Should we be concerned? I mean, this is third article in three days.
Your classification feels right but I'm completely unqualified to add anything of note. A bit on the side, Due The Circumstances I'm going to spend big part of this autumn basking in the so called high culture. And I noticed something while picking things to attend, the operas, theaters and concert halls who put on the shows and spectacles are not that interested in shining some light on events itself. Every spectacle, opera or recital description published on their respectable websites were bland, Wikipedia like, times and dates, duration, actors, Opus this and that, a few biographical paragraphs.
I had this feeling that they assume that if you're going to see it you already know what you're doing.
OK, let's make a "social experiment", I'm going to go to my local newspaper's website and see if someone reviewed the opera to sell me on it.
right now for the book I'm deciphering handwritten letters and it's really tedious so I long for distractions lol. hence the productivity.
& yeah that's a great example. They probably aren't going to review the opera bc it's too "niche," and it's probably true such a review wouldn't be widely read. But that causes the audience for the opera to shrink… and so on.
Oh, I can somewhat sympathize. You see I write quite a lot of letters (just got notification that the last one got delivered) and sometimes I wonder how do people cope. And while I'm not terrible I'm nowhere as classy as old hands used to be. And after say 10 pages your hand gets tired and you get sloppy. I guess people who get my letters got used to it.
I hope it's cursive and not some cursed short-hand? Not that idiosyncratic cursive is much better.
Re: readership
Do you sometimes wonder if modern media have the reach we even assume they have? I sometimes see someone on media blitz and then learn he sold 1000 copies of a book. Recently we (me and my friend, it's his baby, I'm only helping) opened a fun thing in our city. We were in TV, radio, in local newspapers and even got a full episode on the most popular YT channel covering our city.
Can't say it moved the needle that much. Maybe we suck, but it's hard to image, had you told 20 yo me that we get this coverage I'd assume we're going to be visited by Pope next.
Yes it's cursive, thankfully. And mostly people write on typewriters. But every once in a while you get somebody who was just not going to type a letter.…
It's a good question and I sort of think the answer is… no. Certainly with books, lots of coverage doesn't seem to correlate to sales at all. And there are lots of examples of movie that become memes without actually being hits. Presumably, that's because to read a book or watch a movie, you have to take a step from exposure to doing something else. And with email marketing, the rule of thumb that I remember being told to aim for was a one percent return. So… you might have gotten a great return that wasn't a lot in absolute numbers.
But imho it kind of goes to the audience thing. The way mass media works right now is that you try to hit as wide a target as possible for the one percent that might engage with you. If I read a book and was super into it I might hand sell a few copies on here by writing about it. I know at least one person watched Eva because he was enjoying the posts. To the extent that I have any kind of strategy for how I do things here, it's that cultivating a certain kind of randomness means I'm less likely to have totally passive readers, because there is no typical Notebook post.
When I review somewhere else, I'd be kind of surprised if I led to as many people checking out the book, even if the audience is a hundred times bigger, because they're less engaged. I often read comments sections on things I write (unless I think they're going to be weird and personal) and usually what I see is that a comments section is where regular groups of people hang out, but they barely have any interest in the article. It's just kind of an excuse to have a thread.
I like your dissection of how cultural criticism covers a lot of types of writing, that are very different. I think partly the rise of cultural criticism as a category of writing (that obscures the distinctions you point out) reflects the death of local journalism. Local journalism used to be the way that people who wanted to write for a living could start making money. When you look at people in the late 20th c. who became critics, of movies or music (books were a bit different) they were journalists who had some relevant knowledge about movies or music, in addition to their experience writing about school board meetings.
At this point, a lot of people seem to get into writing through doing reviews - you can start making money or getting likes by reviewing video games, or movies, or TV shows, and a certain number of people who have some success with that might move on to interviews, or editing other people's reviews, or whatever, and actually earn money to live on. I can see why people on that career path would think of themselves as a cultural critic rather than a journalist. They are going to be looking for an editing job at a movie review website, not a salaried position doing the police blotter. But by the same token, the people who are writing about culture are less and less in need of editors and publishers, which means that this career path is dying out just as much as local journalism, but more slowly for now.
The more salient division of jobs in the long run would seem to be between specialists, people who speak the language of the performances they're discussing and write for people who understand that language, and generalists, people who can make forms of entertainment or features of the world comprehensible and interesting to an audience without any familiarity. I think there will be a steady stream of jeremiads by writers who are just good enough as generalists to realize that succeeding as a generalist is harder than succeeding as a specialist, and will pine for an age in which it seemed like generalists (back when they were known as journalists) were able to get paid despite their failure to specialize.
yeah, and I think… the death of local media, in the way it once existed, is a done thing. It's not something a person can really resurrect, because the audience is gone. If a decentralized and more local form of writing does eventually emerge and survive, it will probably look and feel different from old local newspapers. It's not fun to live in a period of transition like this one but mass media is always changing so there probably never was a period when it didn't feel like this.
Interesting--I stopped subscribing to my local paper partially because I felt like I finally had the years and the money to make use of a local culture section and I just wasn't getting anything useful. Still subscribe to the NYT as the ur-paper, of course.
Yeah a problem with local media imho is that as the audience shrinks, local papers become less useful. It's kind of like when you go into a bookstore that has had to stop stocking backlist titles. That store has made the moves it needs to make to stay afloat, but the result is a place where I'm less inclined to shop.
