the dailies hometown press performs a juggling act

Transcription

1 the dailies hometown press performs a juggling act The arts, along with business and sports, is one of the three daily sections that fleshes out the hard news in Section A to turn a local newspaper into a rounded information package. All three combine journalism with columns and columns of lists in agate type: The sports section has the box scores; the business section has the stock listings; the arts section variously called The Arts, Entertainment, Life, Living, Lifestyle or some such has a backbone of the daily TV listings on which to hang its broader coverage of arts and culture. In our study of arts and culture coverage in 15 daily newspapers in ten cities Charlotte, Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, Houston, Miami, Philadelphia, Portland, Providence and the San Francisco Bay Area during the month of October 1998, these daily arts sections were usually the small sibling of the three. There were a few instances in which the arts section was more prominent. The Houston Chronicle and the Oakland Tribune made it bigger than business, while the San Francisco Chronicle made it bigger than both. But on average the everyday arts section took the smallest share (7%, vs. 11% for sports and 9% for business) of the newspapers collective pagination. At some of the newspapers, the section is skimpy and it would be a stretch indeed to claim that it represented a serious effort at reporting on the artistic and cultural life of a community. Newspapers such as the Charlotte Observer and the Rocky Mountain News have daily arts sections that are little more than television-plus: They are small, averaging only 5% of the newspaper s over- all pagination, and in each case more than half that section s arts and culture column inches were devoted to the TV beat. And even that statistic understates the dominance of television. Because the focus of this project was on arts and culture, we only examined coverage of TV drama, comedy, made-for-tv movies, documentaries and other entertainment. Counting coverage of TV news and TV sports, which fall outside the arts and culture category, would have made the overall presence of television seem even larger. A newspaper s decision about whether or not to have a substantial daily arts section does not necessarily reflect its overall commitment to the arts and culture beat as a whole. Even though the arts may receive only cursory daily attention, some newspapers provide detailed coverage at the weekend instead. These once-a-week arts supplements, often distributed as a Friday 16 REPORTING THE ARTS

2 tabloid entertainment guide, also have a substantial volume of arts listings. They have very little television, but comprehensive calendar information on virtually everything else. Starting times for movies, live music, theater and other performing arts, business hours for art galleries and museums, free activities, children s events as well as participatory activities all find their home in these sections. In two of them the Cleveland Plain Dealer s Friday Entertainment and the Denver Post s voluminous Weekend Scene over half of the editorial space is taken up by listings instead of journalism. National or Local If the daily arts section is dominated by television, the weekend coverage of the movies takes up more space than any other type of artistic activity. On average, one quarter of all the editorial space in the weekend supplements is devoted to movie listings and stories. In the San Jose Mercury News that proportion was as high as 33%, and in the Miami Herald it was 43%. Movies, whether produced by Hollywood or independents, are almost always released nationally. Television programming consists mostly of nationally distributed network and cable fare. Add to these two the publishing industry, whose marketing of books relies on national chains, and these three media represent more than half the content of these local newspapers arts and culture coverage. So what distinctive advantage can the local news media claim in covering what are essentially national beats? The prevalence of listings offers one answer. What newspapers can uniquely offer their readership may not be the journalistic activity of reporting on and reviewing arts and culture. Instead they offer the clerical service of compiling and displaying comprehensive local listings. Thus their readers can experience the artistic creations that were produced in Hollywood, scheduled by television networks or published by New York City imprints. This clerical activity is much more amenable than regular journalism to the improvements in efficiency and productivity that modern technology affords, and listings are perfectly suited to be converted from print to an online medium. None of the newspapers we studied went so far as to spend more arts and culture column inches on listings than on stories but the Denver Post at 49%, the Providence Journal at 47% and the Houston Chronicle at 46% came very close. NATIONAL ARTS JOURNALISM PROGRAM 17

