Today I attended a small part of the biannual Critics' Roundtable event organised by Wales Arts Review and for me the most thought provoking session was on the future of arts criticism in Wales. This panel discussion fired two debates in my head, the first being about maintaining paid income for arts critics.
Traditional models saw newspapers and magazines making money out of sales of hard copies and advertising, but with the shift from the physical to digital - panelist Gary Raymond, editor at Wales Arts Review, actual predicted the death of printed newspapers and magazines within the next ten years - and the huge amount of information, articles and reviews that are available for free at the touch of a button, how is it possible to make enough money to continue to pay critics for their work?
Advertising is the obvious transferable factor from the old model and is a tried and tested way of making money out of online content but it is by no means the magical wonder solution to all the problems surrounding paying critics for their work. In fact, the fight for advertising might even have a negative effect on arts criticism. The publications that can attract the largest number of hits are the ones that will secure the big advertising deals making articles about the mainstream far more attractive to publishers than the new and unusual or more challenging - a piece about a big well known musical will attract more hits than one about an unknown contemporary dance piece, no matter how amazing that work is. It was also mentioned by the panel today that people are more likely to read reviews with very high or very low star ratings rather than those in the middle. Is it cynical to think that reviews may become influenced by the need to gain hits?
The most popular solution with the panel today was to make readers pay for online content in the same way that they would buy a physical newspaper or magazine. Leading me onto the second debate in my head, is charging for online content really the way forward? The thinking was that if the big name publications started doing this then the smaller ones could do the same and actually earn some money. I personally don't think we should be thinking about online content in the same way as print. It's a completely different medium which people interact with in a completely different way - I certainly do anyway. I wouldn't go to a website and read each article in turn like reading a magazine from cover to cover. I'll read an article because I've spotted a link to it somewhere and it's sparked my interest. I don't just read articles from one publication like buying one newspaper, I'll read from a multitude of sources. If I find something interesting I want to be able to share it on my social networks so that people with the same interests as me can read it too - none of this is conducive with paid content. I don't think I'm devaluing the journalists that have written the articles and reviews that I read by interacting with digital content in this way, I firmly believe they should be paid for their work. I'm also not completely discounting paid for content, but this new and booming way of devouring information needs a new approach from the industry, not the same old ones that were applied to print.
I said in a Twitter discussion following today's event that I'm a solutions not problems kind of girl and I haven't offered up a single solution in this post. I do believe some thinking outside the box is needed to secure the future of arts criticism, but hey, these are just the ramblings of an Onion.
