State of the arts round
Long undervalued, and now underpaid, arts journalism deserves a break, writes Gabriella Coslovich. Illustration by John Tiedemann.
As a budding journalist on Melbourne’s tabloid daily, the Herald-Sun, in the mid 1990s, all I wanted was to join the circus. The writers on the arts pages, I mean. They seemed to be having all the fun, interviewing fascinating people, seeing fabulous shows, writing with freedom and verve. Editorial management had other plans; it wanted me to stay on the main game, news. I should have been flattered. Management wasn’t alone in steering me away from the arts. A now well-known journalist, then a couple of years ahead of me, assured me that business was the way to the top. But business held no appeal. Who’d want to write about share markets, mortgage rates, taxation, when one could write about boundary-pushing artists, incandescent dancers, rousing film-makers and thought-provoking authors?
Arts journalism has never been considered the peak of the profession. It wasn’t part of the Walkley Foundation’s remit until 2017, when the Foundation took over management of the Pascall Prize for criticism as well. This was somewhat ironic given that many jobs in arts journalism had disappeared by then. The Arts Journalism Award has yet to be admitted to the gala ceremony at year’s end, relegated instead to the mid-year awards (not that that in any way curbed my excitement at winning the Arts Journalism Walkley in 2018 for Whiteley on Trial, a true crime book about an alleged art fraud.)
While arts journalism has tolerated being thought of as somehow less worthy, at least it was once well-resourced. Ray Gill, a former arts editor at The Age, with whom I’d worked for many years, reminded me just how well. Now editor of the online arts publication Daily Review, Gill in the early 2000s, at the height of arts resourcing at The Age, had five on-staff writers (including himself), two sub-editors, an editorial assistant, access to other newsroom staff, and a $5000 a week budget for contributors, who were paid 70 cents to $1 a word. We laughed at how ridiculously lavish that sounds in today’s challenged newspaper environment. These days, Gill runs the Daily Review site alone. Since acquiring the site from Private Media, publisher of Crikey, in May 2015, he has not been able to pay himself a salary.
Everyone is doing more with less. The Age’s current arts editor, Hannah Francis, is a one-woman-show, who finds herself having to knock back stories for lack of space and occasionally bearing the ire of writers as a result. The Age’s arts section has shrunk to one page a day during the week, with two pages on Thursday for film reviews. And since The Age’s move from broadsheet to tabloid in 2013, the size of a page itself has reduced, and therefore the amount of content it can carry. Pleasing everyone is not an option, and often it’s the smaller arts companies and less popular art forms that miss out.
Like journalism generally, arts journalism has taken a massive hit in the past five to seven years. And at the same time that in-house arts journalism jobs have been lost, budgets for contributors have withered. Freelance arts writer Stephen A. Russell told me one outlet, which had been paying 50 cents a word and commissioning 800- to 1200-word features, “overnight” slashed payment to a flat fee of $200.
“Fairfax rates dropped 25 per cent overnight and lots of places are going to flat fees, with no consideration of whether it’s a multiple interview piece or an opinion piece,” Russell says.
For those of us who care about the arts as a defining expression of society, and who believe that arts coverage and criticism is essential to a healthy democracy, the decline has been hard to watch, and perplexing too at a time when more people than ever are engaging in the arts, there are more arts institutions and festivals, and the economic benefits of culture and cultural tourism (not to mention the emotional plusses) are well recognised.
The arts can transform cities and regional centres — one need only look to Hobart and MONA, or Bilbao and the Guggenheim, to name the obvious examples. The “Bilbao effect” has entered the lexicon, and Dundee, in Scotland, is the latest recipient of a tourist-attracting arts landmark, with the opening last September on its waterfront of the first-ever Victoria and Albert Museum to be built outside London. Yet we can’t expect a commensurate arts-led revival of Australia’s traditional mainstream dailies.
It’s now old news that the traditional media’s business model has been smashed by the advent of the internet, and what gets covered boils down to economics, says Eric Beecher, chairman of Private Media.
