Do Media Organizations Even Want Cultural Criticism?
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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.”
And as the industry continues to hemorrhage jobs, criticism positions have been particularly vulnerable. “It’s a pretty easy job to get rid of or downsize, because that person is so siloed off,” said one critic. “They do that one thing, and if you don’t value or want that, they just lift right out of the equation. And there’s just a lot of editors these days who don’t value it.”
Bigger outlets have been experimenting with new ways to utilize their critical firepower on staff. There’s certainly more emphasis on recommendations these days — a recent piece in the Times advises what books to read after watching The Gilded Age — tailored to both a particular and a general audience. “It seems that some of the shift in newspaper book coverage has been toward seeing books as commodities and orienting readers toward the question of whether they should buy a book or not,” said The Nation’s literary editor, David Marcus. “That’s not really what the essay review or magazine criticism does, in part because the thing that we’re selling as magazine editors is the magazine itself — we’re selling good writing.”
Staff critics, meanwhile, are writing features and essays and, increasingly, showing up on podcasts. The Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Wesley Morris launched a weekly podcast in June, part of a growing number of Times scribblers who unexpectedly find themselves constantly in front of a camera and/or mic. The New Yorker is among the few publications that still have multiple dedicated critics producing written criticism (as does this magazine, which employs 15 full-time critics), but it has also embraced new mediums to communicate the form, like vertical videos and the Critics at Large podcasts. “I’m all for expanding our forms of criticism — the podcast with Alex Schwartz, Vinson Cunningham, and Naomi Fry is the latest evidence of that — but I’d never give it up,” said editor David Remnick of written criticism, even if it doesn’t bring in as many clicks as, say, an investigative feature. (“Editing according to traffic is not editing; it’s engineering,” he added.) The Times has also embraced interactive journalism, like art critic Jason Farago’s close reads of Cézanne and the pope’s favorite Caravaggio.
The irony of the decline of written criticism is that nearly everyone I spoke to agrees that it is more necessary than ever. “I feel like what’s lost is that super-high level of expert analysis and history,” said Ryan Dombal, who prior to co-founding the music publication Hearing Things was a longtime features editor at Pitchfork, one of the rare online publications that built a devoted readership on reviews. “A lot of it on these new mediums is cool-hunting to me, or sifting through the deluge of music that’s put out every single day. I think that’s valuable, but at the same time, to me, that’s just level one of what a critic is.” The next level, said Dombal, is to say, “‘Why is this meaningful?’ How does this relate to the last, you know, 50 years of popular music? Personally, I feel like the written review is still the best way to convey those deeper things.” As Remnick put it, “Criticism isn’t a matter of quick opinion, thumbs up or down or the aggregation of the same: Rotten Tomatoes. Criticism is ideally something a great deal more probing and interesting than that.”
“People are going to need beacons of taste to get through this onslaught of really discombobulated media,” said Andrew Goldstein, the former editor of Artnet. “It’s not just because of AI — we’ve already been living through this period of metastasizing forms of culture, where there’s too much on social, too much on Netflix, too much on Spotify. And a lot of people are seeking guidance and thought leadership from individuals, rather than publications.”
Goldstein added, “If the publications step away from this core element of taste-making and gatekeeping, they’re ceding a lot of their power.” As is often the case with the industry these days, there is a great deal of anxiety over the media’s ability to influence anything at all. “I recognize that there are advertising and subscription realities that make these lean times for all of us,” said New York Review of Books editor Emily Greenhouse. “But I see in some recent decisions a discouraging insecurity in the move away from written criticism, which strikes me as part of a fear of authority and expertise we’re seeing everywhere in our culture.” The Times has increasingly looked outward for its expertise: Last year’s “100 Best Books of the 21st Century” was chosen by 500-plus literary luminaries, and this year’s “100 Best Movies of the 21st Century” was similarly compiled by 500-plus filmmakers, actors, and other industry professionals. Each came with an immensely popular reader-generated list with more than 200,000 Times readers casting their vote.
“We’re not trying to solve for what criticism gets the biggest traffic; we’re trying to solve for what criticism can reach the most people given its form,” said Sifton. “Is that a challenge for a restaurant on 37th Street or a Berlin music concert or a book of poems? Yeah, of course it is. But it’s also really exciting when we can shine a light on those things in ways that delight a lot of people.”
That idea in itself might represent a new paradigm. “It does sometimes seem like the job of critical coverage — whether by critics or by polls or whatever — is not to shape the audience’s taste, but to reflect it back to them in some way,” said a veteran arts journalist. “And that’s a very big change in what’s understood to be the mission of criticism.”
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