

Motivated by the NAJP, I did some cursory research about a few arts and cultural writing programs. There is a postgraduate course in arts writing at a Melbourne university. At the beginning of this article, I mentioned a 'wishlist'. Well this is my wish. These are the flexible and focused arts writing programs that can be of benefit to writers, audiences and publishers as well as the arts sector in its entirety. They can assist in developing accessible, critical and relevant discourses which are essential to the development of the arts. Here, I present these as possible models for professional development opportunities for arts writers in Australia.

Colombia's NAJP is just one of the arts journalism/writing programs that are on offer overseas. The NAJP is an emerging research center and forum for those concerned with issues in arts and culture. Its mission is to foster a broad-based, engaged and thoughtful discussion of the arts and their place in our society, and of the cultural issues that underlie our valuation of the arts. Journalism is the key link in such discussion. The extent to which journalism is probing or superficial, broadly engaging or exclusive, helps determine the level of public appreciation of the arts. NAJP seeks to strengthen that journalistic link, and improve the quality of coverage, in three ways. The program awards fellowships to individual, American arts and cultural journalists seeking to excel in their work. It strives to enhance the place of arts and cultural coverage in the press. The NAJP is a forum for dialogue about arts and cultural issues through its conferences, research and publications.

In Canada, the Banff Center for the Arts offers eight established non-fiction writers/journalists the opportunity to develop a major piece of writing under its Creative Non-Fiction and Cultural Journalism Program. The program offers eight established, usually Canadian, non-fiction writers an opportunity to develop a major essay, memoir, or feature piece. The month-long residency in Banff enables writers to work on their draft manuscript in individual consultations and round-table discussions. By placing writers in a situation designed to challenge and stimulate their creativity, the program encourages them to explore new ways of seeing the arts and culture and to experiment with a piece of writing that might otherwise be difficult to complete or publish.

As part of their Independent Study Program, the Whitney provides a Studio Program, Curatorial Program and a Critical Studies Program. The ISP provides a setting within which students pursuing art practice, curatorial work, art historical scholarship, and critical writing engage in on-going discussions and debates that examine the historical, social, and intellectual conditions of artistic production.The program encourages critical study and theoretical inquiry into the practices, institutions, and discourses that constitute the field of culture. Many American Art Museums provide opportunities for graduate and postgraduate writers and journalists in the form of internships.

Closer to home, Arts Queensland initiated the Critical Writing Project which aimed to provide emerging writers statewide with opportunities to develop new work and publish. In 2000, workshop groups supervised by a senior arts writers were set up throughout the state for the nine month project. The senior arts writers facilitated discussions, workshops and provided feedback to the participating emerging writers. As well, a youth mentoring partnership was established between an established arts writer, David Broker and an emerging writer, Mark Gomes as part of the Youth Arts Mentoring Program.

Through programs like these, arts writing is in constant focus and reinvention. These models can perhaps provide the impetus to consider varied options for arts writers and developing content for arts/media publications. As well, there is an emphasis on qualified and experience writers who are arts and media based rather than academia-based. Like the NAJP, perhaps this style of interdisciplinary program or project can be built into university arts, writing and journalism programs or incorporated into university-based cultural precincts, and build on the innovations which are already being implemented. Or like the Banff Program and ANAT Summer School, perhaps these programs are undertaken as intensive, short term masterclasses and sponsored by partnerships of arts and mainstream media with arts organisations. I am suggesting that for the arts, media and academic sectors, there is groundwork and opportunities to be explored, discussions to be had and gaps to be filled.

THREE

What about the new generation of arts news services and publications via communications technologies? Since the widespread use of the internet, hundreds of niche and arts oriented websites and other information services have been developed. These range in scope from one person, self publishing ventures to big budget undertakings. In Reporting the Arts: "And the future? Wide open. In many cities, alternative weeklies have worked to fill gaps in the arts coverage of dominant metropolitan newspapers. Public radio, locally and nationally, sees arts coverage as an important piece of its territory ... Finally, the spread of opportunities for arts journalists - and artists - to develop fresh dimensions for their work in interactive new media is yet to be imagined or developed. What do such trends and question marks mean for arts journalism? It depends, in the first instance, on how the protective coloration or packaging strategy was conceived and is being executed at major metropolitan newspapers."

In June last year, NAJP presented a one day seminar, Convergence - New Opportunities for Arts Journalism. Bringing together traditional print arts journalists engaged in new media initiatives, television and radio producers exploring new programming possibilities afforded by advances in technology, and representatives from major foundations considering electronic arts journalism funding proposals, the seminar discussed new opportunities for the arts. As a result of new media initiatives, arts journalism is being reinvented and arts journalists are reinventing themselves.

In a transcript of his keynote address, Michael Kimmelman, New York Times chief art critic said, "Technological change presents possibilities, but the results are almost impossible to know. So I'll start by talking about arts journalism. It's lousy because there's very little interest in and understanding of the arts, little understanding about serious arts reporting. We may be presented with new avenues, but we don't present the old ones very well." As discussion ensues and with questions like, "what exactly is arts journalism at the moment?" and such comments as "are we advocating or reporting? We hope we're doing both", the panelists certainly had some ground to cover.

Judy Bryan, Culture Editor, wirednews.com: "One inclination with new media is to do what we did with old media. But people are doing new things with it. It lets us present new ways of storytelling."

Stephanie Syman, co-founder and Executive Editor, FEED: "I think there are some innovative things the web does for arts criticism. One of the most exciting possibilities is criticism that is more connected with the artworks, and that is somewhat connected with the bandwidth. [On the negative side,] criticism is only as good as the people who are practicing it. There's a big difference between what is going on, and what an average surfer will know about. On the plus side is that the critic isn't working in a vacuum. It helps when I know which essays receive a lot of feedback and which don't. All these great conversations can get going. But there's an inability of the web to drive people to those conversations."

Mark Tribe, Executive Editor, rhizome.org: "The Internet enables us to turn the arts-journalism structure on its head. Rhizome created a many-to-many information process, a discussion group, filtering the most interesting bits of conversation, and creating a weekly journal of that. Rather than the top-down, tree-like communication structure, our structure is ground-up. We created a new kind of discourse. That kind of diversity of discussion creates something new."

John Boundy, Executive Editor, Arts, BBC Radio: "We've all heard the figures of what's going to happen. In 5 years time, 95 percent of your media will not be streamed. You will have selected it. In other words, our program is going to be out the window. The challenge is to think down the line a little bit. Our national networks are now streamed. The technology is way ahead of the content. The technology is all there, but have we got the content to put that out?"

Laura Sydell, journalism professor: "How will this form change the notion of storytelling technique? Will having a piece of criticism on the web really last? Maybe dialogue will be more suitable to this new medium. How will that change the notion of criticism itself? Will there be a role for the traditional critic?"

So many questions. During the Ideas for Australia lecture series, some ten years ago, it was suggested that journalism can provide a 'middle ground' for Australian intellectual life. As the shape and media of journalism changes, infused with and informed by other writing practices, and as information technologies take wing, 'journalism' has the potential to provide much more than a middle ground. Clearly, in some quarters, arts journalism and journalists take/s on a great deal of responsibility: advocacy, criticism, ethics, communication, commitment, information, engagement, discourse, observation, writing, reporting, etc. Once, when I worked briefly with Virginia Baxter, she described the relationship of RealTime to other players in the arts. "We are often thought of as the media, but really, we are artists." It should be that kind of sensibility and awareness that informs arts media and arts writing.