My dear anonymous letter writers, if you think it is so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or film experimenter, may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, so many poets.
—Pauline Kael, I Lost It at the Movies
The Mainstream American Cultural Artifact in front of me—to borrow the media-studies terminology of George W.S. Trow, the late New Yorker staff writer and social critic (and my former journalism teacher at Bard College)—is a National Endowment for the Arts announcement, posted on Dec. 21, 2007, naming the 25 arts journalists selected for its fourth annual Arts Journalism Institute in Theater and Musical Theater, to be conducted at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication in February. The 10-day immersion program, part of a $1-million NEA initiative to offer intensive training for theatre critics and their editors, catches my eye because as a New Yorker I’m not qualified for it. The institute, the site explicitly states, is designed for American journalists of whatever stripe (print, online, radio, TV) “who work outside of the country’s major media markets.”
This eligibility requirement has always struck me as deeply strange—in a way it reinforces several subtly prevailing biases, the main one being that theatre critics and editors in New York are naturally too knowledgeable, too in-the-swim-of-things, too advanced to deserve a shot at a good educational experience in criticism. Hey, we’re rock stars but just don’t know it. There is, of course, the correlative prejudice (or is it a social truth?) that not enough competent critics, writers and editors outside New York have been exposed to innovative and original presentations at a high artistic level. Apparently, only arts journalists working in the top urban areas are really conversant with the rules of the criticism game, whereas the rest of the hoi polloi, overworked or underpaid or both in the lesser U.S. markets, are wandering in the wilderness without true bearings, bereft of the formal tools needed for learning and practicing their trade.
Part of what I’m getting at here is what Trow, in his original and possibly prophetic book My Pilgrim’s Progress: Media Studies, 1950-1998, calls “the assumptions of the Assumed Dominant Mind.” Way back in the 1950s, Trow wrote, “New York City, as it had been for some time, was the dominant city in the country as to culture, especially as to mass culture, certainly as to media….” Translated into theatre terms, that Assumed Dominant Mind means Broadway/Hollywood, the New York Times and Café Society. As well-intentioned as the organizers of the NEA Institute might be, I suspect that much of what guides its requirements is a profound holdover or echo of the critical relativism that still predisposes observers from all over the world to ascribe hierarchical differences in quality, meaning and value to Broadway, Off Broadway and Off-Off Broadway, versus theatres in the so-called regions—a segregated mindset that draws political lines between mainstream theatre and that which has been erroneously called minority theatre. Despite the advent of a network of professional theatres across the country which since the 1960s has emerged to become what is in effect a national theatre, this Assumed Dominant Mind holds powerful sway in every aspect of the theatre field, and it has outlived the death of Broadway. Neither the East Village scenesters nor the grand founding poo-bahs of the resident theatre movement have yet been able to supply Americans with a steady outlay of important cultural artifacts that would justify the contrivance of a myth or a script to replace the one Broadway so relentlessly weaves and tells about itself.
Since I’ve never gone to the NEA Institute, I can’t offer firsthand proof of how truly rigorous, substantive or effective it is. I’m sure it’s stimulating, but I can’t state with any confidence whether it would’ve been appropriate for someone like me. I can certainly say that, in my estimation, many active critics in New York could benefit from such a program. In light of the public censure in 2006 of a certain Chicago Sun-Times critic who was faulted for reviewing a workshop of new musicals, some veteran critics at big-city papers probably ought to renew their vows by taking advantage of the NEA Institute. The motley of new and young critics for alternative New York publications, as well as New York-based bloggers and serious web critics, many of whom have now taken on the burden of covering local theatrical offerings that were once the traditional domain of mainstream papers and alternative weeklies, deserve a chance to bone up as well.
As a theatre critics’ workshop, the NEA Institute is a noble, praiseworthy, necessary effort, even though it is not unique. Given their specifically focused imperatives, such training programs for working arts journalists are probably not going to address the more urgent crises in the field—which would involve joining the systematic effort to encourage more favorable conditions for critics who work for news-media organizations that have shirked arts journalism, as well as addressing the grave problems relating to the practice of criticism for the majority of critics (in all disciplines) who don’t regularly ply their trade in the Assumed Dominant Mind of the media.
