The Guardian frets about disappearing critics. It’s disappointing, coming from this source; unlike the commentary in the U.S. on this subject, like the one I discuss below, you expect a bit more sophistication from the Guardian. Instead, it’s the same old droning on about the allegedly disappearing critics and unfocused, oddly unenlightened appreciation of what’s available on the web.

Consider this passage, emphases added:

The old media have, predictably, been outraged [about the cutbacks in fulltime critics at some papers].  After all, their jobs are on the line. ‘People who make these decisions,’ says [Salt Lake City film critic] Sean Means of the host of sackings, ‘get it into their heads that people who want to read about new movies have lots of places to do so, from fan sites, through blogs to critical aggregators, but they are being short-sighted. The reason people buy newspapers is to hear that particular voice.’

So is he saying that the opinions expressed for free on blogs are not of value? Not necessarily, he says. ‘The truth is, though, that there are very few amateurs who are better than professionals. If you really are good at it you figure out some way to get paid for it. At the risk of sounding elitist, everyone has an opinion, but not everyone has an informed opinion.‘

Both these points are completely incorrect. For the first, while the changing role of the American newspaper is due to a lot of things, many of them business related, at least part of their decline has to do with their timidity and arrogance.

Most daily film critics are timid; few have distinctive voices; over the years almost all have had larger-than-life personalities or opinions beaten out of them. Means is, ironically, right on this point: Readers would like a particular voice. But they have rarely, if ever, existed in any number at daily papers in the U.S.

At the same time, the service part of the papers’ mission has been ignored as well. This is where the arrogance comes in. The typeface of listings started small and got smaller. Papers didn’t care about being comprehensive. (Indeed, most local alternative papers helped find their niche by providing not just better film criticism, but also with more complete and fuller coverage of all the local movies playing, including art films and those showing at small venues.)

And they rarely wrote about consumer issues involving movie-going: What theaters had good projection, increases in tickets prices, the rise of commercials before the showings, and many other related things.

To this day, I find Google’s Showtimes feature to be the easiest and most useful way to find out where a movie is playing. It’s not perfect*, but it’s better, clearer and easier to use than any local paper’s service I’ve seen. Only institutions as hidebound and arrogant as daily newspapers in the U.S. could have lost the captive audience they once had for this most basic service.

As for Means’ second point—”At the risk of sounding elitist, everyone has an opinion, but not everyone has an informed opinion”—he is at risk only of sounding like a nut. The idea that informed opinion is the prerogative of the American metropolitan daily is … quaint.

Beyond that, his understanding of the media world is mired back in the previous century. Today, the audience gets to decide for itself who has the informed opinion it wants. There’s no longer one local institution making that decision for it.

Far too much of the rest of this very long Guardian piece consists of interviews with UK critics in various fields, most of whom confess they don’t look at the web much. I’m not sure those are the horses the paper should be backing at this juncture.

The paper never says the obvious: That for the vast majority of people there is more convenience and more information—more by orders of magnitude—about everything in the cultural sphere. Once the shakeout in the information industries resolves itself, the world will right and there will be normal jobs again for critics, hopefully based on their writing and less on their ability to get along in the timid confines of the (very much changed) American newsroom.

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Another lament on the alleged disappearing film critic, this one from Craig Lindsey at the Raleigh News & Observer.

It’s not irredeemable. I didn’t know all of this, for example:

As for film critics, they’ve been around since the creation of film print. Revered Midwestern poets Vachel Lindsay and Carl Sandburg did time as silent movie-era critics, churning out reviews and essays in the early 20th century. Esteemed novelists Graham Greene and James Agee began writing movie reviews in periodicals in the ’30s and ’40s. Former Winston-Salem resident Bosley Crowther was at one point the country’s most-known newspaper critic, filing reviews for The New York Times from the ’40s to the ’60s.

(Lindsey diplomatically doesn’t say that Crowther was a buffoon.)

But, like most of the sloppy writers addressing this issue, Lindsey is hung up on the status of daily newspaper film critics, which he, like the Guardian, romanticizes. There is, he allows, some film writing on the internet, but tries to dismiss it as hack work:

In the past two decades, there has been such an abundance of film criticism that even a Web movie-review haven such as Rotten Tomatoes had to put a kibosh on accepting new critics. This boom not only has given us writers and commentators who can offer a valid opinion on a flick but also hype machines with feet. They don’t review movies so much as cheerlead for them, penning enthusiastically hacky write-ups just to appease movie studios so they can get invited to future press junkets.

With so many people ready to voice their opinions on movies—some not fully qualified to do it in the first place—it’s no wonder that publications don’t mind thinning the herd.

But of course, there’s far more good writing on film on the net (and much more sheer information) than there ever was in local dailies. And those dailies also paid (and pay now) living wages to more hacks than the web ever will.

As I’ve said before, the real problem here is that what’s really disappearing is free advertising for films in local dailies, which is what most local film criticism is. Since there are ever more movies being released and more ways for the audience to see them, this is a problem only if it is your job to actually market films in this challenging time.

Even Elvis Mitchell, who isn’t an idiot, is quoted saying this:

“We all think about that world of 30 years ago, when it was The New York Times and The New Yorker and Time magazine. And they could really, if not dictate policy, then keep a film director working. A great review could get somebody another movie, and those days have sadly disappeared. But the world of that kind of filmmaking has disappeared too. I mean, I think we have to bemoan that more than this demise of film criticism.”

Hmm … So film criticism isn’t what it used to be, and filmmaking isn’t what it used to be, either!

May I say that commentary on the demise of film criticism and filmmaking is what it used to be?

By which I mean that there will always be some guy affecting world-weariness in the corner moaning about the good old days. Again, just last week everyone in the mediasphere was clucking agreeably about Mark Gill’s speech about that there were too many movies being made.

Who isn’t getting to make movies? Who isn’t getting to write about movies?

The answer? No one.

But wait, what about the poor consumer, the reader of film criticism?

They, of course, have access to more good writing about film, from both national news outlets and independent writers on the web, than they ever did before.

So what is the problem?

* Google hasn’t figured out yet that it needs to weight art houses and unusual venues when folks are searching for local showtimes. A user wants to know where Iron Man is playing at the closest megaplexes, but also wants to know what unusual moves are playing in a different part of town.

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Previously in Hitsville:

Film critics—still missing!
The year of the disappearing film critics
More on the disappearing film critics