“When I used to work in newspapers back in the ’80s we had the luxury of being able to make judgements that were purely journalistic,” Beecher says. “And when I was editor of The Sydney Morning Herald we had, in adjusted terms, an arts coverage budget that was probably two or three times greater than it is now. We probably devoted two or three times more space than they have now. And the change, I don’t think, has anything to do with any kind of change in cultural attitudes or growing philistine attitudes or anything like that, it’s just the sheer brutal economics of publishing newspapers.”
The Age’s editor, Alex Lavelle, says the paper retains a strong commitment to arts coverage, pointing out that arts is one of just five areas that has its own section every day, the others being business, sport, opinion and world news. Art stories, he says, are covered in the news pages “virtually every day”, as well as in the recently redesigned Spectrum magazine.
Nonetheless, the contrast between the paper’s weekday arts and sports coverage is too stark to ignore — in the second week of February this year, I counted 13 pages devoted to the arts, and 48 to sport. I ask Lavelle about this.
“If you include Spectrum and other magazine content, there’s not a huge disparity in terms of pagination between arts and sport in the paper overall,” he says. “We see wider general interest in sport than arts but both are a vital part of the rich tapestry of Melbourne and Victoria.”
When Spectrum launched in March 2014, it was a 48-page liftout. Today, it hovers around 32 pages. According to the latest Enhanced Media Metrics Australia report, from December 2018, Spectrum was the most read section in the Saturday Age, with an average of 281,000 readers per issue. Another 394,000 readers read the section in The Age’s sister paper The Sydney Morning Herald. (The Saturday Age’s sports section attracted an average of 214,000 readers per issue, while The Sydney Morning Herald’s Saturday sport pages attracted an average of 251,000). Meanwhile, The Weekend Australian’s respected arts and culture magazine, Review, has an average readership of 345,000 per issue.
Review is the second most-read section of the paper (Inquirer attracts 350,000 on average per issue), and editor Tim Douglas puts its success down its writers, noting that the paper “heavily promotes”, among others, the likes of film critics David Stratton and Philippa Hawker (who was snapped up by The Australian after she was made redundant by Fairfax despite a public petition to keep her on staff).
“Every editor at The Australian, from Chris Mitchell to Paul Whittaker to our current editor Christopher Dore, has been really interested in what we do in Review,” Douglas says. “It’s an important part of our brand.”
It helps, of course, to have the financial backing of a powerful proprietor such as Rupert Murdoch, who appears keen, for now at least, to maintain the legacy of his late mother and staunch arts advocate, Dame Elisabeth Murdoch. But The Australian hasn’t been entirely immune to financial pressures, with arts journalists including news hound Michaela Boland and feature writer Sharon Verghis taking redundancies. (Boland is now the ABC’s national arts, entertainment and culture reporter.)
Ray Gill puts it this way: “Arts journalism is disappearing, but the demand from readers is strong. The problem is that no one knows who is going to pay for it.”
In May 2017, Daily Review hit a peak of 180,000 unique visitors a month. That number has dropped to about 80,000 to 100,000 a month as Gill strains to maintain the website alone. He used to employ a full-time editor and a full-time business manager, paying for most of their wages through revenue raised from advertising and running masterclasses, and subsidising the shortfall himself. Since their departures at the end of 2017, Gill has relied on reader contributions which have gone towards, but not fully covered, the cost of paying commissioned contributors, the hosting of the site and the $500-a-month costs of using Mailchimp to send emails to 60,000 subscribers. Forced to take on paying work, Gill now only has time to email subscribers about once a week instead of three to four times a week as he did from 2015 to mid-2018.
The news is not all bad. While arts coverage in Australia’s mainstream media has diminished, readers’ access to arts information has burgeoned through the very instrument that has decimated newspapers the world over — the internet.
Says Beecher: “If I’m interested in visual arts, or I’m interested in ballet, or I’m interested in any part of the arts, I can probably find a lot more specialist information both locally and globally than I ever could before the internet. In a global sense we’re living in the greatest golden era of content in human existence.”
