In the current business climate, print media’s having a rough go negotiating its place in a world where so much free information is available via the Internet. At ARTicles, the blog of the National Arts Journalism Program, Douglas McLennan used Roger Ebert’s meditation on the issue as a launching point. Ebert was bemoaning the state of criticism in newspapers and told this story:

Why do we need critics? A good friend of mine in a very big city was once told by his editor that the critic should “reflect the taste of the readers.” My friend said, “Does that mean the food critic should love McDonald’s?” The editor: “Absolutely.” I don’t believe readers buy a newspaper to read variations on the Ed McMahon line, “You are correct, sir!”

First response is that Ebert dates himself with the McMahon reference, who hasn’t been on TV regularly since Star Search went off the air in 1995, but otherwise, he’s right. If a critic shares the readers’ values, what does he or she have to contribute? What news is there for him or her to write? Good criticism, even in media that reaches broad audiences, gives them something to think about, even if it’s noticing that shots are actually framed. Obviously, the same is true for music. The critic should provide a perspective that gives readers something new to consider – even if after thinking about it, they reject it.

Ebert concludes that good criticism is dying because newspapers are remaking themselves in a more celebrity-obsessed mode, to which McLennan responds:

But it’s actually easier if you’re a movie fan to read intelligent movie reviews now than it was a decade ago. I can go to Rottentomatoes.com and find 112 reviews of Synecdoche, New York, and get a much wider range of opinion and exactly the kind of provocative criticism Ebert cherishes. I can follow Broadway or the travails of the LA art world much more easily than I could before. Yes, lots of this coverage is still being published in the daily newspapers. But increasingly it’s also coming from erudite blogs and other online publications.

It seems to me that this bluster about arts journalism leaving the daily newspaper is more about the crumbling state of newspapers and their reinvention than it is the disappearance of intelligent reporting or criticism. Intelligent journalism isn’t going away. There’s definitely a market for it. Newspapers are killing themselves as they take away readers’ reasons to pay attention to them. Fine. Let’s get over it and go to where the good stuff is.

This has certainly been my experience. In the last couple of years, I’ve found more thoughtful, provocative writing online than I’ve found in magazines and newspapers, partly because of the changing nature of print media, but also because of the near-infinite expandability of the Web. There’s room for more interesting writing because there’s room for more writing. Ultimately, the online journalism and criticism question is the same as the one about music online: Who’ll figure out how to make it easier to find and sort out? The person who can develop that software or process has the next Google.