3 18 REPORTING THE ARTS Decisions, Decisions When newspaper publishers approach the arts and culture beat, they have three sets of decisions to make. Should it be presented primarily in a daily section or in a once-a-week supplement? How should their overall editorial space be divided between stories, their journalistic product; and listings, their clerical one? And most important of all, how much prominence do they believe the arts should have? That decision concerns both presentation and substance. First, where do the arts sections stand in the overall newspaper? Construed narrowly, the coverage that goes under the explicit label of the arts extends only as far as television, movies, music, and the performing and visual arts. In Cleveland the arts are an undiluted but circumscribed beat. For example, the daily arts section of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Entertainment, is unusually segregated from a companion daily lifestyle section called Living. The Charlotte Observer, on the other hand, offers a daily dose of Living -plus-something-else, combining such subjects as theater, music and museums with food, fashion and religion. In Charlotte, arts and entertainment appear as one facet of the larger feature beat, diluted and broadly construed. The arts sections can dominate the so-called feature pages of a newspaper, organizing a sprawling array of topics that range from cultural production through the decorative arts, to topics that are outside the domain of arts and culture altogether such as food, shopping, recreation and the comics. Alternatively, the arts may occupy just one feature section among many. Besides the Cleveland Plain Dealer, newspapers as different as the Chicago Tribune and the Providence Journal devote more than 20% of their overall pagination to non-arts feature sections. All three newspapers routinely present their coverage of architecture, fashion, design, crafts and antiques topics we consider to be a proper province of arts and culture journalism outside their designated arts sections. The Miami Herald even puts publishing outside the arts and culture context, presenting its book reviews as part of its Week in Review section. Second, the publisher must decide what resources to devote to covering arts and culture stories listings aside no matter which section format the newspaper happens to adopt. Our study compared an array of daily newspapers, those in large markets and small, local and national, in single-paper markets and those with competitors. Devoting more than 8,000 column

4 inches to arts and culture stories in a month represents an enormous commitment for a smallcity newspaper like the Oregonian. The readers of the Houston Chronicle, who got to read an equivalent volume of journalism, were beneficiaries of a much less impressive proportion of that monumental publication s efforts. Similarly, fewer than 9,000 column inches a month written in the snappier style demanded by a tabloid such as the Chicago Sun-Times, may represent no less a commitment than the broadsheet Chicago Tribune s 11,000. Big City Beat Volume and proportion a newspaper with an extensive commitment to coverage of arts and culture must deliver both, not only the gross number of column inches, but also a large proportion of its pagination to a combination of the daily and the weekly arts sections. Both things considered, this study found that extensive arts and culture journalism is the province of big city dailies. The Chicago Tribune provided the most column inches. The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Chicago Sun-Times and the two San Francisco papers (who co-produce their Sunday edition so its huge weekend Datebook supplement goes to both sets of readers and is counted twice in this study) devoted the largest share of their pagination to arts sections. Conversely, the papers with the smallest volume of coverage were the Charlotte Observer, the Providence Journal and the Oakland Tribune and those with the smallest proportion of space were the Providence Journal and the Denver Post. The notion that arts and culture is a big city beat is confirmed by the avalanche of coverage provided by the national edition of The New York Times. Its sheer volume of column inches (listings excluded) over 19,000 in a single month almost matched the arts and culture coverage of the second city s two dailies, the Tribune and the Sun-Times, combined. In contrast, the monthly average for all 15 metropolitan dailies in our study was just over 8,000 column inches. Listings accounted for an unusually small 27% of the total space the Times devoted to the arts (compared with a 40% average for the 15 local newspapers) confirming the fact that the provision of listings is a local, not national, specialty. Was the explanation for this high volume that the Times covers everything in greater depth than other newspapers? Or does the Gray Lady have an unusually detailed commitment to the arts? The answer is not only the former, but remarkably, the latter as well. Stated as a proportion of the national edition s pagination, its daily arts section was larger than sports although business was bigger still. Neither were those other two factors at work, which in other newspapers can lead to an inflated daily arts section. The arts had not expanded at the expense of other feature sections which accounted for an unusually high 23% of the overall pagination or at the expense of the weekend supplements. New York, New York New York City s role as the national center for three major cultural sectors book publishing, Broadway theater and the visual arts was reflected in the Times arts and culture coverage. Obviously, because of the sheer volume of column inches that the Times lavishes on the arts, it writes more than other newspapers about every sector. But the prominence it afforded books and the performing arts was unusual even in percentage terms. Mostly because of its Sunday Book Review, almost one quarter of the space the Times devotes to arts and culture journalism is about books. Among local newspapers, only the Miami Herald, the Rocky Mountain News and the Charlotte Observer exceeded 20%. The performing arts, mostly theater and dance, ranked as the Times third most important area (18% of coverage vs. 19% for movies, 24% for books) of cultural production. Only the Oakland Tribune gave performance more than 15% of its space among the local newspapers. By contrast, television, that staple of daily arts and culture journalism, gets short shrift at the Times even though the networks are based in the Big Apple. Only relatively speaking, of course because of the sheer size of its arts sections, the Times actually has more TV column inches than every local newspaper in our study except for the listings-heavy Houston Chronicle and the Philadelphia Inquirer. But with television representing only 5% of all arts and culture stories, the Times is the only newspaper that devotes less space to television than to the visual arts of painting, sculpture and photography. For national coverage of television, USA Today is a specialist. Overall, it has less than one quarter of the Times volume of arts and culture coverage, but its daily arts section takes up a larger proportion of the newspaper s overall pagination than the Times does (13% vs. 10%) and more than half of its daily arts and culture space is devoted to stories and listings about television. With a large daily arts section, few other feature sections, a small weekend effort and its focus on television, USA Today is configured like the NATIONAL ARTS JOURNALISM PROGRAM 19

