Read all about it ... only if it's sport
Arts and entertainment continue to get a raw deal from the dying printbiz.
A Current Affair picked up on one of my pet topics last week when it did a story on the greatly exaggerated death of the cinema — pointing out that more people go to the movies than to football games of both major codes combined.
Full marks to ACA for doing its bit to challenge the stubborn notion that Australia is a “sports mad” nation to the detriment of other forms of entertainment and diversion.
I have long argued, including in a spirited radio debate with Peter Dick back in September, 2009, that the arts are way more popular than sport. The stats regularly show that when it comes to people getting off their backsides and going out for fun, cinema, theatre, museum and gallery visits and live concerts beat sport. And when we stay indoors, we consume way more drama and comedy than sport on TV and streaming services.
Peter was having none of it, which only went on to illustrate my second point: that cultural activities get a raw deal in the mainstream media in terms of credit and coverage commensurate to their popularity.
Back then, I was editing a 20-24-page arts and entertainment lift-out in a weekly newspaper. No such thing exists today — unless you count the endless pages of fashion, beauty and “wellness” stories aimed at an audience that has never read a physical newspaper and never will.
Meanwhile, the sports pages just grow and grow.
I had a look at last Thursday’s print edition of The Courier-Mail. Thursday used to be the big day for entertainment coverage in newspapers because it was when new movies were released and when people started making plans for the weekend.
There were 12 pages of sport starting from the back page, plus eight pages of rugby league in the middle, with four pages of racing form guide inside that. So, in a 64-page paper, 24 were about sport (and only certain sports at that, but that’s a story for another day). That’s not counting a huge spread about the comeback of the Brisbane Bullets basketball team taking up three-quarters of a two-page section called Queensland Business Weekly.
As for the arts and entertainment? Well, there was the usual daily one-page TV guide, and three pages dedicated to “lifestyle”, one of which had reviews of new release movies.
It’s an inexcusably poor state of affairs built on the back of:
Inaccurate presumptions about what the audience or potential audience wants;
The corporate interests of the newspaper; and
Reverse snobbery — the idea that the arts are elitist and therefore to be ignored.
As I’ve written about talk radio, print news media is suffering because those who run it are out of touch with what ought to be their core audience. Of course, newspapers are doomed to a slow death, but why hasten that demise through poor editorial decisions? Why not give older readers — you know, the ones (allegedly) with all the money — something to read in an area that interests them?
Online, it’s a different ballgame, of course. There’s a lot of showbiz gossip and titillation in the mainstream titles, much of it lazily acquired by scanning the socials, but little in the way of criticism or longform interviews with creative people who are not global celebrities.
Years of inattention to serious arts and entertainment coverage by legacy titles has led to the audience going elsewhere (or nowhere at all).
Once upon a time in Brisbane, a professional theatre show would be reviewed by up to five newspaper critics and a few more from radio and the street press. Even an amateur production might get one or two mainstream reviews.
Now I know there are serious online arts publications (including InReview, an offshoot of InQueensland, where I once wrote a weekly column) but they struggle to gain traction.
Does this defeat my argument about the popularity of the arts? Not at all; it illustrates how effective mainstream media has been in shaping people’s expectations about what should and shouldn’t be discussed in the public arena.
Given that gambling advertising plays such a big role in shaping the media these days, perhaps the arts would get more coverage if we could bet on them.
A tenner on Macduff by a head in the final act, anybody?
Disclaimer: Brett Debritz used to work in newspapers and on radio.
This post was updated at 5.50pm on September 21, 2024 to correct the date of the discussion with Peter Dick and insert audio.