Final Edition?
by Brad Erickson

In March, the Hearst Corporation sent shock waves across the country by announcing the Seattle Post-Intelligencer would cease to publish its daily paper, becoming an entirely online journal. Hearst had earlier threatened to shutter the San Francisco Chronicle as well, unless major concessions were wrung from the paper's unions. They were, and San Francisco's major daily continues--for now.

These headline-grabbing developments are only the latest changes in an industry that has been experiencing wrenching changes for some time. For years, we've watched papers grow thinner and thinner. The theatre community, along with the rest of the arts sector, has felt the impact of dwindling arts reporting. Fewer feature stories, curtailed critical coverage and the reduction of calendar listings have had a direct effect on ticket sales.

Several years ago, Theatre Bay Area helped spur a dialogue between the Chronicle's then Sunday Datebook editor Joe Brown and the theatre community. At the time, complaints from theatre administrators were rife. The paper's weekly arts section, "the Pink," said many, had abandoned its once extensive feature coverage of theatre and other regional arts in favor of movies, TV and popular music. Publicist Carla Befera offered statistics, culled from more than a decade of Pink-watching, to illustrate the precipitous decline.

Joe Brown attended a community meeting convened at a downtown San Francisco theatre and gamely presented the assembled theatre folk with the disembodied head of the "Little Man," the famous--or to some, infamous--icon used by the Chronicle to indicate critical ratings. Fluctuations in the Little Man's posture (working downward in enthusiasm from wild applause to satisfied clapping, to enigmatic attentiveness, to sleep, to premature departure) can mean jumps of tens of thousands of dollars in box office revenue for larger theatres. That such power could be wielded by an idiosyncratic cartoon continues to drive Bay Area theatre managers to distraction.

For many theatres though, what's worse than an unhappy Little Man is no Little Man at all, as Traveling Jewish Theatre experienced during its revival of The Last Yiddish Poet. The production was the first of theirs in many years not to receive coverage in the Chron. With no review and no feature, TJT had a difficult time attracting single-ticket buyers, and the show was forced to close early.

Troubles at the Chronicle are mirrored in other major Bay Area papers. The San Jose Mercury News has told South Bay theatres they might be able to snag a feature for an upcoming show or a review, but not both. Take your pick. The ANG papers of the East Bay laid off their theatre critic more than a year ago. The weekly alternative papers--San Francisco Bay Guardian, SF Weekly, East Bay Express, Metro--have substantially reduced the number of their reviews, their listings or both.

It's all been driven by economics, of course. Internet media have siphoned away advertisement revenues from printed periodicals, and the current economic crisis has only made hard-to-get ad dollars even scarcer. Declining ad revenue forces lay-offs in editorial staffs, the further shrinking of content, followed by drops in subscriptions and plummeting circulation. Fewer readers attract fewer advertisers who pay the bills. And the cycle continues spiraling downward, seemingly without remedy.

All of this would be sad enough for those of us who love our news delivered in newsprint. But many theatres are seeing their own fortunes linked to those of the papers that cover--or, rather, don't cover--them. And here is where real trouble for our sector lies.

Over many decades, we have conflated arts journalism with arts marketing. We have outsourced a good deal of our audience development efforts to the critics and arts reporters of the print media. Yes, we have placed advertisements--pricey ones--in these papers as well, but as the complaints of the theatre managers attest, the real bang, in terms of drawing audiences, has come from editorial content.

Now, even as newspapers try to find a new and sustainable business model, the theatre community must untangle our marketing efforts from arts journalism and critical assessment.

Informing the public about the work and engaging the community in a continuing conversation actually increases the perceived power of the art itself. Researcher Alan Brown, in his groundbreaking studies on the intrinsic impact of the arts, has shown that the more informed audience members are before attending a show, the greater their impression of the performance. If audiences can stay connected with the art, by learning more and entering into ongoing dialogue, the deeper will be the show's impact. And, the greater the impact of the art, the more likely audience members are to return for more.

In this digital era, the options for informing and engaging audiences are abundant--perhaps too abundant. No clear successor to the daily paper has risen from the pack of URLs. Maybe no mega-internet-portal ever will. Theatres will need to stay nimble and become adept with delivering information in myriad formats.

For perennially under-staffed nonprofits, it won't be easy. But new technologies enabling multi-party discourse offer new opportunities to spark fresh excitement--excitement that can result in viral information sharing, in new voices of critical commentary, and, yes, more butts in seats.