If you're a blogger or a blog reader, or maybe just someone who cares about the future of writing that's about art, you oughta hunker down for a few minutes and read Nicholas Pickard's article The Future of Journalism & the Arts. It's a thorough examination of many of the issues facing the critics, businessman, and artists currently caught in the Bermuda Triangle that is "qualified" arts criticism. (The quotes are there because I'm unsure how to define that term, as we all should be.) We're in the middle of a massive paradigm shift. How it all turns out, is about 50% up to us.
Pickard himself is largely referring to an article in The Monthly, which is what he quotes here.
It would be difficult to overstate the serious media’s anxiety about the future of quality journalism. This anxiety stems from an old dilemma – is journalism a public trust or a business? – overlaid on a new dilemma: that as the internet matures into a successful commercial medium, the funding model for quality commercial journalism is collapsing.
The big question on everyone's minds at the moment, of course, is this:
Can pages such as this or any other blog or independent site guarantee the quality and quantity that the mainstream could once be proud of and without the finances? With the proliferation of blogs, will we get to the point of critical mass and a saturation of opinion?Read the whole thing here.
Congrats and thanks to Alison Croggon.
