Back in May, I suggested that the so-called “book review crisis” might be the tip of a cultural iceberg, affecting American newspaper coverage of all the arts. About a week and a half ago, Terry Teachout picked up the theme, in a WSJ column that acknowledges the economic reality that “whenever times get tough at an American newspaper, fine-arts coverage gets thrown off the back of the sled first,” but also concedes that bloggers who are creating their own criticism, often in direct response to diminished newspaper content, are “increasingly… sharper, livelier and timelier than their old-media competition.”
And yet online criticism can’t be touted as the simple cure-all for the critical tradition. “Blogging, valuable though it can be, is no substitute for the day-to-day attention of a newspaper whose editors seek out experts, hire them on a full-time basis, and give them enough space to cover their beats adequately,” Teachout admits. “The problem is that fewer and fewer newspapers seem willing to do that in any consistent way.” The solution, from this perspective, seems rather straightforward: Pour those resources into a good website. If Talking Points Memo can hold its own agains the political desks of America’s biggest newspapers—and with increasing regularity beat them at their own game—it seems entirely within the realm of possibility that a website of literary and/or cultural criticism and/or journalism with adequate financial support and an intelligent marketing campaign should be able to be able to attract a readership that satisfies its own critical mass requirements (which are understandably lower than that for a political website). This isn’t exactly rocket science, or even particularly original; as I understand it, it’s pretty much the Nick Denton business model. DISCUSS: So how would one go about making that work?