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Entertainment Journalism

As new forms and delivery systems for arts and entertainment proliferated, interest in news and comment on all aspects of entertainment and its creators reached new heights in the early twenty-first century. The rise of blogs and other Internet-based avenues for sharing information helped democratize entertainment journalism by throwing it open to amateurs and semi-professionals. At the same time, serious criticism by trained professionals seemed in decline, resulting in a trivia-obsessed public and a reduced market for serious reviews of traditional art forms.

At a time when hard news has softened into what could be termed a 24-hour song and dance, parameters of entertainment journalism can be difficult to identify. Journalism about entertainers can lose definition when many journalists appear to have become entertainers. Meanwhile, infotainment is offered alongside self-avowed “fake news” comedy venues like The Daily Show and The Onion—which, in turn, is where increasing numbers of citizens say they get their news (and, according to some research, are better informed than those who stick to more traditional sources). Infotainment—the practice of mixing news with entertainment—is not new; it dates at least as far back as the medieval period, when traveling troubadours and theater troupes in a pre-literate age shared gossip and events from towns they had recently visited. But such light content has increasingly dominated what is being called a post-literate age.

When Neil Postman wrote his landmark treatise Amusing Ourselves to Death in 1985—before the rise of the Internet and its incarnations of news lite—he was primarily concerned with the dumbing down of both America and the world in a post-literate age. He saw this phenomenon as the result of people gorging on the eye candy of television in preference to the more intellectually demanding medium of print. Postman had no objection to entertainment, even of the mindless variety; what he feared was a citizenry that could no longer tell the difference.

Fewer Professionals, More Amateurs

The landscape of entertainment journalism at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century is marked by a growing conundrum: We have fewer critics of the arts than we did 100 years ago. Yet at the same time, we have far more of them. A century earlier, when magazines were our only national medium and newspapers were at their most plentiful, a major city like Chicago would have roughly a dozen daily newspapers, each with its own theater, music, and art critics. A hundred years later, Chicago had a few suburban papers and two major downtown dailies, only one of which, the Tribune, dominated those zip codes that were home to most patrons of the arts. Other cities followed the same pattern. So while the proliferation of blogs and websites has increased the raw number of critics writing, most communities find that for a play or exhibit to succeed financial-ly—to draw enough customers to support the organization that produced it—it must gain a positive review from the critic who works for the dominant (or, in an increasing number of venues, the only) newspaper.

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