Should we be concerned? I mean, this is third article in three days.
Your classification feels right but I'm completely unqualified to add anything of note. A bit on the side, Due The Circumstances I'm going to spend big part of this autumn basking in the so called high culture. And I noticed something while picking things to attend, the operas, theaters and concert halls who put on the shows and spectacles are not that interested in shining some light on events itself. Every spectacle, opera or recital description published on their respectable websites were bland, Wikipedia like, times and dates, duration, actors, Opus this and that, a few biographical paragraphs.
I had this feeling that they assume that if you're going to see it you already know what you're doing.
OK, let's make a "social experiment", I'm going to go to my local newspaper's website and see if someone reviewed the opera to sell me on it.
Nope.
right now for the book I'm deciphering handwritten letters and it's really tedious so I long for distractions lol. hence the productivity.
& yeah that's a great example. They probably aren't going to review the opera bc it's too "niche," and it's probably true such a review wouldn't be widely read. But that causes the audience for the opera to shrink… and so on.
Oh, I can somewhat sympathize. You see I write quite a lot of letters (just got notification that the last one got delivered) and sometimes I wonder how do people cope. And while I'm not terrible I'm nowhere as classy as old hands used to be. And after say 10 pages your hand gets tired and you get sloppy. I guess people who get my letters got used to it.
I hope it's cursive and not some cursed short-hand? Not that idiosyncratic cursive is much better.
Re: readership
Do you sometimes wonder if modern media have the reach we even assume they have? I sometimes see someone on media blitz and then learn he sold 1000 copies of a book. Recently we (me and my friend, it's his baby, I'm only helping) opened a fun thing in our city. We were in TV, radio, in local newspapers and even got a full episode on the most popular YT channel covering our city.
Can't say it moved the needle that much. Maybe we suck, but it's hard to image, had you told 20 yo me that we get this coverage I'd assume we're going to be visited by Pope next.
Yes it's cursive, thankfully. And mostly people write on typewriters. But every once in a while you get somebody who was just not going to type a letter.…
It's a good question and I sort of think the answer is… no. Certainly with books, lots of coverage doesn't seem to correlate to sales at all. And there are lots of examples of movie that become memes without actually being hits. Presumably, that's because to read a book or watch a movie, you have to take a step from exposure to doing something else. And with email marketing, the rule of thumb that I remember being told to aim for was a one percent return. So… you might have gotten a great return that wasn't a lot in absolute numbers.
But imho it kind of goes to the audience thing. The way mass media works right now is that you try to hit as wide a target as possible for the one percent that might engage with you. If I read a book and was super into it I might hand sell a few copies on here by writing about it. I know at least one person watched Eva because he was enjoying the posts. To the extent that I have any kind of strategy for how I do things here, it's that cultivating a certain kind of randomness means I'm less likely to have totally passive readers, because there is no typical Notebook post.
When I review somewhere else, I'd be kind of surprised if I led to as many people checking out the book, even if the audience is a hundred times bigger, because they're less engaged. I often read comments sections on things I write (unless I think they're going to be weird and personal) and usually what I see is that a comments section is where regular groups of people hang out, but they barely have any interest in the article. It's just kind of an excuse to have a thread.
I like your dissection of how cultural criticism covers a lot of types of writing, that are very different. I think partly the rise of cultural criticism as a category of writing (that obscures the distinctions you point out) reflects the death of local journalism. Local journalism used to be the way that people who wanted to write for a living could start making money. When you look at people in the late 20th c. who became critics, of movies or music (books were a bit different) they were journalists who had some relevant knowledge about movies or music, in addition to their experience writing about school board meetings.
At this point, a lot of people seem to get into writing through doing reviews - you can start making money or getting likes by reviewing video games, or movies, or TV shows, and a certain number of people who have some success with that might move on to interviews, or editing other people's reviews, or whatever, and actually earn money to live on. I can see why people on that career path would think of themselves as a cultural critic rather than a journalist. They are going to be looking for an editing job at a movie review website, not a salaried position doing the police blotter. But by the same token, the people who are writing about culture are less and less in need of editors and publishers, which means that this career path is dying out just as much as local journalism, but more slowly for now.
The more salient division of jobs in the long run would seem to be between specialists, people who speak the language of the performances they're discussing and write for people who understand that language, and generalists, people who can make forms of entertainment or features of the world comprehensible and interesting to an audience without any familiarity. I think there will be a steady stream of jeremiads by writers who are just good enough as generalists to realize that succeeding as a generalist is harder than succeeding as a specialist, and will pine for an age in which it seemed like generalists (back when they were known as journalists) were able to get paid despite their failure to specialize.
yeah, and I think… the death of local media, in the way it once existed, is a done thing. It's not something a person can really resurrect, because the audience is gone. If a decentralized and more local form of writing does eventually emerge and survive, it will probably look and feel different from old local newspapers. It's not fun to live in a period of transition like this one but mass media is always changing so there probably never was a period when it didn't feel like this.
Interesting--I stopped subscribing to my local paper partially because I felt like I finally had the years and the money to make use of a local culture section and I just wasn't getting anything useful. Still subscribe to the NYT as the ur-paper, of course.
Yeah a problem with local media imho is that as the audience shrinks, local papers become less useful. It's kind of like when you go into a bookstore that has had to stop stocking backlist titles. That store has made the moves it needs to make to stay afloat, but the result is a place where I'm less inclined to shop.