The other Mainstream American Cultural Artifact in front of me is a Dec. 31, 2007 New York Times article titled “In Cincinnati, a 126-Year-Old Paper Goes to Press for the Last Time.” The report states that E.W. Scripps has decided to stop printing both the venerable Cincinnati Post and its companion paper, the Kentucky Post, which have suffered a massive circulation bloodletting in recent years. Both newspapers “are part of a dying breed of afternoon dailies,” the Times reports. “Fewer than 10 cities still have two or more daily newspapers, and Cincinnati was the last two-paper town in Ohio. The demise of the Post leaves the Cincinnati Enquirer [owned by Gannett] with far less competition.”
This Times story brings to mind critic Robert Hurwitt’s traumatized call-to-alarm at a 2001 American Theatre Critics Association convention in Ashland, Ore., in which he prefaced his “Perspectives in Criticism” speech by talking about the November 2000 merger of the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner: “A year ago, when asked by you to deliver this address today, I had to respond that, though honored, I didn’t know if I would still be employed as a theatre critic by this time.” After years of living with uncertainty and rumors about the fate of newsroom employees in the two competing newspapers, Hurwitt, who had been the Examiner’s theatre critic, was lucky to eventually find his bearings as one of the Chronicle’s two theatre critics (along with Steven Winn). Nevertheless, the experience shook Hurwitt to the core. “Arts coverage always seems to get treated as a poor stepsister at most papers, to be viewed as expendable, a luxury, a frill,” Hurwitt said.
Improving the state of arts criticism is never a priority when the unyielding realities of the newspaper business come into play. When the New York Times revamped its Arts & Leisure pages, theatre observers pointed accusatory fingers at what they griped was the youth, inexperience and dumbed-down attitudes of the new section editors. When the Chicago Reader was sold in July ’07 to the owners of Atlanta’s Creative Loafing and three other alternative weeklies, the Reader’s production staff was decimated (operations were moved to Atlanta), the editorial staff was variously slashed or consolidated, and the number of theatre reviews published per week plummeted. In the new world order, the Reader’s chief critic Albert Williams told PerformInk, “No theatre is entitled to coverage.” Similarly, in the coming months, many Cincinnati theatres and some Kentucky ones will feel the brunt of what it means to be entitled only to Gannett-style coverage of the arts. The sadder story is that, except for a few enlightened corners of the universe (such as the New York Times—“Our National Treasure. Our Marilyn. Our Elvis. In other words: What We Have,” says Trow), raising the level of criticism around the country was rarely on anyone’s mind when things were going financially well.
All too often, critics come by their jobs by accident. Few writers with real training are hired for critics’ jobs, and not many have arts-related experience before being given assignments as critics. In a modest phone survey conducted for his 1991 book The Critic, Power, and the Performing Arts, John E. Booth attests: “Nearly two-thirds of the newspaper critics are male, the overwhelming majority are white, and their median age is around 40. Most critics have completed their B.A. and over half have taken some graduate courses; more than one-third have advanced degrees. Most theatre critics majored in English and the liberal arts.” Nearly two decades after the publication of Booth’s book, that profile is still pretty much spot-on, except that I would add poignantly that in the past two to three years, there has been an attrition or erosion in the number of regularly working female critics at major New York publications. “There is relatively little information on the texture, quality and circumstances of being a critic,” Booth writes.
Partly to bolster a writer’s critical sense with education and experience, but also to counteract the historical sense of randomness or arbitrariness attached to the hiring of new critics, a few open-minded institutions and critics’ groups have continued to raise standards by providing courses, seminars and workshops. The American Theatre Critics Association has offered a series of development programs in several U.S. cities aimed at training the next generation of theatre critics. I was selected to be the lone New York critic to attend the 1999 pilot effort, the Austin Critics Seminar, which received support from the Austin American-Statesman. Because of funding and logistical issues, that ATCA program has stalled for the time being, but the experience whetted my appetite for the O’Neill National Critics Institute of the O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Conn., where, thanks to the New York Times Company Foundation, I was chosen as a critic fellow in 2003. Opportunities for training internationally also exist. In 2005 and 2006, with the financial support of the Foundation of the American Theatre Critics Association, I was a U.S. delegate to two international seminars for young critics in France and Korea. Every year, the International Association of Theatre Critics organizes several of these roving affairs, held in conjunction with various international theatre festivals, in which American critics can convene and compare notes with theatre critics from around the world.