5 Oakland Tribune, one local newspaper in our study with a minor commitment to comprehensive arts and culture coverage. But even USA Today had more arts and culture coverage than the third national newspaper in our study, the Wall Street Journal, whose volume of arts and culture coverage was slightly more than onetenth of that found in The New York Times. If many local newspapers are attempting to showcase the arts, along with sports and business, as regular sections to round out their daily product, the Journal, true to its Wall Street roots, provides a clear-cut alternative. With 57% of its pages devoted to business, it sets aside a mere 1% to daily arts, and its sports section does not exist. High Road or Low Road? One major mission of this study of arts and culture coverage in metropolitan daily newspapers was to discover whether fine arts or mass entertainment held sway. What face of the cultural scene did these newspapers present? Highbrow or mainstream? Commercial or notfor-profit? Elite or populist? High or low it is a convenient dichotomy the edifying and inspirational vs. the superficial and the entertaining. One addresses the very soul of its individual audience member. The other treats its audience as an undifferentiated demographic to be accumulated for profit. It is a convenient dichotomy, but one that this study found to be confusing in describing what a newspaper does. First, its readers daily artistic and cultural life is obviously a mixture of high and low elements; a newspaper would be blinding itself to that fact by taking one road or the other. Blending and mixing high art and mass culture searching out the places where they overlap comes more naturally to the novelty-seeking taste of a newspaper. In the month of our study, for example, the Charlotte Observer offered a detailed investigation of Elton John s reworking of Aida ; the Philadelphia Inquirer (whose beat extends to Atlantic City) examined how a fine art gallery might attract tourists to Las Vegas new Bellagio Hotel; and the Cleveland Plain Dealer offered an extensive review of a PBS television production of King Lear. Second, we found that newspapers are illequipped to become specialists in either the high road or the low road uniquely. Coverage of television (in daily arts sections) and movies (in weekend supplements) is a part of a newspaper s primary responsibility. Ignoring these mass media 20 REPORTING THE ARTS

