Thursday, April 30, 2009
News / News Bites Trib rejiggers its visual arts coverage
Posted by Deanna Isaacs on 04.30.09 at 12:29 PM
The Chicago Tribune's not talking, but gallerists are, and what they're talking about is how the daily plans to cover visual art now that it's sacked the city's its only full-time art critic, Alan Artner, in its latest round of cuts. Word is that they'll be doing it on a blog written by freelancers. Stay tuned for more.
Comments (7)
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That's a very pertinent question. But just for the sake of accuracy, Alan wasn't the city's only full time art critic. Lauren Weinberg of TOC is a full time critic...
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If you want to see what the Tribune is really up to read it here http://www.visualeditors.com/apple/2009/04/tribune-considers-design-copy-editing-functions-to-be-%E2%80%98manufacturing%E2%80%99/
Highly recommend the link that "The End is Here provides" above. It may be a little technical for some, but it should raise alarms. What the Tribune is doing is quickly slapping together prefab pages of all but local news and then transmitting the pages to the company's other newspapers around the country, which are forced to use them. The pages are quickly done, virtually all the stories have to be hacked and whacked down to nugget size, and the pages are quickly and sloppily assembled, many early in the day, which means that the little news they contain is likely to be stale by the next morning. Because of the strict, preset formating, the pages all look the same from day to day. Plus they're being used more and more in the Tribune itself. Welcome, Chicago, to the world of zombie newspapering.
Another sad day in the Tower with bosses admitting their gaffe over releasing unpublished copy to test groups. They've lost this staff.
@twitter Sad indeed. Here's the story: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5h09pJwjixHZuGPRV5yvPPMzYNlcgD97T45Q80
I shouldn't be surprised by anything Tribune anymore, but I continue to shake my head. Modules? Produced early in the day for the next day's edition? Unless I miss my guess, pages produced early in the day will need to draw predominantly on the previous day's news to publish in the following day's paper. Stories that are nearly 48 hours old? In a 24-hour news cycle? That's asinine. And as for the focus-group story that twitter mentioned and for which pelham provided the link? That's staggering. And all if it, cumulatively, is sad.