Australian Book Review editor Peter Rose agrees. “Never, probably, have we had access to as much arts journalism from here and abroad, in such quick, convenient forms,” Rose says. “I don’t think the outlook is bleak at all, and there is certainly an appetite for discerning, expert, independent journalism among our readers. The challenge is to find ways of supporting our arts journalists with decent rates and editorial support — not just free tickets and a byline. ABR is just one organisation that — with a lot of hard work, and new entrepreneurial measures — has done so.”
ABR pays for everything it publishes (with a minimum fee of $400) and is committed to increasing its rates in coming years. The publication is supported by government grants and private benefactors, and in August 2014 launched ABR Arts online, publishing reviews of film, theatre, opera, music, dance and art exhibitions, including overseas productions.
“We are trying to offer something different from the newspapers,” says Rose, “with longer reviews, the average being 900 words.”
This is the anomaly of the times — on the one hand, there has never been more content for people to read and, on the other, many of those providing the content are struggling to make a living.
“I don’t think anyone can make a living from arts writing alone anymore,” says Elissa Blake, co-editor of the online arts platform, Audrey Journal, which she launched with husband Jason Blake in November 2017. Formerly a freelance arts writer, Elissa now works full-time as assistant media adviser at the University of Sydney, while also co-editing Audrey.
The axing of The Sydney Morning Herald’s regular stage column in Friday’s entertainment lift-out was the clincher for her and Jason to start a new online arts platform.
“It was the one place in the newspaper where I could place stories by smaller emerging artists and independent theatre companies,” Elissa says. “Those stories rarely appear in the newspaper now as the editors chase higher clicks with stories on the biggest shows in town with the biggest audiences. This has been such a loss. So the reason for Audrey, initially, anyway, was to provide a space for the independent sector and to tell their stories.”
A significant proportion of Audrey’s funding comes from Sydney’s major performing arts companies and venues, and the site is free from subscriptions and paywalls. Asked how the site maintains independence given its industry funding, Elissa says that Audrey is “not a newspaper” but “an arts platform aiming to bring artists and audiences closer together”.
“To be clear, none of the industry funding goes towards reviews and all of the arts companies support total independence in critical writing,” she says. “There’s no point to it, otherwise.”.
In Melbourne, Alison Croggon (novelist, poet, librettist and critic) and Robert Reid (playwright, director, game designer and academic) launched Witness in March 2018, an online platform for critique and debate of the Australian performing arts. To maintain independence, they do not accept advertising, and generally do not accept sponsorship from performing arts companies. Witness is funded through government grants and subscriptions, but it is facing closure by June unless additional grants and subscribers can be found.
“We are out there trying to work out how to survive,” says Croggon, who in 2009 became the first online critic to win the Geraldine Pascall Critic of the Year Award (now the Walkley-Pascall Prize for Arts Criticism), primarily for criticism published on her influential blog Theatre Notes, which she ran from 2004 to 2012.
One of Croggon and Reid’s missions is mentoring new and culturally diverse critics. In 2018, they launched the First Nations Emerging Critic program. This month, they take on their second First Nations Emerging Critic, Jacob Boehme, who joins the inaugural critic Clarissa Lee, now associate editor of Witness.
There is no doubt that arts journalism and criticism is springing up in new forms, being kept alive by an eager, younger generation, used to doing it themselves, as well as older, established editors and writers passionate about the arts and willing (or able) to make financial sacrifices.
New ventures include online magazines such as Liminal, founded in late 2016 by writer and photographer Leah Jing McIntosh, which every Monday publishes an interview with an Asian-Australian from a creative field. Liminal relies on government grants and reader donations, and launched its first book of interviews, at Melbourne’s Loop Bar on March 21. The classical music and arts magazine, Limelight, endures, after being bought by Limelight Arts Media last year. The Age has taken on three new arts critics (Maxim Boon, Kim Dunphy and Jana Perkovic) and The Saturday Paper, owned by property developer Morry Schwartz, has upped its cultural content, adding a second page of arts criticism, with a third of each edition now comprising arts and cultural coverage. The Guardian and The New York Times have opened Australian offshoots and the arts are part of their coverage.