6 would be as unthinkable as ignoring the box scores in the sports section. On the other hand, these local newspapers, with massive investments in once-a-week supplements, would be equally remiss if they decided to put all their eggs in the entertainment basket. Neither their format nor their staffing equip them to compete head-tohead with those national organs whose specialty is daily coverage of the Hollywood-based, celebrity-oriented mass media. Instead of high and low, our results suggest other parameters for measuring a newspaper s approach to the arts and culture beat. Is it journalistic (writing articles) or clerical (providing listings)? Is it daily (news-based but ephemeral) or weekly (feature-driven but more permanent)? Is it local (a newspaper s unique niche) or national (artistic product made for a national audience but also covered by national media)? And finally, this study proposes the dichotomy of accessible vs. esoteric instead of high vs. low. We isolated three sets of editorial choices to determine where a given newspaper s priorities lie story assignment, story selection and story placement. A newspaper tells its readers what it considers most important by the reporters and critics it hires, by where it decides to assign them, by what individual artistic and cultural events it covers most heavily and by what stories it chooses as its leads to headline its daily arts section and its weekend supplements. Our findings isolated four important ways in which these newspapers avoided the Hollywoodbased, celebrity-oriented, mass-media formula that a magazine like Entertainment Weekly or a daily television program like Entertainment Tonight offers. Where s the Glitz? First, television was afforded surprisingly low prominence. This is surprising because, by volume, coverage of television appears to be one of a daily newspaper s major services. Stories and listings occupied on average more than 25% of the overall space these newspapers devoted to arts and culture, yet almost all of this coverage was relegated to a section s final pages. In only four of the 15 newspapers did television stories regularly qualify for the headlines in the daily arts section: the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Miami Herald, the Providence Journal and the San Francisco Chronicle. Second, gossip and celebrity columns were a daily feature of every newspaper, but these stories, too, were rarely given prominent positions in the arts sections. News about celebrities may be trivial, but it is also ephemeral. It therefore must be delivered daily, otherwise it gets stale. So none of the newspapers made gossip columns a staple of their weekly arts supplements and three of them the Chicago Tribune, the Miami Herald and the Charlotte Observer incorporated their daily celebrity round-ups into general news rather than their everyday arts sections. Only three of the 15 newspapers gave gossip a prominent role in their daily arts sections. The Oregonian and the Philadelphia Inquirer each devoted more than 20% of their daily story space to gossip and the Chicago Sun-Times routinely placed Bill Zwecker s celebrity column on its arts front page. Third, all of the newspapers had a strong commitment to reviewing artistic and cultural productions as opposed to merely focusing on publicity and fluff. And film the media industry whose publicity apparatus is probably the most sophisticated was among the most heavily reviewed of all. Overall, more than one-third of all editorial space assigned to arts and culture stories was devoted to film reviews. Not surprisingly, publishing received the highest proportion 53% of all book articles were reviews. But movies came in second at 44%. The two San Francisco papers mostly in their shared Sunday Datebook supplement devoted more than half of their coverage of movies to critical reviews. Fourth, the month we studied October 1998 happened to include the week-long highfashion shows in London, Paris and Milan. A newspaper that sought a glamorous, celebrityoriented image for its arts and culture coverage would have given these shows pride of place. But only five of the 15 newspapers made high fashion a high priority. The Cleveland Plain Dealer, NATIONAL ARTS JOURNALISM PROGRAM 21

7 which featured fashion writer Janet McCue extensively, and the Houston Chronicle both devoted more space to Milan than to any other single artistic or cultural production in that month. The Philadelphia Inquirer, meanwhile, paid an extensive tribute to the just-closed-up house of Isaac Mizrahi, and the Rocky Mountain News relied on syndicated fashion articles in its non-arts features sections. The other newspaper that treated high fashion as an important feature beat was the San Francisco Chronicle. This newspaper illustrates that it is not the presence of a given type of arts coverage that evinces its editorial philosophy, but its prominence. The Chronicle gave extensive space to high fashion and to interior decor, and John Carman was routinely given the arts section lead to write about television P-phooey on Pfeiffer the Decade s Worst Show... Plots Run Thick As Irish Stew on Trinity yet no one would characterize its arts coverage as negligent of high culture. Cheek by jowl with The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer a soon-to-be-canceled UPN situation comedy about Abraham Lincoln s White House the Chronicle ran reviews of the likes of Tristan und Isolde and Bill T. Jones as well as an op-ed appreciation of Frank Sinatra and a feature piece on Charles Mingus. The Chronicle s approach is quintessential of a general preference to blend high and low rather than choosing one path over another. Uniquely Qualified Of course, most newspapers do not report on such a culture-rich environment as the San Francisco Bay Area. For most newspapers, it is not so easy to achieve a deft mixture of in-depth coverage of the national mass media with more local and more highbrow art. These are the horns of the dilemma. If a newspaper ignores those artistic media that most of its readers enjoy most of the time network television, Hollywood movies, recorded music, mass-market publishing it looks hidebound and out of touch. But the mass media s own industrial economies of scale dictate that they are national, or local, in scope. A local newspaper has no special claim to expertise in them compared with national newspapers, entertainment magazines and specialist cable television channels. So if a local newspaper s assignment desk found itself giving top priority to these national beats, it would be deploying its cultural reporters in areas of intense competition, areas they would not be uniquely qualified to cover. In cities that are too small to support a large staff, this can lead to a lack of coverage of those beats in which a local reporter would be an unrivaled expert the local music scene, galleries, theater and other performance. The Charlotte Observer and the Providence Journal, two of the smallest newspapers in our study, fell into this trap. Both ran the fewest local reviews (25% and 23% of overall story space respectively vs. a 35% average) and skimped on coverage of the theater and music (specifically classical music in Charlotte), while their television coverage occupied a higher percentage of space compared to any of the other publications. Outside Help Not all arts coverage is written by the newspaper s own staff. Local coverage can easily be supplemented by freelancers and national coverage by syndicates. The Providence Journal, for example, devoted the highest proportion of its space to the two national beats of television and the movies (45% vs. a 36% 15-newspaper-average) and headlined its daily arts section with syndicated previews of such made-for-tv movies such as Ann-Margret in Life of the Party, James Garner in Legalese and the return of CHiPS. The San Jose Mercury News made least use of its own staffers to cover arts and culture. During the month of our study, syndicates accounted for almost as many articles as its own reporters. It was the only newspaper out of the 15 in which staffers accounted for fewer than half the articles in its weekend supplement. Two other smaller newspapers, the Oakland Tribune and the Oregonian, also used syndicates heavily, but for a different reason. Rather than giving prominence to the syndicated fare, they used it to free their own reporters to cover the local arts scene. In Oakland, the performing arts occupied a higher share of overall arts and culture coverage than in any of the other newspapers studied, and Chad Jones theater reviews were a staple of the front page of the arts section. In Portland, the music scene was more heavily represented than in any other newspaper except the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The Oregonian had the second most articles on rock n roll, the greatest number on R&B and hip hop, and the greatest number on the local music scene. The use of syndicated content can thus be a cost-effective way for a newspaper to cover the national entertainment media and still have resources left for local specialization. Similarly, using freelancers can expand the range of local 22 REPORTING THE ARTS

