As Madison Rep goes under, one last criticism from a critic
News
The "dialogue" between struggling arts organizations and struggling media continues across the country. Laura Collins-Hughes describes the latest sand throwing in Madison and Los Angeles in Survival Tip: Talk to the Media, on the NAJP blog. Tip courtesy Thomas Cott's fabulous You've Cott Mail daily arts news email.
Ever since Wall Street began its free fall last September, arts organizations going under have hardly needed to give a cause for their demise. The popular, rarely questioned assumption -- even on the part of many journalists -- is that the economy did them in. Which is what makes Milwaukee Journal Sentinel theater critic Damien Jaques' blog post about the recent death of Madison Repertory Theatre remarkable. "The news was disseminated in the same inept, clumsy way the company has conducted much of its business for the past five years," he writes. "The Madison Rep's financial and public relations problems began long before the national economy tanked." Arts organizations love to crow about the "free publicity" they get from the media, but too few of them grasp how crucial it is to engage in real communication with journalists: editors, reporters and critics. If journalists can't get close enough to organizations to try to understand them, it's unlikely we'll fully comprehend their value, let alone reflect it in the quality or quantity of our coverage. It's also probable that we won't detect any signs of trouble until they're screaming for help. That last might be fine for the people in charge, who'd rather keep their organizations' problems out of view, but it's not so great for employees or audiences or communities.