All of these developments are heartening. However, an area that remains at risk is investigative arts journalism, the sort that holds the industry to account. Stories about fraud, mismanagement, industrial turmoil, corruption, conflicts of interest, harassment and so forth may be overlooked when there’s no one with the time or experience to pursue them.
Such a story was broken last year by the ABC’s Michaela Boland, on how a glittering fundraiser at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum lost nearly $140,000 and Australian taxpayers footed the bill. Daily Review was nominated for the Walkleys’ Arts Journalism Award in 2017 for an article by artist John Kelly questioning the impartiality of the selection process for artists for Australia’s Venice Biennale pavilion, which prompted changes to that process.
Arts journalism is more than “soft news” or “lifestyle”. It can and should also be hard-hitting. My book Whiteley on Trial grew out of stories I’d broken for The Age with the support and focus that a robust newsroom brings to arts journalism. The stories were written at a time when the arts section was well-resourced and the arts were covered with the seriousness of any newspaper “beat”. And yet the idea that “anyone” can do arts writing, that it’s light and fluffy, persists. In February, Michaela Boland vented on Twitter about a colleague who had finally said what she’d always suspected was a pervasive attitude: that “arts reporting doesn’t require any particular expertise”.
At least now arts journalism and criticism are being celebrated at the Walkleys — a signal that they matter — and the next move should be to have them recognised at the end of year awards.
So is there a future for arts journalism? Researching this article made me more optimistic than I have been for some time. One of the challenges has to be resisting the pressure to write click-baiting, celebrity-driven stories, by finding a sustainable financial model to support intelligent analysis and the coverage of the arts at all levels. While it’s great to see new ventures online, it’s important that arts coverage is maintained and strengthened in the mainstream media, and that the arts don’t simply become niche. The breadth of audiences reached by the mainstream media means that some young kid who has never thought about the arts might discover a new interest, or even gain a new perspective on life. As Alison Croggon says, the work of Witness should be complementary to the work of the mainstream media — not a substitute.
The Saturday Paper editor Maddison Connaughton worries about the loss of mid-career arts writers.
“In arts writing and criticism there are some great small publications and start-up publications — and still a few established critical voices writing consistently for the papers — but the middle has fallen out,” she says.
“That’s a loss for the country. Young critics bring a wealth of new ideas and perspectives, and established critics can pull a lifetime of context and learning into their writing, but I believe it’s during the middle part of their career that critics do much of their best work. We’re missing out on that writing.”
Eric Beecher points to funding initiatives being taken by governments overseas and in Australia to protect so-called public interest journalism, and suggests that such initiatives could also apply to arts journalism.
“If collectively there were jobs created for say another 20 or 30 or 40 arts journalists across Australia, that would probably make a fairly material difference, wouldn’t it?” Beecher says.
He estimates the cost at about $5 million, and suggests that funding could come from a mix of public and private sources.
“I know it’s radical and it absolutely has to be arms-length from whoever provides the funding,” says Beecher, “And the funding needs to be fixed not variable and not subject to the whims of a government.”
It is a radical idea. But these are radical times. As for me, I don’t regret my decision to become an arts journalist. My old friend at the Herald-Sun may be far more famous, but I’ve had an enthralling ride, worthy of the high-top.
Gabriella Coslovich is a former senior arts writer with The Age. She took redundancy from The Age in September 2012 and has been freelancing since. Her book, Whiteley on Trial, published in October 2017 by Melbourne University Publishing, won the Walkley Foundation’s 2018 Arts Journalism Award.
John Tiedemann is an illustrator and cartoonist. See more of John’s work on his website here.
This reporting was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund through their support of the Walkley Arts Prizes. Entries are open now for the 2019 prizes, closing April 26.
