Conversing on the Arts by Clicking a Mouse

[Diana McCarty]

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>Conversing on the Arts by Clicking a Mouse
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>July 9, 2003
>  By JOHN ROCKWELL
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>For those lamentably addicted, the Internet is creeping
>toward a total takeover of our lives. But maybe addictions
>can be ranked as more or less beneficent.
>
>Certainly the presence of a Web site called ArtsJournal.com
>has added something important to cultural discourse.
>
>What ArtsJournal offers is a daily summary, with links to
>the complete articles from print publications or Internet
>magazines, of what its editor and founder, Douglas
>McLennan, deems the most important high-arts articles in
>the worldwide English-language press.
>
>If you trust his judgment, which seems pretty solid, he has
>created what he innocently calls "the best arts section in
>the world."
>
>This may come as a shock to loyal loggers-on to the
>better-known ArtsandLettersDaily.com, which got started in
>mid-1998, a year before ArtsJournal. With some 2 million
>"page views" a month, Arts and Letters has five times the
>readership of ArtsJournal, although everyone concedes that
>such figures are slippery to measure.
>
>Mr. McLennan, 45, is a former music critic and arts
>reporter who lives in Seattle. While Arts and Letters Daily
>appeals to an intellectual and academic readership,
>ArtsJournal covers what newspapers cover: art thefts,
>orchestras going under, music downloading, theater
>companies building new buildings and the like. Mostly it is
>reportage, with only occasional reviews of major events.
>Mr. McLennan calls his site "a conversation about culture."
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>His audience, he says, consists of arts journalists, arts
>professionals (curators, music administrators, even actual
>artists) and educated people from all walks of life with an
>interest in the arts.
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>The two sites were created during the dot-com euphoria of
>the late 90's, and both survived in large part because
>their financial expectations were too modest for them to
>crash very far. Mr. McLennan resisted temptation and has
>managed to putter along as a kind of gonzo outsider.
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>"Two months after I started, I got a buy-out offer of $1
>million," he said in an interview in New York. "The woman
>on the other end of the phone said, `We can make you a
>millionaire by Christmas.' "
>
>Mr. McLennan was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, studied piano
>in Canada and the United States and spent a year in
>Manhattan as a fellow in the National Arts Journalism
>Program at Columbia University. As a journalist he has
>worked mostly in Seattle, for The Seattle Weekly and The
>Post-Intelligencer, but devotes himself now to ArtsJournal
>and the myriad spinoffs his teeming brain is always
>devising.
>
>Mr. McLennan confines the journal's links to the articles
>he highlights each day. But he has additional features,
>most designed to make a modicum of money, to keep the
>operation afloat and maybe even allow him to afford more
>than the minimal help he can now employ.
>
>There is a subscription. (You get the summaries with or
>without links in your daily e-mail.) There is syndication.
>There are articles by Mr. McLennan providing an overview of
>continuing issues, with links to related stories. There
>will soon be an ArtsJournal streaming audio sideline. Just
>this week there are ArtsJournal-sponsored blogs by leading
>figures in the arts. And Mr. McLennan himself consults for
>various publications, writes freelance articles and is
>working with Minnesota Public Radio on a possible arts-news
>project.
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>He also toys periodically with turning the site from its
>current for-profit status into a nonprofit organization,
>allied with a foundation or other institution. But so far
>Mr. McLennan, an incorrigible lone wolf, hasn't found a
>partnership to his liking.
>
>If there is a cloud on the horizon, it is the possibility
>that more and more publications will decide to sell their
>material, rather than give it away. The Wall Street
>Journal, for the most part, already does that, and hence
>does not really appear on either site.
>
>"It's not particularly in their interest to cut us off,"
>Mr. McLennan said. "I can be their biggest deliverer of
>traffic."
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>Mr. McLennan's main problem right now is figuring a way,
>economically and conceptually, to ease the burden of
>putting out the site onto others. Were he to fall seriously
>ill, that would be it. More imminently, he is planning a
>monthlong trip with his wife and daughter this fall to
>Africa.
>
>"One of the nice things about the site is that you can do
>it anywhere," he said. "But you can't do it from where I'll
>be in Africa. I'm hoping to be able to hire two or three
>people.
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>"But while you would think doing the site would be easy, if
>you're looking at 1,000 stories a day, you have to have a
>sense of context to tell you which are important. It isn't
>easy."
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>http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/09/arts/design/09JOUR.html?ex=1058770659&ei=1&en=c66a980fd71fe87d
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