HELP WANTED

posted by James Reel

    Rumor has it that now that Ann Brown has moved permanently to the head of the Arizona Daily Star’s opinion pages, theater critic Kathleen Allen will take over Ann’s old job as editor of the paper’s weekly entertainment tab, Caliente. (I edited Caliente’s precursor section for a while in the late 1990s.) This means that the theater-critic slot will be open. A newsroom informant tells me that management will probably slide the world-music critic into that position.
    I don’t know whether this is good news or bad, because the fellow has yet to prove himself as a theater critic, and I’m happy to give him the benefit of the doubt. If the rumor is true, though, it’s symptomatic of poor management practices at the Star, where editors believe that arts critics are as interchangeable as newsside reporters. Sure, you can rotate a young reporter from the police beat to courts to schools. As long as the reporter has access to the paper’s archives and people with fair institutional memories, moving from one beat to another is no problem. (Because of that institutional memory requirement, though, taking over a government beat is not so easy.) Arts coverage, in contrast, requires specialized knowledge of an arcane field, and the ability to write about it engagingly yet intelligently. The Star has embarrassed itself in the community by dumping an unsophisticated kid from the sports department into the movie critic’s position, and handing classical music coverage to someone who knows a lot about country music but can’t tell a clarinet from an English horn. (The Star "corrected" the story in that link, but still got the instrumentation wrong.) Let’s hope something similar doesn’t happen with the theater beat.
    If I were king of the Arizona Daily Star, I’d pull copy editor M. Scot Skinner kicking and screaming back into his old theater-criticism job. Scot was despised in some quarters of the theater community, but he knew what he was talking about, and expressed his opinions knowledgably and forcefully. Then I’d lure Ken LaFave down from Phoenix to take over the classical music beat, where he started back in the 1970s, and force executive editor Bobbie Jo Buel to get down on her knees and apologize to Renée Downing and beg her to return to the Star and review movies again. Then I’d send Bobbie Jo and her minions to the sports department, where they would toil as agate clerks while listening to the collected works of rapper Vanilla Ice. Yes, it’s cruel, but torture is now OK in the USA. I'm not talking about Abu Ghraib and Gitmo; every day, newspapers torture their readers with inept arts criticism.