By Charlotte Klein, a features writer and media columnist at New York Magazine

From Intelligencer

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Source Image Getty

It has been a tough summer for cultural critics. The Associated Press said it would end its weekly book reviews, citing “a thorough review of AP’s story offerings and what is being most read on our website and mobile apps as well as what customers are using.” Chicago Tribune film critic Michael Phillips took a buyout, leaving the paper without a chief film critic for the first time since the 1950s. Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday also took a buyout, while Vanity Fair parted ways with chief critic Richard Lawson. The New York Times reassigned four of its critics — television critic Margaret Lyons, music critic Jon Pareles, classical-music critic Zach Woolfe, and theater critic Jesse Green — to new roles, drawing an outcry from those who felt the paper was shrinking its arts coverage. In response to those moves, The New Yorker’s film critic Richard Brody wrote an impassioned essay titled “In Defense of the Traditional Review.”

There has been no single cause for these upheavals. The AP’s reviews were historically syndicated by daily papers, many of which no longer exist. Vanity Fair has a new editor, Mark Guiducci, who has decided to move away from trade-style reviews that are the bread and butter of industry-focused publications like Variety. The Times, for its part, insists that the shake-up at the “Culture” section is just that, not indicative of a broader shift. “Lost in the static around reassignments of four critics is the very welcome news that the Times is hiring four new critics,” said Times assistant managing editor Sam Sifton, who oversees the paper’s cultural coverage. “We’re taking valued colleagues who’ve done incredible work on their beat and moving them into new assignments where they can really benefit the report, and we’re taking that opportunity to inject some new voices and some new critics into the report.”

Still, the flurry of changes can’t be separated from the larger contraction of the media industry, which is forcing outlets of all sizes to make difficult decisions about how cultural criticism contributes to the bottom line at a time when there is no shortage of opinions or platforms on which to air them, from album reviews on YouTube to movie takes on Letterboxd. Other traditional functions of the review — telling readers what a book is about, say — have also been usurped by the internet. Criticism has been in decline for so long that you can count the full-time staff positions in certain critical fields on one hand — which makes every loss reverberate even louder and the questions more pressing. Do reviews draw readers? Boost subscriptions? Sell ads? And if the answer is “no,” how do reviews fit with both a publication’s identity and its quest to stay afloat?

The consensus of the people I spoke to was that stand-alone reviews just don’t generate traffic, and reviews of more niche art forms, like an independent film or a string-quartet performance, are even harder sells. There are exceptions: the latest Sally Rooney novel, a highly anticipated Hollywood blockbuster, an especially beloved critic going to town on someone. But the vast majority of reviews go virtually unread.

Part of the problem is that reviews now float amid millions of other pieces of similar content on the web instead of being part of a bundle that you used to get on your doorstep, which allowed a reader to serendipitously stumble upon a piece of criticism they otherwise wouldn’t have sought out. “By having packaged content, the big and the small together, you could funnel the eyes there for the big shiny things to the less shiny thing, and it was exciting. Now we know people love Q&As and Thanksgiving recipes and could give less of a shit about dance reviews,” said one prominent arts critic. “Some of it is anti-intellectualism and the death of high culture, but some of it is also that the landscape of media consumption is set up now so you never have to do the equivalent of eating your vegetables, and that means you never get to suddenly realize that you love Brussels sprouts.”

It doesn’t help that, in the midst of a traffic apocalypse brought on by changes to social-media and search algorithms, it’s all too easy to see what people are and aren’t reading. At a time of acute sensitivity to traffic, data analytics make the reading public’s preferences painfully clear, even if almost every editor will tell you they aren’t making decisions based solely on the numbers. “When we were producing a print report, you really had no idea — is this working? Is this not working? It was just typewritten letters from aggrieved readers on the Upper West Side,” said Sifton. “Now we have all of this granular data, and so we know a lot more about the consumption patterns, but we’re not chasing clicks. What we’re trying to do is make the report the most accessible that it can be to the widest variety of readers.”

For more on this story go to: INTELLIGENCER

NOTE: From INTELLIGENCER – This story is free for a limited time. Subscribe to enjoy uninterrupted access. Subscribe now