Arts Journalism Longa, Space Shorta

"When I hear the word 'culture,'" Hermann Goering notoriously declared, "I reach for my gun." Nowadays, a history-challenged Jeopardy contestant facing that statement ("Obnoxious Comments For $500") might guess: "What did a leading cutback specialist say in the age of corporate newspapers?"

Or haven't you noticed the recession in arts coverage? The newsletter of the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University reports strong evidence over the past year: a 10-percent cut in The New York Times's Arts and Leisure section, severe cutbacks in the arts sections of major Knight Ridder papers such as The Miami Herald, the San Jose Mercury-News, and The Philadelphia Inquirer, the loss of staff reviewers of visual arts, theater, and dance at the Portland Oregonian, and similar bloodletting in newsholes and budgets elsewhere.

In such sorry times, we might as well keep Goering's reflex test. If someone calls you an "arts journalist," what do you reach for, besides just hanging on to your job?

Is it the status of grand communicator of one art or another to masses slightly more benighted than brilliant old you, the longtime "beat" reporter or critic? Are you implicitly a booster of local arts organizations, the much-needed attender-in-chief, whose presence as critic or reporter keeps arts groups alive on the Berkeleyian principle, to be is to be perceived? Or are you the marginally more cultured equivalent of the straight-news reporter -- fiercely independent, involved in a different enterprise than the artists you cover -- an iconoclastic observer who works more for readers than anyone else, but ultimately serves a personal vision of articulable truth?

About 90 officially stamped arts journalists -- all past or present fellows of the NAJP -- converged last month on San Francisco's ritzy Mark Hopkins Intercontinental Hotel (where Hitchcock filmed Vertigo, natch) for a reunion. Complete with panels, swank dinners at tony locales, gossip, job networking, and breakout discussion groups on issues like "the Culture Squeeze" and the business's changing balance between staff and freelance arts writers, it also enabled some modest toe-sticking by geographical outsiders into the Bay Area arts scene. One predictable lure naturally attracted this group: free tickets.

Joined by an array of invited journalistic powers with decision-making sway over arts coverage -- among them Kevin Klose, CEO of National Public Radio, and John Pancake, arts editor of The Washington Post -- the gathering certainly lived up to the NAJP's advance billing as "the largest ever assembly of arts journalists of various stripes," though whether the candlepower equaled Mr. Jefferson dining alone must be left to the historians and front-desk staff.

But if those opening philosophical issues about the trade were never directly addressed, they occasionally emerged by inference from trench-level grumbling about rampant cutbacks, cultural illiteracy among top corporate managers, and the disproportionate attention paid by supposedly "national" New York-based media organizations to their backyard institutions. The lack of focus probably indicated the still-inchoate understanding of arts journalism as a distinct professional activity, one that NAJP director Michael Janeway has referred to as "a neglected field."

No course on "arts journalism," however, figures as a requirement in the program, just as most journalism schools treat the field as a marginal concern, sometimes tossing their students the option of a cultural-journalism elective along the degree path. So "arts journalists" in the working world, including staffers who began as straight-news types, are expected (like journalism students generally) to extrapolate their ethics and rules from staples like ambulance chasing and community-meeting reportage to the scarcely related activities of reviewing a Garrison Keillor opera, or deciding whether representational portraiture lives again, or judging that a veteran actress doesn't convince in the role of Ibsen's Nora. Yet whether journalism's encounter with art should resemble its handling of government, or crime, ought to be a Page One concern for those who practice, encourage, and shepherd arts journalism.

Marian Godfrey, the Pew Cultural Program director who rightly won applause for conceiving the NAJP, explained in welcoming remarks to the group that the program's original impetus grew out of her own background as an arts administrator -- a desire to help journalists understand better the arts and institutions they cover. Though Godfrey in no way suggested that arts journalists should be mere communicators of the arts rather than critics, that glimpse into NAJP's bureaucratic etiology made clear that the arts themselves were conceived as key beneficiaries of NAJP, with better arts journalism a means to the goal.

Would a National Political Journalism Program consider the enhancement of government interests a goal? A farsighted answer would be Yes. But a more reflex reaction from the news-media community would probably be No, betokening the adversarial atmosphere that informs political journalism. Several of the weekend's panels illustrated the strains that exist between arts journalists seen as colleagues of artists in their aims -- an attitude that can translate into a palsy-walsy ethos between arts journalists and their administrative contacts -- and arts journalism as a critical genre with its own needs and imperatives.

At the Saturday symposium on "The Future of Arts Journalism," held at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, a session titled "Views From the Other Side" featured San Francisco arts leaders such as Carey Perloff, artistic director of American Conservatory Theater, and Brenda Way, artistic director of the dance group ODC. They stressed the need for arts writers to stoke a cultural "conversation" in their cities or nationally about the art before them. They also forcefully urged journalists to resist the growing bent of newspapers to see arts coverage as a consumer service -- heavy on the "If You Go" listings, light on savvy reflection and commentary. Given the symposium's locale, several speakers targeted as an example of dumbed-down consumerish simplification the San Francisco Chronicle's "Little Man" a figure drawing accompanying reviews (actually a longstanding device) whose changing demeanor (e.g., snoring, applauding) provides an instant, short-form visual version of stars or thumbs up and down.

In that respect, Perloff, Way, and company jibed better with many of their listeners than some upper editors, who often disdain the notion of arts journalism as liberal education and prefer the consumer model.

At a later session titled "Views From the Top," several executives with authority over arts coverage, yet mainly from straight news backgrounds, laid out visions not necessarily supported by arts journalists working under them. Perhaps most provocative was James Warren, the new deputy managing editor for features at the Chicago Tribune. Having come from powerful mainstream managerial jobs, such as running his paper's Washington bureau, Warren calculatedly positioned himself as a voyager in a strange new land, questioning assumptions right and left.

Why, he wondered, were so many people in his features department on lists for free theater tickets even though they don't cover theater? Why did features people accept the tradition of boring hotel-room interviews imposed on them by movie studios, who trot out stars to advance a picture by setting them up in a suite, then running a score of movie journalists through it? Warren announced that he'd implemented a general ban on such interviews, encouraging reporters and editors to drag a visiting actor or author to, say, Comiskey Park, to at least get a fresh view on the park's exploding scoreboard.

To some, Warren's feisty interventionism amounted to long-overdue rejection of clichéd coverage. To others, it smacked of an illegitimate shift on the journalist's part from reporter to impresario, producing or staging an event at some possible cost to discussion of the art involved. (Does one want John Updike expounding on his new novel, or an exploding scoreboard?) But such challenging moments pushed the assembled journalists toward what seemed rare at a conclave run by an academic center for arts journalism: searching discussion not just of jobs and trends, but of core intellectual issues behind the activity they all practice.

Packing to leave the luxury of the Mark Hopkins, one critic worried about downsizing joked that he'd considered printing up T-shirts -- "I Survived the Arts-Coverage Recession" -- then decided journalistic integrity made that prediction premature. In such an atmosphere, philosophical approaches to the genre easily fall by the wayside. And imposing that obligation on NAJP might be unfair, since its contribution to highlighting the field certainly exceeds any previous academic effort, including statistical studies of coverage patterns, sociological investigations of how writers like architecture critics function in their communities, and timely conferences.

But until arts journalists and their supporters examine the intellectual issues of their trade as seriously as investigative reporters probe their own dilemmas over protecting sources or going undercover -- marching onto op-ed pages as controversies break, demanding the same attention as American media dopily devote to sports -- they'll continue to be enablers of their own marginalization.

Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle and literary critic of The Philadelphia Inquirer, was an NAJP Senior Fellow in 1998.