8 arts coverage. The Chicago Tribune specialized in freelance assignments, averaging almost four such articles daily. It was the only newspaper to run more freelance stories than syndicated ones. At the Tribune, more articles were written about local theater than at any of the other 15 newspapers, and its coverage of opera, dance, jazz and other locally produced arts was heavier than average. Critical reviews were the hallmark of the Tribune s arts coverage. The paper ran the most reviews of any of the papers in the study, averaging more than 50 a week. This was accomplished, in part, by a heavy reliance on freelancers. In most other newspapers, reviews were more likely to appear in the weekend arts supplement only in the Chicago Tribune were they as commonly seen on a daily basis. And the Tribune was the only newspaper of the 15 to devote the majority of its coverage of music to reviews. Less committed, but still unusually high in their freelance assignments were the Oregonian and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Both newspapers provided unusually intensive coverage of the local arts. In contrast to the Oregonian s focus on rock n roll and R&B, the Inquirer headlined classical music, averaging more than one article each day on that beat, more than any other newspaper of the 15 except for the Plain Dealer in Cleveland. The big Philadelphia story in October 1998 was the return of conductor Riccardo Muti to the podium of the Philadelphia Symphony, warranting not only the cover story in the Inquirer s weekend arts supplement, but also breaking news coverage in the metro section. Admittedly, hiring freelancers is not the only way to guarantee heavy coverage of the local arts scene. The Cleveland Plain Dealer, for example, ran half as many freelance reviews as the Chicago Tribune, yet ran more articles on dance, rock n roll and classical music. Music beat staffer John Soeder, for example, was regularly given the lead of the Plain Dealer s daily Entertainment section for articles on the likes of R.E.M., Barenaked Ladies and the Afghan Whigs. But two large metropolitan daily newspapers, the Houston Chronicle and the Miami Herald, are counterexamples. They used fewer freelancers to cover the arts than any of the other newspapers and ranked near the bottom in their coverage of both music and the performing arts. Instead of such local pieces, they relied on the national mass media for headline fare. Houston s daily arts section would routinely feature a Jeff Millar movie review, with such product as Antz, Clay Pigeons, Practical Magic and Holy Man warranting lead status. In Miami, television was given unusual prominence as the arts section lead. One important local artistic medium was almost universally ignored by the 15 newspapers in the study radio. Only the two Chicago papers and the Philadelphia Inquirer ran more than an occasional article on the programming options available for what is a primary listening source for music of all types. The Chicago Tribune also ran a major feature on public radio s This American Life, a locally produced but nationally syndicated narrative-documentary show. Among the national media, the burgeoning field of video games whose revenues are now on a par with that of Hollywood movies was also all but invisi- NATIONAL ARTS JOURNALISM PROGRAM 23

