319 stories by "Douglas McLennan"
If you’re a follower of ArtsJournal blogs, you’ll notice that this blog doesn’t look the same as any of the others. That’s because I’m in the midst of redesigni…
Professional sports has more money than God, and they spend more to attract and entertain fans than anyone else. So how does the NFL sell itself? Not by touting the quality of its games. The…
Professional sports has more money than God, and they spend more to attract and entertain fans than anyone else. So how does the NFL sell itself? Not by touting the quality of its games. The…
Is the future of live classical music recitals to turn them into a multimedia experience that is somehow more "familiar" to a generation raised on video screens. Here's a report from Lang La…
Is the future of live classical music recitals to turn them into a multimedia experience that is somehow more “familiar” to a generation raised on video screens. Here’s a r…
How do you make a living as an artist? In the old mass-culture model you needed a distribution and marketing engine that could fire up on your behalf to reach as many people as possible. Sel…
How do you make a living as an artist? In the old mass-culture model you needed a distribution and marketing engine that could fire up on your behalf to reach as many people as possible. Sel…
The NYT's Charles Isherwood writes about what he calls the "odd-man-out" syndrome: This can roughly be described as the experience of attending an event at which much of the audience appears…
Nick Carr has a great post about the course of technology development. Progress doesn't always go the way we think it ought to (even if we're right).Progress may, for a time, intersect with …
Thanks to those who volunteered to host a webstream of the Arts Journalism Summit at USC today. Streaming begins at 9AM pdt. See you in a few hours. (Looking for more information about the S…
UPDATE: The first blogs are beginning to sign up to stream: www.createquity.com, www.artsDC.com, http://gatheringnote www.seattledances, www.salvadorcastillo.wordpress.com. One blogger has a…
This week I gave a talk in San Francisco and I mentioned that Sunday - today - ArtsJournal is ten years old. In web terms, that makes us pretty old. Except, in the room were the editors of a…
I've been on a lot of airplanes recently. Flying isn't much fun, but I like being in other places. So in the process of travel I tend to see those around me as either obstacles to my getting…
Ken Brecher tells this story about Alexander Graham Bell. The inventor of the telephone apparently spent the last part of his life railing against the way people were using his invention. Wh…
The latest new-generation movie megaplex recently opened near us. It's got stadium seating, reclining extra-wide luxurious seats with cup holders in the armrests, and so much legroom you cou…
Choice is good right? Malcom Gladwell does a great talk on how Howard Moskowitz revolutionized marketing by understanding the dynamics of choice. His example here is spaghetti sauce. Traditi…
I was a bit surprised by some of the reaction to my last post on the unsustainability of the ticket sales model in the Attention Economy. Boil down my argument and it's essentially this: pro…
Another lifetime ago we were in the Manufacturing Economy. We made things. Then we were in the Transportation Economy. We outsourced making things and brought whatever we needed to us. Then …
In the past couple of years, half of all the staff arts journalism jobs in the US have been eliminated. In some cases, newspapers offloading their staff critics have replaced them with freel…