Each of these opportunities for professional development happened during key moments in my life, so in concert with the insights, practical advice, inspiration, skills training and immersion experiences that usually attend such seminars, I took away from them much that was useful and personal. In the year I studied with the critics Michael Barnes and Robert Faires in Austin, for example, my mentor and champion, the Village Voice’s longtime theatre editor Ross Wetzsteon, had recently died, and with the many changes in ownership and editorial staff at this once-legendary alternative weekly, I acutely felt the same dreaded my-days-as-a-critic-are-numbered feeling that Hurwitt described in his aforementioned speech. Sure enough, four or five years later I recognized the name of not a single staffer on the Voice masthead except for the critics J. Hoberman and Michael Feingold. So the Austin Critics Seminar was, for me, a way to test the waters: Is this criticism business something still worth pursuing?
Back in New York, however, I had begun to face the imperatives of a different question: How is it possible for an American theatre critic to possess a truly national outlook—to become one of Robert Brustein’s “repertory critics with a passionate overview”—but whose purview transcended Broadway essentialism?
Going back to school was, for me, not an option and still isn’t. (Today, young people can earn a master’s degree in arts journalism after 12 months of intensive study at Syracuse University’s Goldring Arts Journalism Program or at Columbia University’s journalism school, but at the time, these programs did not exist.) Barring going on a road trip to every single theatre city in America, the only other potential solution to my parochialism problem seemed to be the O’Neill Critics Institute, because its Playwrights Conference each year offers staged readings of new writing from around the country led by top directors and actors. One of the unique aspects of the O’Neill Institute is that critics are assigned to new works-in-progress and can, when schedules permit, plumb the mysteries of how plays change as they observe firsthand the process of putting them on their feet.
The glimpse into the backstage life is just part of the O’Neill program, though. This two-week boot camp, created by the late Ernest Schier, is primarily designed to improve a critic’s copy. It’s not just about writing on deadline—it’s about writing that nearly extinct cultural artifact, the overnight review. The faculty (which, my year, included Newsday’s Linda Winer) gives critiques of what has been written while everyone sits on benches under the copper beech trees that line the estate’s rustic campus. So while it was exciting to break bread with theatre artists over lunch or dinner, it was psychologically challenging to dash off these quick hits—the same kind of short notices that I had rebelled against as impediments to my growth when I was at the Voice.
What’s frustrating about critics’ training programs in America is that philosophically their methods are not always rigorous and their range is seldom deep and broad-based. Competency in dealing with Asian-American, black, Hispanic, Latino and Latina theatre history, for instance, is not particularly high on the curriculum; frequently the framework or underpinnings that support the craft are taught superficially, casually, impressionistically; the whole undertaking can be too innocent of an animating point of view. This is not to say there are formulas or immutable laws in criticism. (Trow again: “There are no rules in American journalism; no American Medical Association to revoke our license; no Rules of Engagement.”) But the criticism I respect always issues from the iron in the critic’s fire—an animating belief, perhaps, an attribute of personality, an idiosyncratic temperament, an analytic technique or a kind of pugnacity.
At the very least, the two international seminars I participated in were predisposed to consider new developments in dramatic theory and theatre history, such as Hans-Thies Lehmann’s idea of a postdramatic theatre, a key reference point in international discussions of contemporary theatre. In Seoul, the French theatre critic Patrice Pavis, whose book Analyzing Performance offers a powerful conceptual tool for interpretation, gave a keynote lecture arguing that dramatic criticism ought to widen its perspectives and venture into new tasks. Pavis lists a few of those tasks: “To take on and make explicit value judgments, which criticism, like theory, cannot avoid. To admit the enterprise of legitimization that is presupposed by any discourse, even a negative one, on an artist, a movement, a way of working. To become aware of the cultural identity of whoever gives a judgment, all the while allowing them the right to talk about what does not concern them (about another culture, another milieu, another identity, another religion). To delocalize critics. To make them analyze shows that are still foreign to them. To not burden oneself with legitimacy, authenticity, fundamentalism, even of a cultural nature.”
This is dangerous stuff—maybe too smart and potent for newsrooms. Because English is not the first language of the critics who attend IATC seminars, writing cannot be the main focus, so the premium on analysis and contextual discussion is therefore far greater. One of the aims of the Korea congress was continuity—to encourage and help establish stronger personal ties among a network of international critics who are likely to be future leaders of their countries’ critics groups. In America, training programs typically herd young critics around like sheep, with established critics assuming the roles of mentors, yentas or cranky Yodas. Our young critics rarely get to confront or challenge their older peers. But in Korea, we were given a chance to face off with our seniors. Instead of discussing the various shows we had seen, we spent our mornings and afternoons in Seoul in classrooms talking about how and why we got into the business of writing theatre criticism in the first place, and debating the obstacles, problems and conditions we had confronted as writers coming into our own as theatre critics.
