That essay by Roger Ebert—who is, as one commenter below said, a god, and a great guy to boot—got me thinking about the state of film criticism beyond my earlier post below. And there are some good comments to that post here (including one from Ebert himself).

But I think we all have to accept that there’s really not much of a use anymore for a traditional “film critic” at most daily newspapers. The idea of every metro area having its decently paid corps of local film writers is nice, and as someone who used to be a film critic and has written about film on and off for a long time I’d feel better if there were more jobs out there rather than fewer.

Indeed, I think my original post came off as a bit cold—I intended the Dylan Thomas reference in the title to have a little more tragic resonance.

All that said, here is the reality:

1. Newspapers in large part deserve their fates. There are a lot of great writers out there, and they don’t deserve to be out on the streets. But everyone saw this coming. Here’s a question that is almost never asked in all the stories about the decline of newspapers: What did we do to stop it?
2. Papers are confronting a meltdown on two fronts; their ad business model cratered, and their monopoly on readers evaporated. Please forgive the triple mixed metaphor of the melting and evaporating crater, but what did we all do to combat the implications of that second threat?
3. In that second realm, specifically, newspapers got out of the business of provoking thought and kindling debate and into reinforcing the prejudices of its readership, or targeting imaginary readers with the curiosity of a sullen teenager or the sensibility of a doddering grandmother. I once worked at a paper that did a section cover story on calendars. Don’t laugh: Turned out they have boxes for each day of the week, and you can write appointments on them, and they often include cute pictures of kittens, or women in bikinis. And conveniently, they can be purchased easily on those little floating carts at the local mall. Appeals to readers (or advertisers) in that way may have worked in the short term. But no one with an IQ over, oh, 90 wants to pay for that sort of nonsense delivered on their doorstop each day, and as soon as they could get along without it, they did.
4. This is slightly different from Ebert’s analysis, which puts gossip as the culprit. I think if readers want it, a paper should provide it, in print or online. The sad thing is that, enticed by the numbers crap like that generates on the web, papers are contenting themselves with just culling other junk from wire services like AP. What they should be doing is generating their own, good, local gossip that readers can’t get anywhere else. Herb Caen was a gossip columnist.
5. I don’t even think the AP limit on 500 word reviews is an issue. It’s the quality of the 500 words that matters. The AP is just giving its member papers what they want. The bigger problem, when it comes to the fate of our local dailies, is that for too long papers treated coverage of pop culture as an afterthought. Ebert is a rarity. As I’ve written before, I spent significant time in two of what are supposed to be America’s most razzle-dazzle cities, San Francisco and Chicago. Both places, unusually, had two papers. And for extended periods of time in each city, years in both cases, both papers lacked rock critics worthy of the name. As a local alternative paper writer, I liked these circumstances. It made my outfit look better, and gave me (I wrote a lot of press criticism) something to humiliate the local dailies with, on an almost weekly basis. The dailies eventually rectified the situation, to varying degrees (the Sun-Times, Ebert’s paper, eventually smartened up and hired Jim DeRogatis, for example) but in each case only after years of alienating potential readers.
6. Journalists need to accept that most national cultural writing is going to be concentrated in a handful of supercritics. It does seem like the vast middle of a worthy profession (if one of somewhat recent vintage) is going to vaporize. That said, the benefits to readers are enormous. The hegemony of those supercritics will always be threatened by up and coming blogger-critics, who will not be hampered by the delivery monopoly dailies used to have.
7. Advice to kids: If you want to be a critic, concentrate on theater.
8. So… what should be done? In the realm of movies, here’s what I think a self-respecting daily should do:

• A) For most big movies, write up a neutral capsule describing the film, its director and stars and let people know what to expect. Then, whenever possible, run a couple of short reviews with conflicting takes on it. That provides a service to readers (that neutral capsule is important to some folks) and provokes thought. Kind of like Siskel & Ebert in print.
• B) Present it on the web in an open and spacious way that makes it easy for readers to “get” the contrast of the two reviews. Don’t shoehorn the feature into the paper’s reader-unfriendly web template. (And don’t use the same hedlines and subheds on the web that are used in the paper. The gnomic ludicrosities demanded by print publishing and often written by perverse copy editors are unneeded on the web. It is one of the dailies’ biggest vulnerabilities that they have not altered their hedline policy for web publishing.)
• C) Papers should play up iconoclasm and contrariness. You don’t need to have contempt for pop culture to say, stylishly, that Twilight, for example, sucks.
• D) Figure out what your town needs. San Francisco had one of the most vibrant film scenes in the country. At SF Weekly, we hired a guy named Gregg Rickmann to write an amazing column we called “Reps, Etc.” which detailed all the art, underground and odd-location films showing in town, putting films in context of festivals, interesting series and such; letting readers know what to expect at off-beat venues; and including anything else they might need, right down to including cross streets with the addresses. Amazingly, no other publication in town had ever taken such care with one of the dominant interests of the area.
• E) Even in a less adventurous town, maybe the staff film person should spend less time reviewing 10,000 B.C and more time playing up consumer issues; which theaters are jacking up prices, which have poor projection, or which offer digital projection, and making sure to highlight what offbeat product there is in town. Why? To “support the scene”? No! Because it’s a service the paper can provide to its readers that no one else can.