330 stories by "Douglas McLennan"
.It’s been a while since we redesigned ArtsJournal. AJ is now 14 years old, and this will be the fifth redesign. And a new content platform as well, as the site moves to WordPress. Thi…
# The two terms sometimes get mixed up. They’re not interchangeable. For the most part, the big cultural debates of our time take place without participation of our artists and arts le…
That’s “Massive Open Online Course” and they’re everywhere right now. Some of the most prestigious universities are creating courses online and attracting tens of tho…
How does somebody who wants to write about the arts get an audience? In the old days you found a small local publication to write for while you learned your craft, and graduated to bigger pu…
Mitt Romney said last week he’ll kick funding for the arts and public broadcasting to the curb if he gets to be president. # “We’re not going to kill Big Bird, but Big Bird…
If I built the best-ever VCR, would you rush out to buy it? Of course not. Even though my VCR might be the most excellent VCR, no one cares about VCRs anymore. # Being excellent at something…
TV used to be an appointment medium. It’s Thursday night at 8 and you’re in front of the set watching or else you missed your favorite show. Then VCR’s, DVD’s and DVR…
I pay my cable provider to supply me with TV. # Since I don’t want to watch on my cable provider’s schedule I pay for Tivo. Since my cable provider doesn’t have all the mov…
Build something in the physical world and the minute it’s used it starts to decay – scuffs, dents, chips. Drive a car off the new car lot and it immediately loses ten percent of …
Literacy has traditionally been described as the ability to read for knowledge, write coherently and think critically about printed material. - Wikipedia # Literacy at its most basic is the …
Seems important to note the passing of music criticism as a legitimate job in Canada. John Terauds, for six years staff classical music critic of the Toronto Star, was reassigned this week t…
If you’re a follower of ArtsJournal blogs, you’ll notice that this blog doesn’t look the same as any of the others. That’s because I’m in the midst of redesigni…
Professional sports has more money than God, and they spend more to attract and entertain fans than anyone else. So how does the NFL sell itself? Not by touting the quality of its games. The…
Professional sports has more money than God, and they spend more to attract and entertain fans than anyone else. So how does the NFL sell itself? Not by touting the quality of its games. The…
Is the future of live classical music recitals to turn them into a multimedia experience that is somehow more "familiar" to a generation raised on video screens. Here's a report from Lang La…
Is the future of live classical music recitals to turn them into a multimedia experience that is somehow more “familiar” to a generation raised on video screens. Here’s a r…
How do you make a living as an artist? In the old mass-culture model you needed a distribution and marketing engine that could fire up on your behalf to reach as many people as possible. Sel…
How do you make a living as an artist? In the old mass-culture model you needed a distribution and marketing engine that could fire up on your behalf to reach as many people as possible. Sel…
The NYT's Charles Isherwood writes about what he calls the "odd-man-out" syndrome: This can roughly be described as the experience of attending an event at which much of the audience appears…
Nick Carr has a great post about the course of technology development. Progress doesn't always go the way we think it ought to (even if we're right).Progress may, for a time, intersect with …
Thanks to those who volunteered to host a webstream of the Arts Journalism Summit at USC today. Streaming begins at 9AM pdt. See you in a few hours. (Looking for more information about the S…
UPDATE: The first blogs are beginning to sign up to stream: www.createquity.com, www.artsDC.com, http://gatheringnote www.seattledances, www.salvadorcastillo.wordpress.com. One blogger has a…
This week I gave a talk in San Francisco and I mentioned that Sunday - today - ArtsJournal is ten years old. In web terms, that makes us pretty old. Except, in the room were the editors of a…
I've been on a lot of airplanes recently. Flying isn't much fun, but I like being in other places. So in the process of travel I tend to see those around me as either obstacles to my getting…
Ken Brecher tells this story about Alexander Graham Bell. The inventor of the telephone apparently spent the last part of his life railing against the way people were using his invention. Wh…