Abroad, I learned that theatre critics in other countries bemoan their profession’s loss of function and effectiveness, as well as their political limitations. Several critics banded together to advocate on the issues of gender and age representation, decrying the fact that plum critics’ jobs in established publications are in some cases de facto lifetime positions, almost inevitably for men. Others tackled the always-messy problem of ethics. A third camp strongly believed that, with the advent of blogs and Internet-only publications since the turn of the millennium, there has arisen a crucial need to deal with the problem of pluralism. Why are print critics accorded higher status in the field when everybody knows that the Internet reaches more (and younger) theatregoers and readers with greater speed and more global reach? Why are web-only critics treated as somehow renegade in standing, given that the majority of young critics today (not to mention some old-timers as well) toil regularly and with integrity for online portals?
Given the media cutbacks and corporatization, the Assumed Dominant Mind wants us to accept the Internet as the new paradigm: In the distant future, all criticism will flee into the online world. But the new pluralism that the Internet encourages comes with a price. Although democratic thinking, accessibility and open-mindedness are all good principles to keep in mind, a pluralist perspective suggests that all opinions are acceptable and of equal value. “Are there to be no limits, no rules for theatre criticism in the new media?” the anti-pluralists inquired. “We need consistent discussions on such questions.”
My team suggested that before these larger considerations could be addressed, core questions need to be first taken into account: Can anyone become a critic? Who has the right to claim to be a theatre critic? What are the basic qualifications for a critic, anyway? “It is not enough to have a cultivated background in literature to be a critic of the theatrical life,” we replied. Critics should possess a wide-ranging understanding of the social, political, racial, class and ecological contexts involved in the artwork under consideration; an awareness of trends and historical developments in other art forms (such as cinema, dance and music) is becoming increasingly essential; it might be preferable for critics to have had some practical experience working in the theatre prior to writing about it. To make a difference in the world, critics have only the knowledge they possess and the talent they can bring to bear on describing what they see—these are the fundamental tools. In an ideal world, this facility with language and expression would appeal to, coax and beguile audiences and artists alike. All theatre criticism, we declared, should aspire to break the mold or reach new heights.
Let me rock ’n’ roll with the last Mainstream American Cultural Artifact in front of me: a Time Out New York December ’06 cover survey, “Critiquing the Critics,” in which theatre reviewers in major New York outlets were ranked and graded, using five categories (knowledge, style, taste, accessibility and influence). A group of publicists, curators and artists (“the people most likely to be directly affected by criticism”) were then asked to supply commentary. This feature calls to mind Spy magazine’s pseudo-scientific charts and its bitchy “Review of the Reviewers” column in which an anonymous gadfly spat out frat-house potshots and cocktail-party put-downs at the cabal of New York reviewers who had supposedly used their influence in questionable ways.
During those mythical days when drama critics filed their reviews overnight—when the likes of Walter Kerr and Brooks Atkinson churned out text as fast as the copyboy could deliver it to the copy desk—Manhattan critics, one imagines, styled themselves as tart-tongued desperados, Addison DeWitts who traded withering gibes and intellectual bon mots with their peers in nightclubs and ornate lobbies. In the late 1980s, Spy was abrasively funny because its crude, name-calling tactics made the inheritors and stakeholders of the Café Society set nervous about their status. Time Out New York’s survey couldn’t have possibly set our critics on edge because the charts and numbers gesture toward a scientific process. Where Spy sharpened the put-down to down-and-dirty levels of pithy precision, Time Out New York dulled its appraisement in favor of a geeky Zagat guide mentality.
Segue to a more serious discussion: Young critics today live in an anxious, uncertain age where the bottom line is seen as more valid than informed opinion—in which the democratization of criticism is being defined by the mercantilistic pressures exerted by polls and public consensus. We make do with limited budgets, dwindling space, peripheral status and scant attention. Unless they work for the Times (or the one or two other papers that maintain their competitive edge by offering possibilities for travel and compensation), critics today can’t conceive of a theatre criticism that goes beyond their local beat and is truly national in perspective.
