Not long ago I was asked if music critics have a code of conduct. They don’t, as far as I know, but there are strict rules about conflicts of interest. If a critic appears to have some connection to a group he or she reviews, then those reviews aren’t legitimate. And note the word “appears.” As all critics know, the appearance of conflict of interest is what matters most. A critic might be objective, but if there appears to be some reason to think otherwise — if, let’s say, a critic has been paid to do something by the group being reviewed, or, in an extreme case, serves on its board — then the reviews shouldn’t be written.
Bear this in mind as we look at an explosion that happened in Cleveland. The Cleveland Plain Dealer had a classical-music critic, Donald Rosenberg, who served at the paper for 16 years. He’s admired by colleagues at other publications, and respected by Cleveland musicians. But he ran into a problem. In 2003, a new music director, Franz Welser-Möst, came to the Cleveland Orchestra, and for the most part Mr. Rosenberg didn’t like the way Mr. Welser-Möst conducts.
So Mr. Rosenberg and the orchestra were locked in an uncomfortable dance. Mr. Rosenberg of course wrote negative reviews (though not always; sometimes he liked what he heard). The orchestra had to put up with them. For six years this went on. And then, on Sept. 18, the Plain Dealer’s editor, Susan Goldberg, told Mr. Rosenberg that he was no longer the paper’s classical critic. He was now just an arts reporter, and while he still could write music reviews, the orchestra was off-limits. A new classical critic, Zachary Lewis, had been appointed, and he’d write the orchestra reviews.
An uproar followed. The Baltimore Sun’s classical-music critic, Tim Smith, broke the news on his blog, and protests broke out. Other critics were scandalized. The heat got so great that the New York Times took note of it, in a long story that ran Thursday on the front page of its Arts section. A storm of comments appeared on Mr. Smith’s blog, many coming from Cleveland, some even from members of the Cleveland Orchestra, who (without necessarily taking sides on their music director) supported Mr. Rosenberg’s right to say whatever he liked.
And here we come to a conflict of interest, or at least the appearance of one. The Plain Dealer’s publisher, Terrance Egger, serves on the orchestra’s board. So did his predecessor, Alex Machaskee. Which has led people to ask — on Tim Smith’s blog and elsewhere — if the paper really can cover the orchestra objectively.
Ms. Goldberg, the Plain Dealer’s editor, said she won’t comment — properly, perhaps — on what she calls an “internal personnel matter.” And the orchestra denies all involvement. Its executive director, Gary Hanson, and the chairman of its board, Richard Bogomolny, both posted comments on Tim Smith’s blog. “I have never met with [the newspaper's editors] to protest Donald Rosenberg’s opinions,” Mr. Hanson wrote. “To those who practice the fine art of ‘ready, fire, aim,’” wrote Mr. Bogomolny, “it might be useful for you to contact us before making accusations. For the record: No one from the management and board leadership of the Cleveland Orchestra has ever asked the Plain Dealer management to remove Don Rosenberg as critic of The Cleveland Orchestra.”
Both men said they admired Mr. Rosenberg, whether or not they agreed with his views. But wait! These dignitaries are commenting on a blog. Mr. Hanson also posted a comment — the same one — on a blog written by Steve Smith (no relation to Tim Smith), who writes classical-music reviews for the New York Times. Why do they seem so defensive?
The appearance of a conflict of interest, it seems, really does create problems. But before I go on, I should declare my own relationships. I’m friendly with Mr. Rosenberg, Mr. Hanson and Mr. Welser-Möst. I like and admire them. And I’ve interviewed Mr. Bogomolny, as well as Alex Machaskee, the Plain Dealer’s former publisher, and liked and admired them, too. Plus, I’ve been hired to work on projects with the Cleveland Orchestra. So it’s with sadness that I write what follows.
I think that the Plain Dealer and, above all, the orchestra are in a rocky position. Maybe all this will blow over. Maybe Mr. Lewis, as he reviews the orchestra, will be seen as objective, and no one will think that his paper demanded favorable reviews. His first piece, which ran Thursday, was a profile of Mr. Welser-Möst, which raised eyebrows from some observers. But the profile seemed balanced, and it acknowledged — as certainly it should have — that Mr. Welser-Möst has gotten negative reviews from critics who aren’t Mr. Rosenberg, among them Anthony Tommasini, chief classical critic of the New York Times.
But remember the rule — it’s the appearance of conflict of interest that counts. The Plain Dealer’s publisher, once again, sits on the orchestra’s board.