9 ble. This study revealed a couple of prime opportunities. Freelancers could offer their local newspapers a regular radio column, and a national syndicator could launch a video game column for newspapers seeking to give their arts and culture coverage a younger demographic profile. Not Newsworthy In each artistic field there were a few breaking news stories during October There were obituaries: singing cowboy Gene Autry, former Hollywood child star Roddy McDowall, polka king Frank Yankovic. In the world of television, late night talk show host David Letterman s schizophrenic stalker, made famous by the tabloids, committed suicide, and the teen-oriented drama Felicity stirred a faux-scandal when a teenage screenwriter was exposed as a 32-year-old. In the world of letters, the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to the Portuguese writer José Saramago. The National Gallery in Washington, D.C. set an attendance record with its Vincent van Gogh exhibit. And there was a tempest off- Broadway in New York City over whether the anti-clerical play Corpus Christi crossed the line into blasphemy. It is a marker of how much arts and culture is a features as opposed to a news beat that so few of these news events received detailed coverage by any of the newspapers we studied. When the top ten most heavily covered individual stories, artistic events or productions were ranked for each newspaper, arts news rarely cracked the list. So much arts and culture coverage appears in weekend supplements, which are intentionally designed to have a longer shelf life than the daily news cycle, that the shortage of news is no surprise. The supplements ran features instead. While a run-of-the-mill movie, book, play, or musical act might receive a routine review, the very biggest arts and culture stories in these weekend supplements received extensive extra coverage profiles, trend pieces, interviews, backgrounders. This strong promotional role became print media s signature contribution to the publicity and marketing machine that tries to turn individual cultural productions into must-see events. It was rare, however, that any mass-entertainment nationally produced, heavily hyped movie or television show should be the beneficiary of such attention. By and large, these local newspapers resisted deploying this considerable apparatus frivolously. This did not mean that they were loath to engage in promotion. They just preferred to expend their energies on worthy causes. Civic Virtues In this context, worthy meant either civic virtue or high art. When a cultural institution whether a local museum or Oprah Winfrey happened to have made the effort to take high art and popularize it for the masses, newspapers were enthusiastic endorsers. Exhibit A during October 1998 was Winfrey s movie Beloved, based on Toni Morrison s prize-winning novel. There was no surprise that it was the single most heavily covered artistic production by the Chicago Sun-Times, since the second city is Winfrey s home. But the movie also topped the top ten at the Denver Post, the Miami Herald, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Providence Journal and the San Francisco Examiner and 24 REPORTING THE ARTS

10 was the single most heavily covered movie at five of the remaining nine newspapers. Painting and the visual arts usually fare poorly in terms of volume of arts coverage, but not when a local museum runs a blockbuster show: Caravaggio at the North Carolina Museum led the Charlotte Observer s coverage; Mary Cassatt at the Art Institute of Chicago received extensive coverage from the Tribune and the Sun-Times; the Native-American artist Tim Roybal was covered in depth by the Denver Post; and Richard Diebenkorn at San Francisco s Museum of Modern Art made a splash in both the Chronicle and the Examiner. In Chicago and Cleveland, two historic theaters the Oriental and the Allen were renovated and reopened and rewarded with detailed coverage in the Tribune and the Plain Dealer respectively. The $17 million expansion of the Berkeley Repertory was the number-one story in the Oakland Tribune while next door in Silicon Valley, the opening of the Tech Museum was a major story for all Bay Area publications. Such cultural institutions are not only significant to the renewal of urban areas, they also attract tourists. Similarly, in Denver and Chicago, annual film festivals made movie coverage less national and more local in scope. In San Francisco the annual jazz festival received detailed coverage from the Chronicle, the Examiner and the Oakland Tribune. Art for the Masses A major goal of this study was to discover whether, crudely put, major metropolitan newspapers were elitist or populist. In their approach to arts and culture did they focus on high art from a critical perspective? Or did they engage in publicity and promotion for the purveyors of mass entertainment? Our answer defies those categories. Mass entertainment was frequently grist for critical reviews. High-minded and civically virtuous high art was often rewarded with extensive free publicity. The marketing officers of major museums and artistic centers should therefore feel encouraged in their pursuit of blockbuster highart exhibitions. High art if it was produced, presented or marketed in a way that made it engage a mainstream audience attracted the most comprehensive and prominent coverage of all artistic categories. This is the most important finding of this study for presenters of arts and culture, whether they are in the commercial sphere such as Hollywood studios, record companies, publishing houses or television networks or not-forprofit such as museums, opera companies, symphony orchestras, theater companies or dance troupes. If they make art of high quality that is accessible to a wide audience, they will find newspaper editors and journalists predisposed to give them pride of place. Andrew Tyndall NATIONAL ARTS JOURNALISM PROGRAM 25