British Theatre Guide Blog

Matt Boothman’s report Brickbats in Cyberspace makes interesting reading.  Although it deals specifically with the effect of theatre blogs on print media, with people like the Telegraph’s Charles Spencer fearing for the survival of the professional critic, it is actually just a part of the wider problem faced by newspapers: falling cirulation due to the increasing number of people who get their news from the Web and mobile phones as well as radio and TV.  With easy Web access via the latest generation of mobile phones, together with new developments such as RSS feeds, more and more people are forsaking the traditional print media with the inevitable consequence of falling circulations and reduction in advertising.

Newspapers are having to put more and more of their content online and offer additional services.  Quite a number of local and regional papers are equipping their reporters with digital video cameras to beef up their online content and at the same time reducing their staff and relying on freelances.  I was talking only this week to the chief photographer of a NE local paper who is now, in fact, the only staff photographer.  Gaps in coverage are now filled by former staffers who have taken redundancy and now work on an occasional freelance basis for the paper.

I asked about the scribes - those who do the actual writing of news stories - and he said they had not been affected yet: although they had been offered voluntary redundancy, no one had taken it up.  Can compulsory redundancy be far away?  I suspect not.

As far as theatre is concerned, many local papers rely on freelances to review.  That can be a good thing - I know of at least two local/regional papers whose freelance opera critics are experienced and extremely knowledgeable, far more so than anyone on the staff. 

But I think Charles Spencer was more concerned about the national papers and their critics.  It is possible, I suppose, to foresee a future in which theatre criticism in the national newspapers will go the way it has been for wome time in some sections of the local press - anyone who is willing to go to the theatre gets to review because there is no specialist critic, but I really can’t see that happening with the broadsheets at any rate - and probably not the tabloids either, I suspect. Their readers are hardly likely to accept Joe Bloggs instead of Spencer or Billington et al.

However one of his major concerns - and one, I have to admit, that I share - is the quality of the critical writing in the blogosphere.  National newspapers - and websites like the BTG - vet their critics carefully, both for their writing skills and their knowledge and understanding of the art form, and what they write is, in newspaper parlance, “subbed” - read and, if necessary corrected, by a sub-editor.  A blogger is simply someone who wants to write a review and has the online space in which to do so.  They could be major experts or totally ignorant, and their writing skills can range from excellent to atrocious.

Which is why, I think, the contribution to the debate made by the BTG’s London editor Philip Fisher is absolutely correct.  People will learn whom they can trust; they will recognise who knows what they are talking about and who writes well.  The others may continue to publish, but they won’t be read - or believed, if they are!

The Internet has changed so many aspects of our lives that we would be foolish to think it won’t have an impact on theatre criticism.  If we think back ten years or so to when Net access became so much easier and more common, we will remember the plethora of personal pages which made up so much of what was available online.  Where are they now?  Most have gone - or vanished from sight - and those which still exist have changed into something different because they fill a niche and offer content which is both of interest to visitors and is of a quality which attracts.  The blogosphere is the noughties’ equivalent of the personal pages of yore: most won’t be around in two or three years and those which are will be either recognised as being of real value or be just voices crying in a wilderness of no visitors.

Content, we are told by Internet experts, is king, and so it is.  But it has to be content which is accurate, reliable and of interest.  The same applies to blogs which offer theatre criticism. Some of them will survive and go on to become imnportant parts of the world of theatre: others will vanish.  There will always be a place for good, reliable, trustworthy and accurate content, whether in print or in digital form