As for the orchestra, how can anyone be absolutely sure that it didn’t play some role in what happened? The mere fact that Mr. Hanson and Mr. Bogomolny felt that they had to deny this (on blogs!) shows that they’re on the defensive. What happens if their denials aren’t believed? Which, to judge from comments on Tim Smith’s blog, is exactly what seems to be happening.
And what kind of newspaper coverage will the Cleveland Orchestra now get? In Cleveland, the coverage now might look tainted. If Mr. Lewis writes friendly reviews, he might have been told to write them. If he writes unfavorably, he might be bending that way to prove that he’s independent. How can anyone know?
Nationally, things might look even worse. This whole affair highlights something the orchestra surely doesn’t want widely publicized — that Mr. Welser-Möst has detractors. Who now won’t know that? And what will critics write? The orchestra tours every year. Won’t critics listen with even more critical ears? They’re primed, now, to listen for trouble. And, if only unconsciously, they might want to support Mr. Rosenberg.
What should the orchestra do? It needs, in my view, to restore its integrity, or rather the perception of it, which has been damaged, whatever the reality might be. Mr. Hanson and Mr. Bogomolny, joined, ideally, by Mr. Welser-Möst (hard as this could be for him), might consider publicly asking the paper to reinstate Mr. Rosenberg.
And they might ask Mr. Eggers, the Plain Dealer’s publisher, to resign from their board. In his defense, I might note that serving on important community boards is natural for someone in his position. He’s also on the board of the Cleveland Clinic, a world-famous hospital. And it’s not unknown for newspaper publishers to serve on arts boards. To cite just one example: Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the former publisher of the New York Times (and father of the present one), was board chairman of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which of course the Times covers.
Was that, in practice, a bad thing? Maybe not. But every veteran critic knows cases where, in similar situations, executives with arts connections have meddled, or tried to, with newspaper arts coverage. And — to state the principle one last time — the appearance is troubling. Top executives of newspapers appear to engage in conflicts of interest they’d forbid their critics to have.
Should they be doing this?
Mr. Sandow is a composer, critic and consultant who writes about classical music for the Journal.
A week ago, a widely respected classical-music critic was forced by his newspaper to stop covering the city orchestra that he had been writing about for decades.
You may or may not have heard of him – his name is Donald Rosenberg. But you have very likely heard of the ensemble he covered for so long. It’s the Cleveland Orchestra.
Though his employers at The Plain Dealer simply announced his reassignment in the Sunday paper of Sept. 21 without explanation and though orchestra executives deny interfering, it’s an open secret in the Cleveland area and in the classical-music world that Rosenberg was demoted to reporter because the orchestra management was unhappy with his critical assessments of music director Franz Welser-Most’s conducting - and that the newspaper was unhappy because the orchestra was unhappy.
Plain Dealer Publisher Terry Egger is a member of the orchestra’s board. The rest of that board includes leaders of major businesses and organizations in the paper’s circulation area. Whether these facts had any direct bearing on Rosenberg’s demotion or not, the scent of conflicting interests has added suspicion to outrage among the critic’s supporters.
The situation has been getting a great deal of attention, with other critics weighing in on their blogs, and other newspapers – including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal – writing stories. Much of the coverage has focused on the beside-the-point questions of whether Rosenberg’s frequent dissatisfaction with Welser-Most’s work was justified or not and whether his opinions were shared by other critics or not.
Other commentators have hit a little closer to the bullseye by remarking that it’s the fundamental, professional duty of a critic to report honestly what he has seen, heard and experienced during an artistic event, so long as his evaluation addresses the artist’s work and methods rather than the artist personally, and so long as he offers informed reasons for his conclusions. They’ve noted, in other words, that a good critic’s job is not just to shut up if he can’t say something nice.
The proper nature of criticism is something that critics, artists, editors and audiences have debated for centuries. And it’s an important issue. But it’s only a small part of the much broader and more troubling question that Rosenberg’s ousting raises: How many uncomfortable facts and ideas are we willing to let authority stifle in exchange for a controlled and safe-seeming society?
Music criticism may not seem like much of a fight to pick in the struggle for freedom of expression. But it’s representative of a vital right that we’re in danger of losing through our own acquiescence.
