… in Kansas City, the NYT reports:

In the wave of buyouts and layoffs hitting newspapers this season, The Kansas City Star has decided it can no longer afford a classical music critic. Paul Horsley, who took the critic’s job eight years ago, was quoted on the Web site MusicalAmerica.com as saying, “I think it was a very ‘corporate’ decision.” He added, “I think they eliminated the beat they thought they could most easily farm out.” Kansas City’s orchestra, opera and ballet companies are said to be organizing a formal protest.

Good luck! Last summer, the Times detailed the shrinkage in this field:

 Classical music criticism, a high-minded endeavor that has been around at least as long as newspapers and reached an English-language peak with George Bernard Shaw, has taken a series of hits in recent months.

Critics’ jobs have been eliminated, downgraded or redefined at newspapers in Atlanta, Minneapolis and elsewhere around the country and at New York magazine, where Peter G. Davis, one of the most respected voices of the craft, said he had been forced out after 26 years.

Newspapers have a lot of challenges these days, but cutting coverage in classical music is counterproductive, for two reasons. One, interest in classical music skews older and richer; those are two demographics that subscribe to daily newspapers disproportionately. It’s crazy to give whole classes of readers a reason to cancel their subscriptions.

The second reason is a little more weepy, but hear me out. I don’t think papers have to be high-minded, or suicidal. But it’s true that, with their special legal status, that they owe their communities something. If every daily in the country stopped writing about the local classical music scene, it wouldn’t be a death blow per se. It would merely be a horrendous one, which would hurt all the local music organizations for some period of time before another network of coverage sprang up.

Which brings me to the point I wanted to make. There’s obviously a market for coverage of the fine arts. The papers just have to figure out how to do it more creatively in a changing marketplace. Local papers have a unique knowledge base about the arts in their local communities, and it should be easy—and not very expensive—to leverage that online.

The paper should be enlisting online freelancers who, in return for reviewers credentials and a small fee, go to local classical music concerts and write short reviews for the paper online, immediately after the show. Two of these a day at, say, $50 per, is only $35,000 a year, That would at once a) save the paper money, b) provide increased coverage of a scene desperate for it and c) help establish the paper’s web site as the local source for commentary on the fine music scene. And it’s a model that could easily be adapted to gallery coverage and that of the local jazz and club scene.