In August last year the Sydney Morning Herald launched a blog on the theatre industry known as The Green Room.
It was a fascinating experiment that saw vigorous debate among theatre goers and theatre practitioners, with many people going head-to-head over passionate and complex issues.
Hosted by Siobhan Doran, a sometime Herald journalist and theatre writer for Sydney Stage Online, the blog dragged people through a host of interesting and controversial issues. From a discussion over whether Cate Blanchett should be the Artistic Director of the STC to your most memorable theatre experiences.
The debates were often visceral and there was a lot of blood-letting. For the first time in the history of Sydney theatre, people felt comfortable to say what they thought in open and honest ways and get passionate about the art form.
But not any more it seems.
First Siobhan Doran left the Herald and then the blog was in a hiatus throughout all of January. This was at the exact time when the Sydney Festival was in full flight, hosting their own blog which was attracting nearly 1200 visitors per day.
The Sydney Morning Herald could have expanded the good work it had fostered last year and established themselves as a hub for arts commentary and discussion.
Instead, The Green Room sat dormant until January 29 when Siobhan left a message announcing her departure. On February 1, Chris Dobney smh.com.au Arts & Entertainment editor announced his new role 'keeping the green room door open'.
Unfortunately it was open just a crack. It is no longer listed on the Herald blog central database and hasn't been updated for nearly three weeks.
The Herald's lethargic approach to the arts is hot on the heels of a host of industry complaints about their online arts coverage where they mix in promotional articles and reviews under the one heading of 'Arts Reviews'.
They recently changed the heading to Arts Previews and Reviews but how is a member of the general public meant to properly differentiate between arts criticism and journalism? Not to mention how misleading and annoying these blurred lines are.
Meanwhile, news outlets throughout the world are establishing fascinating multimedia experiments on arts journalism that are responding to the changing face of its readership. If the Herald doesn't do this, the web in Sydney will be filled and dictated to by the arts bodies with their own blogs and myspaces and the independent voice and influence of the Herald could dissappear.
Postscript 1 March 2007: The Herald today confirmed that it has no intention of re-instating the arts blog.
Tuesday, 20 February 2007
SMH forgoes the arts
Posted by Nicholas Pickard at 3:29 pm
Labels: Arts Journalism, Blogs, General Comment, Media
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6 comments:
Hi Nick,
Just discovered your blog last week via Alison Croggon's Theatre Notes. Very glad to have finally found a Sydney based site. Having just read your blog for today and agreeing with the shameless distain with which the SMH treats the arts I wanted to say thanks for staging this blog and that I look forward to it having a long and vibrant life.
Cheers
Christopher T
Nick - you have your finger on the pulse here, my friend. I have written to SMH online myself about both of these issues, especially the previews/reviews fiasco. I tend not to receive a reply - which kind of says it all about how seriously the arts is (not) taken by SMH. But that's fair enough, they have to concentrate on the big issues like how many sex partners celebrity junkie Anna-Nicole Smith had.
But, as I suggested to them, they should either maintain the Green Room blog or definitively close the door. This one post every 2 months business is such a joke I think I would die of shame if it was my responsibility. With any luck our mates at SMH will join the chat you started.
Hello Nicholas, and congratulations on your blog.
Being a smh.com.au junkie, I too, made daily visits to The Green Room. It was obvious that the blog was one of the less 'popular' (and certainly under-utilised) blog in the stable, and I would suggest that it was this fact that saw it discarded. There were only ever a handful of comments, compared to the hundreds of daily comments on some of the other "Lifestyle" blogs.
I wonder if The Herald's lethargy be a reflection of just how lethargic Sydney's arts community has become?
Australian media (and a large percentage of the Arts community) has a long-held view that there is no money in the Arts. Independent companies can rarely, if ever, afford to advertise in anything other than the Live Theatre Directory (the sum of which is equal to most independent company's production budget!), so of course the papers will not give quite as much space to something that isn't paying its way - known in the trade as "the ad ratio".
Creating the Preview and Reviews section of the site is just sheer laziness on their part - an insipid quality that permeates Australian media generally it would seem at the moment.
Congratulations on bringing a new insight to our view of the arts in Sydney.
Long may you reign.
Thanks Geoffrey.
Fair point about it not being as popular as some of the lifestyle blogs, but compare it to the comment tally of other 'Entertainment Blogs'.
Box Office (Film) run by Garry Maddox averages the same as the Green Room; Club Metro (Music) run by Alex Tibbits & Bernard Zuel attracts anything between 12 to 100 or so, but avergaes about 50.Noise Pollution (Rock) run by critic Clem Bastow attracts mostly in the teens. Undercover (Books) run by Susan Wyndham gets mainly no response but occasionally a few and rarely over 50.
So maybe you are right. But maybe it's a lethargy of the entire entertainment community.
However, all these other blogs are still running and exist on the SMH Blog Central page. Why?
I can't speak for everyone, but I can't remember the time I even read a Maddox review. I don't care what he thinks. It appears I may be in good company.
Compared to "Theatre", "Film" and "Music" represent a significant income stream for the 'ink n paper' Herald and I imagine a mention on the blog would all be considered part of 'the package'.
I have to admit I found "The Green Room" a bit lame. Safe. It lacked personality and points of engagement and seemed, like many journalists in this town, to bow low and reverentially at the sacred shrine of the STC.
What Fairfax will need to come to terms with, and before too long, is the same aspect of online publishing which has altogether transformed our favourite guardian.co.uk. And I believe that is this: while there has been a positively overwhelming explosion of weblogs around the world, the good ones - like words in ink on paper - still rely on something other than spurious claims, generalisations and obtuse observation. The power of the written word.
Call me old-fashioned, but The Sydney Morning Herald, in both its guises, is presently falling woefully short of the mark on every count. It is quite possible that the lethargy we criticise in the Arts pages may be a symptom of a far greater infliction. That The Herald is stuck in a rut and is being left behind as its readers, us, find new, insightful and authorative information from other sources.
Hi Nicholas,
We were all disappointed at smh.com.au that Siobhan Doran decided to leave the blog but if you read it you will see that, first of all it was her decision, and, secondly, she did not confirm that decision to us until the Sydney Festival was over.
Both Siobhan's departure and its timing were disappointing to us.
I have now taken over the blog. And I would be the first to agree that I could post more often than I find time to. But there have been three blogs since 1 Feb.
The first was on the Sydney Festival, the second on the Mardi Gras Festival and the third, which went live today, is on the state of new Australian theatre and its level of support within Sydney's mainstage theatre companies.
You can read all three blogs at the url below and make your own decision whether Fairfax is doing its job properly as regards our theatre coverage.
http://www.smh.com.au/greenroom
In response to your comments about why arts previews and reviews are 'mixed in'. We take seriously our task of providing people updated information as to what's on and what's coming up. Often we will run a preview, together with other details about the show, maps etc. When a review comes in, the preview is replaced. Our policy is to distinguish at the story level what is a review and what is a preview. If a piece is a review, the word 'reviewer, is appended to the byline, right at the top of the page immediately below the name of the show.
I hope this helps address some of the issues you've raised and I'm happy to receive any suggestions you might have as to how we might improve further.
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