Look what’s been happening: Americans’ fear of violence, poverty and persecution has steadily grown over the last decade. We’ve allowed our government ever-greater control over our individual privacy in hopes of protecting ourselves from terrorists. We’ve become so fearful of losing our health-care benefits, pensions, jobs, businesses and homes - our way of life – that we’ve let whole industries and their government cronies rape our nation financially in the deluded hope that it would somehow benefit us, too. We’ve allowed a culture of religious vigilantism to sway our secular leaders, bend our laws and suppress our speech. And even when we see the evil all this has produced, we’re afraid to protest. Conformity rules.
Instead of helping us resist our fear, the press has allowed itself to be squelched, too. All over the U.S., news outlets have been practically genuflecting before the political power of religion ever since George W. Bush won his second term as president on a wave of rural, conservative, Christian votes. As the economy has worsened and the newspaper industry has begun its own particular Titanic slide into oblivion because it didn’t notice the iceberg of the Internet looming, dailies everywhere have frantically tried to woo back advertisers and readers with content so focus-grouped, so imitative, bland and seductively reassuring that, in time, readers have come to expect to have their tastes and biases stroked - and papers have started to forget that their real mission is to inform the public and not to curry favor with powerful businesses, institutions and consumer blocs.
When someone like Rosenberg has his voice silenced, it means that the press – like the rest of the nation – has caved in to a power it should have defied, colluding with it to crush and control ideas out of fear of financial or social punishment.
But without the free exchange of ideas, creativity of any kind – including the work of major newspapers and famous, influential orchestras -cannot thrive. And without creativity, we’ll be stuck as we are, with no hope of improvement, breathing the same stale, depleted air through failing lungs, like the occupants of a tiny room surrounded by thick stone, who can’t tell whether they’re protected from outside harm by an impregnable fortress or trapped and dying in a viewless, doorless prison.
Donald Rosenberg has been a colleague and close friend of mine for many years. As a longtime critic of theater and other art forms, I share many of the same convictions and principles with which he informs his work. I was his editor for four years at The Plain Dealer. And I also sang for a decade with the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus.
I note this, not just in the interest of full disclosure, but to illustrate the point that no matter what organizations we belong to or believe in, we must not allow them to hurt us and themselves by quelling ideas, facts and informed opinion. All human enterprises are creative; none can prosper if they are fueled by fear.
Thought for the weekend from a brain too exhausted to function rationally and therefore susceptible to hallucinatory moments of clarity: The best preparation for becoming an entrepreneur is not business school, not practical experience, not … Life.
It’s improv. A day in business, a night of networking ….
Yes, I know there don’t seem to be many of these, but I can’t believe that I’m some kind of entrepreneurial head case. I bet there’s a whole lot of suffering and angst going on in the start-up community all the time.
It’s just that I’m probably one of the few talking about it. Business people in general don’t seem to like to let on what a tough time they’re having. Stiff upper lip, go-get-em attitude and all that. Very northern European. But I talk about it because I think it’s important for people – especially fellow entrepreneurs - to realize that starting a business or any creative project can be just plain hard and depleting. That it’s normal to feel crushed a lot. That they’re not alone.
We have to learn to cope with all the bad days.
AND we have to learn to enjoy the heck out of the great ones, when they come along. It’s only fair. We keep having to make lemonade all the time, so when life gives us pure dark Belgian chocolate, we deserve to revel in it.
I felt like I was handed two boxes of bonbons yesterday because I got several big free-lance assignments (we entrepreneurs have to eat while building the biz ….) and especially because I signed up two terrific new bloggers for the Geniocity.com site. I’ll reveal more about them in the next week or so.
It was fabulous.
So for a few hours – maybe a whole 24 (!) – I’m going to bask in the sense of relief and elation suffusing my sore psyche and let a few of my nerve endings romp therapeutically in the metaphorical Godivas and use a generous number of extremely large words just because I want to.
Highly creative idea person needed to think up new product(s)/service(s), plus entire workable enterprise to make, sell and deliver them. Substance abuse discouraged. Must have superlative conceptualization and follow-through skills, including vivid imagination, hard common sense, monkish devotion to research and writing, cocktail-party personality, relentless organization, eel-like flexibility, dead nerves, bubbling passion, endless patience, staunch principles, bewitching persuasiveness, low expectations and a bent for practical math.
Own kneepads essential.
Ability to sit, drive, meet, talk on the phone or mouse-click for 12 hours straight an absolute requirement, no exceptions. Fluency in digital technese, adspeak, boilerplate and bankish encouraged. Large trust fund a plus.
