Carolyn Jack

Editor and CEO, Geniocity.com
A project of The Genius Group LLC

Creative people in search of access

A bunch of us Clevelanders had an interesting discussion last night down by the Cuyahoga River. 

A crowd of artists and other creative-community members gathered at SPACES, a nonprofit gallery, to hear a panel of local arts journalists talk about how they do their jobs, how the processes and constraints of those jobs have changed in the digital age and the current economy, and what arts people can and should do to get their news and work before the reading/watching/listening public. Sponsored by the COSE Arts Network, the panel included Ideastream (WCPN/90.3 FM  NPR)  “Around Noon” producer Dave DeOreo; Scene magazine arts editor Michael Gill;  Plain Dealer art and architecture critic Steven Litt; and me.

Eventually, the podcast will be available and I’ll provide a link so you can experience the whole wide-ranging discussion. But what interested me the most about it was this sort of collective epiphany the group seemed to have – the realization that, even with the Internet putting public access in reach of anyone with a website, an e-mail account or a social network, it’s clear that gatekeepers still control whose creative work gets widely seen or heard. And that there will always be gatekeepers of some kind, as long as humans have mass communication.  And that that, believe it or not, is a good thing.  

 These days, many of those choosing the information to disseminate are self-appointed. Individuals with little or no training in communications, they blog, they tweet, they post stuff on their personal sites and Facebook pages in a breathtaking and clamorous display of free speech. It’s a heady feeling for all of us to sense that we can reach the entire human race with a few clicks and keystrokes.

But even if every one of us on the planet ends up with a blog someday, most of us likely still won’t have real access to the public. That’s  because access comes through influence, and influence comes from the ability to reach a consistently large number  of people. And what consistently draws a large number of people?

Expertise and useful, reliable, entertaining content. 

What came out during the discussion was that artists and others still want and need the validation of their work that comes from being covered by a reporter, host or critic who really knows something about a field and commands wide public respect because of it.  Which means, in most cases, that media professionals, not citizens journalists, are going to continue to be the  people who decide what gets written or talked about in the media, no matter what form the media take in future.

This is not to imply in any way that there aren’t a lot of knowledgeable, talented  individuals out there whose blogs and tweets are informative and worth reading.  But unless they can build and keep a sizable amount of public  influence, theirs will still be single voices among billions of others on the planet, all vying for attention and each drawing only a handful of followers.

Getting reviewed or featured by one of these communicators won’t get anybody much traction with the general population. Who among the general population has time to search through a billion different amateur or near-amateur news outlets?    

The fact remains that, just as people want trained teachers in their classrooms rather than random  residents of the community, so humanity needs and wants professional critics and news people to separate the worthwhile from the endless amount of mediocrity we have no time to sift through for ourselves. Creative people and those interested in creative work will, as always, often disagree with what gets chosen. They will also always have the right – and, increasingly, the means - to seek out for themselves what they consider excellent.  But to reach the largest number of news consumers who understand and care about  their work, artists and arts communities can’t do better than to work with successful professional media.

Let’s hope some of those media survive.