For the next generation, there is no such thing as us-versus-them. Every critic, regardless of age or experience or gender or training, is stuck in the same sinking boat. Even with the illusory panacea offered by the Internet, there is still virtually no diversity of opinion to do justice to the diversity of the arts. What passes for journalism in the arts today are online reader reviews and cultural listings, which consume an increasing portion of space devoted to the arts. (Time Out New York represents the triumph of the news bite in the guise of comprehensive coverage.) A 125-page survey called “Reporting the Arts,” released in 1999 by the now-defunct National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University, showed conclusively that when the U.S. experienced an arts boom prior to 2001, arts coverage in mainstream newspapers failed to keep pace. This survey of 15 U.S. newspapers in 10 metropolitan areas (excluding the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times) stated that in the competition for resources, editors devote more reporters, more space and more budget to sports, business and popular-culture coverage—despite studies consistently showing that readers spend as much money, if not more, on virtually every area of the arts.
This gap between the arts boom and critical coverage only widened after 9/11. For three years, until the appointment of former New Yorker and Voice critic Charles McNulty in 2005, the Los Angeles Times actually functioned without a theatre critic, using a stable of freelancers to cover the beat. This situation proved to be a boon to LA Weekly, but what was really significant about the Times’s actions is that it did not seem to consider any of its California-based critics to be worthy of the position. In the past two or three years, New York City has witnessed a noticeable changing of the guard among the first-string critics for major dailies, some of whom transferred their energies to other departments or have been replaced by younger turks who, presumably, could attract young readers. (A related irony: Nobody ever argues that hiring a female theatre critic could equally attract female theatregoers and readers.) Meanwhile, influential general-interest magazines and political journals such as the Nation and Newsweek, which once upon a time valued the theatre enough to set aside space for regular critical coverage, have opted to keep the theatre critic position vacant, with nary a word of explanation or justification.
Young critics in New York rarely have the job security to grow and mature in one place as writers and thinkers. A majority of critics are freelancers who eke out a paltry living for somewhere between $50 and $100 per review, and hardly anybody ever cares to know who these new critics are unless a show is in dire need of ejaculatory ad blurbs for the purposes of marketing and publicity. Female critics who have to raise a child (as Pauline Kael and Susan Sontag did) are likely to find themselves shut out. Those lucky critics who have an academic post or a big trust fund must eventually play a game of musical chairs. The exceptions still prove the rule: After an editorial change at the Village Voice, one of our finest theatre critics, Jonathan Kalb, who heads the theatre department at New York’s Hunter College, actually managed to become the main theatre critic for the New York Press, the Voice’s chief free-weekly-rag competitor. “Despite the fact that it was for only four years,” Kalb notes in his essay “The Death (and Life) of American Theatre Criticism,” “I lasted longer at New York Press than any of its previous theatre writers, conceiving my columns not merely as reviews but as essays of general interest grounded on current theatre events.”
Is it morally ethical for organizations and educational institutions to continue to train and graduate critics? Full-time gigs are shockingly sparse, the pool of potential applicants (especially in New York) is huge, and yet the actual decisions employers make are devoid of any genuine appreciation for the theatre. In a newspaper operation, a theatre critic is as likely as not to emerge from the ranks of sports writers, entertainment columnists and (less frequently) book reviewers. The issue of succession can be a dicey and unstable proposition, since second- or third-string critics do not often land in the lead critic spot, and newspapers tend to hire from outside (sometimes based on the recommendations of pundits, such as Brustein, who relishes job-placing his criticism and dramaturgy students in prominent positions). Ambitious young critics and stringers have to jump to another newspaper—or take their bootstraps in hand and move to another state—if they want to savor the glory of being among the top critical echelons.
The vast majority of critics languish somewhere in a floating middle, grateful to have managed for so long, their work perennially underpaid, their value in both the theatre and journalism professions constantly undermined, and yet still in love with the theatre. Over time, some of these long-practicing critics ease into the mind-deadening habit of writing 250-to-500-word capsule reviews, or they con themselves into believing that the seasonal doldrums, come awards time, amount to theatrical sizzle. To promote a public stance of objectivity, they tend to affect a jaded, seen-it-all voice in their writings, a been-there/done-that stringency, a critical disdain that masks their own parochial tastes, bolsters the audience’s encrusted attitudes, gives too much praise to mediocre offerings and is literally terrified of going bravely out on a limb, lest their judgments be viewed as too wildly different or too idiosyncratic from prevailing opinion.