Prefer previous experience in these areas: fund-raising, file-clerking, IT, the armed services, massotherapy, bookkeeping, storytelling, motivational psychology, NASCAR, bureaucracy, game shows, data-entry, panhandling, industrial engineering, skunk-wrangling, philosophy, fire-walking, indentured servitude, politics, poker, alchemy, baggage-handling, plate tectonics, improvisational comedy, evangelism, night carrier-landings, parasitology, kung fu and opera.
Investors had a big ol’ hootenanny at the end of last week. And when they finally woke up Monday, they had a collective hangover that looked a lot like the onset of clinical depression.
On Friday, they thought the cavalry had arrived to save them and all those sorry, overextended, who-cares-make-hay hucksters who took over the banking and loan industries while the government winked and held the doors open. They saw charging horses and flashing weapons and cheered their own salvation with a whooping, hollering orgy of piling back into the wagons they’d just crawled under … only to realize when the dust cleared that it was merely George W. Custer in a cowboy hat, waving his fountain pen at the head of a tattered, debt-ridden regiment of federal spendthrifts.
And even though they – and we – would like to believe that a couple of signatures can give this movie a happy ending, deep down we know that this is likely no summertime Hollywood western (“Buckaroo Bailout” ?), but a long, grim, anguishing Bergman flick the likes of “Autumn Sonata.”
When the economy tanks, entrepreneurs are often the ones sucked under with it, as a story in the small-business section of Monday’s New York Times points out. It figures: We’re smaller, with fewer clients or customers, fewer resources. Some are already facing reality, closing or selling their enterprises and going back to corporate life. It’s not a guarantee of safety, but at least the paychecks there are steadier and usually come with health insurance.
How do you know when it’s time to fold? When you’re out of money? Or when you’re out of hope? I’m a first-time entrepreneur and have no answer, but I can guess that the need to eat has a way of dissolving dreams quickly. Still, as long as the whole world doesn’t collapse, some of us will keep going, biding our time and winterizing our little companies so they’ll survive the coming harsh season somehow, while we take on second jobs.
Could the cavalry have a real leader in its ranks? Or will we have to hold out until one appears out of our own midst? I have no idea. But the real entrepreneurs among us may start raising chickens inside that circle of wagons.
We entrepreneurs spend about 99.99999 percent of our time chipping away at brick walls with teaspoons. And bent teaspoons is often all we get.
But every once in a while, we dislodge a whole brick. At those moments, we have proof that we’re getting somewhere and renewed hope that, someday, we’ll actually break through.
That’s how I feel right now, because – after months of work – I’ve added two great artists and about 30 pieces of art to The Geniocity Shop on this site (click on the store name to the right of this post to check them out). And more are coming.
I hope you’ll take a look at Michael Zelenka’s gorgeous, handmade glass pieces and Keith Berr’s glorious photographs. Both artists imbue their work with a long, rich experience of craft, vivid intelligence and the fresh perspectives that only imagination can supply.
You’ll also see that The Geniocity Shop’s list of creative categories is growing. We now have separate pages for glass, film/video, painting/drawing and photography, and we’ll keep adding new ones.
That thought makes me want to just jump around the room and yell, preferably to some incredibly loud rock and roll (“Black Math”!), but it’s late and everyone else is asleep. So I’ll just quietly go to bed with a really big smile on my face and hope that I can jab another brick out of the way in the morning.
I am so burnt. I spent yesterday tearing around in the car, meeting with people, getting contracts signed, picking up merchandise – all good things. But then I hit the computer last night to attempt a task that left my head and eyeballs aching.
I had to choose keywords for my site. There ought to be combat pay for having to choose keywords for your site. Those of you who have worked in journalism will understand when I say it was like thinking up 25 two-and three-word headlines for a single edition.
I had to do this in order to assist someone who was assisting me with search optimization for Geniocity.com. Search optimization – or SEO, for my fellow Luddites – is one of those inescapable monetizing processes (IMPs) that the IT world guilts you into doing because you can’t afford not to (CANT). It takes significant words or short phrases describing and/or contained in the content of your site and embeds them or tattoos them or something somewhere in the endless digital forest of coding, so prowling search engines can pounce on them like, what? hounds? and drag them back to their mouse-clicking masters who desperately want to find sites about all-cotton underwear and what Sarah Palin eats for breakfast. (Moose muffins - duh.)
And if you’re lucky and you did your keyword homework, they’ll find you and madly click on every page and ad and delightful collectible available for purchase on your site.