This barely suppressed contempt is especially deadly when the work being evaluated comes out of ethnic theatres and culturally based companies. It is bad enough that most critics, of whatever race, aren’t adventurous enough in seeking out works from theatres of color. If critics evince too much commitment to covering these so-called special-interest fields, they are accused of beating a dead horse or having a warped sense of political correctness.
One of the fundamental reasons critics today are viewed with such low regard is that they are mainly creatures of dissent and negativity. To be a great critic means to enrage people—to beg for a fight. Critics can be good drumbeaters for the arts, but as George Jean Nathan said, the reality is that they have “the duty of telling the truth at the risk of bankrupting every box-office in the country.” Hardly the sort of people to personally root for.
On some tacit level, playgoing does not equip our critics to become citizens of the world. Although they are supposedly the mediators between the stage and the audience, our theatre critics frequently do not contribute to the larger social, political or philosophical issues of the moment. What do theatre critics today have to say about race or religion or violence in America? Where were they during the run-up to the Iraq War? Has Bill Moyers ever invited a theatre critic on his show? American critics are trained to be witty aesthetes, quip-happy gatekeepers who see every play as an invitation to outshine the murk being evaluated. Frequently, they are hit-seekers rather than theatregoers; they look fully animated and alive only when discussing a show’s commercial possibilities. Will it sell? If it won’t, why not? Being better read, better educated and better exposed to theatre than most Americans doesn’t always ensure that critics see the purpose of criticism, its mission or potential. Why aren’t critics arguing that a healthy arts-criticism scene is vital to the sustainability of a free and advanced society?
High-quality arts journalism is not primarily a consumer good. It is a cultural asset, one of the bases on which democracy and community are built. “Criticism must always profess an end in view, which, roughly speaking, appears to be the elucidation of works of art and the corrections of taste,” T.S. Eliot said. But as anyone who has hacked away at writing reviews season after season knows full well, unless American publishers and editors are committed to beefing up and setting higher standards in arts coverage, the constraining obligation to convey some blend of opinion and information in order to tell consumers which shows to see has a decimating effect. In the long run, it will wipe out the unruliness, willfulness, trained intelligence and independence upon which great criticism depends.
Opportunities for Theatre Critics
American Theatre’s Affiliated Writers Program: Supported by the Jerome Foundation, this program for early-career arts writers is designed to stimulate high-quality cultural reporting, feature writing and theatre criticism. It is open to New York City and Minnesota residents. Visit www.tcg.org and see ad on page 79.
International Association of Theatre Critics: Seminars for Experienced and Young Professional Theatre Critics: Participants are offered hotel, meals and tickets (but not the plane fare, and they may have to share rooms) to international festivals. The working languages are often English and French, though they vary by location. Young critic applicants should be under 35 and have at least a year’s experience in published theatre criticism. A recommendation from the national theatre critics’ association where the applicant is a member is required. Visit www.aict-iatc.org.
Master of Arts degree program with an arts and culture concentration at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism: Columbia’s J-school in New York offers a one-year, full-time M.A. program with a concentration on arts and culture. The M.A. program is open to students who are already at the J-School in the M.S. program and to students who already have basic journalism skills from another program or from professional experience. Visit www.journalism.columbia.edu.
O’Neill National Critics Institute: This intensive writing workshop for critics runs concurrently with the National Playwrights Conference and the National Music Theater Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Conn. The cost, $1,800, includes a private room, meals, tuition and tickets. The application deadline is May 15. Visit www.theoneill.org/critics.
USC Annenberg/NEA Arts Journalism Institute in Theater and Musical Theater: A competitive 10-day fellowship program (the 2008 workshop takes place this month) for arts writers, reporters, critics, editors and broadcast producers who have been making theatre coverage part of their regular work. It is one of three NEA Arts Journalism Institutes, along with the Institute for Music and Opera at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the Institute for Dance at the American Dance Festival in Durham, N.C. Visit www.annenberg.usc edu/CentersandPrograms/ProfessionalEducation/NEAArtsJournalism.aspx.
USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Program: A three-week, continuing education fellowship for six to nine arts journalists who have already distinguished themselves in some significant way nationally or locally. Visit www.annenberg.usc.edu/CentersandPrograms/ProfessionalEducation/GettyArtsJourn.aspx.
Syracuse University’s Goldring Arts Journalism Program: The first master’s degree program in arts journalism at an accredited journalism school, based at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. The intensive 12-month program begins in July, with immersion visits to New York City. Visit http://artsjournalism.syr.edu