Anyway, Idid all this using the Google Adwords Keyword tool. Very handy, except, of course, that it turns up about 5,000 other variations, synonyms and related ideas for the words you’ve entered. I mean, that’s great, but you have to read them all - or most of them – and check the graphs that go with them to see which words or phrases get the most hits. It’s like reading all the varieties of Smith in the phone book and then measuring with a ruler to see how many of each kind there are so you know the most popular one to paint on your mailbox. Even though Smith isn’t your name. Or mine.
So now I’m legally blind or close to it. But I was focused and persistent and all sorts of good business-y things and got my keywords picked. And now I think I’ll spend the morning in a darkened room with cucumber slices on my eyelids (or maybe zucchini if we’re out of cucumbers) and try to make the words creativity and innovation and creative innovation and innovative creativity and creations stop blobbing and dividing like amoebas in my head.
Have I ever got a keyword for anybody who tries to find me today.
I spent most of yesterday on letters. To be exact, it was actually one letter, customized and reproduced many times.
And considering that the text fit on a single sheet of paper, I sure did agonize over it. The worst part was trying to make sure the computer file printed out properly on my company stationery (I’m a writer, not a skilled secretary). But the wordcraft wasn’t much fun, either - not so much because this letter was a marketing tool, but because writing letters has always made me a little uneasy.
I worry: Do I sound fake? Arch and cutesy? Dry and humorless? Hopelessly inane? …Smarmy? If I work too hard at it, it won’t sound conversational, but if I go with what comes naturally, it’s probably going to sound flip. Flip is fine for close friends. Dry is fine for strangers plying me with unwanted magazine subscriptions. But make me correspond with anybody in between, and I develop tonal stage fright.
It’s not just that I’m out of practice, although I guess I am – most of us almost never write letters anymore and composing e-mails doesn’t offer quite the same exercise. It’s just different to commit something to paper – what you put down has a permanence that demands more attention from the reader and more respect, too, whether it’s a love letter or just a hasty thank-you note for the peanut brittle.
Once paper has had words marked on it, it becomes a cultural artifact. You just can’t say or feel that about something you can make disappear by clicking delete. (Even though it never - ever - truly leaves… .)
Can you imagine a published volume called “E-Mail to My Daughter” by Maya Angelou? or “The Selected E-Mails of Arthur Miller” ? (And yes, he did write some. I got one, once, and “The Crucible” it wasn’t.)
So what’s my point here? That letter-writing is a pain, but you have to do it well because people remember how you sound on cream vellum. Or even on 20-lb.-weight copy paper. That can be to your advantage if clients and customers like what they read. Just don’t let your charming and effective words get ink-jetted all over your company logo.
Did that get your attention? Well, I admit I’m being a bit dramatic, because most entrepreneurs and other business people will never do anything even remotely jail-worthy. But the point is, you may not know if you and your enterprise are always on the right side of the law unless you have a lawyer.
I mentioned a few days ago what my most important first steps were in getting my business started. Finding a great lawyer was at the top of the list. Now, you may think you don’t need one, at least at first, because you can probably create a company or corporation by yourself simply by going online to a government site (here’s the Ohio Secretary of State’s site) and filing the proper forms and fees.
But do you understand the differences among all the many types of companies and corporations? Do you know how to set yours up so it works the way you need it to? How to raise money so the government doesn’t decide you’re a scam artist the likes of Max Bialystock in “The Producers” and throw you in the slammer? How to define the relationships among you and your partners, board and/or investors so everyone’s clear on who owns or runs how much?
I’d guess … not. And all those issues are so just the tip of the iceberg. Here’s what I’ve needed my lawyers for just in the two years it’s taken me to get from idea to launch:
Forming a limited liability company (LLC)
Drafting an operating agreement
Trademarking a product name and slogan
Recommending a great accountant
Drafting a consignment contract
But that hasn’t been all they’ve provided. They’ve educated me on types of corporations, translated all the language in all the documents for me and patiently answered the questions I posed in unnumbered urgent phone calls.
In other words, they’ve given me peace of mind along with the information I needed. I knew I’d be making mistakes as an entrepreneur, but I wanted them to be chose-the-wrong-color-for-the-brochure mistakes, not oops-I-forgot-to-get-a-license-for-this mistakes. Thanks to them, I can sleep at night confident that I won’t wake up and discover my life has turned into a weird episode of “Law and Order” or some cable-TV Congressional hearing.
Yes, it’s expensive – by my standards, anyway. And yes, yes, yes, it’s worth it.
