Study looks at how/how much arts are covered

In recent months, many Seattle artists have hotly debated local media coverage of the arts. But behind the heat there has been little objective measure of the amount and kinds of coverage the arts get. Or a way of comparing arts coverage in Seattle with other cities.

Today, the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University releases the first comprehensive study that tries to quantify how arts and culture are reported in this country.

The study, sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts, looked at arts coverage in 15 newspapers in 10 regional cities, in three national dailies (The New York Times, USA Today and the Wall Street Journal), by The Associated Press, and on ABC, CBS and NBC.

The cities, chosen for their geographic diversity and range of population, were Chicago, Cleveland, Miami, San Francisco Bay Area, Portland, Ore., Houston, Philadelphia, Charlotte, Providence, R.I., and Denver. Though the study didn't include Seattle, it provides a national snapshot with which arts coverage here can be compared.

The report finds that while most newspapers have a commitment to arts coverage, the way they do it is a source of considerable debate between editors and writers.

Arts and entertainment coverage is seen as a juggling act between high art and popular culture, and between critical and celebrity journalism. While most newspapers have maintained a commitment to arts coverage, much arts writing has been squeezed into once- or twice-a-week entertainment sections where movie coverage dominates. And almost 50 percent of the space devoted to the arts is not filled with journalism, but by lists of showtimes and galleries.

Arts coverage gets an average of 7 percent of the news space at the 15 newspapers studied, less than business (9 percent) or sports (11 percent).

Movie coverage accounts for one-quarter of all arts coverage, with music (17 percent), books (16 percent), TV (12 percent) and performing arts (11 percent) trailing. The study found visual arts, architecture, dance and radio receive only "cursory attention" and that the visual arts are rarely covered by full-time staff writers.

One-third of all arts coverage is made up of reviews. Given the prominence of weekly entertainment sections, arts features -- profiles, trend pieces, interviews and previews -- dominate coverage. Arts news makes up less than 10 percent of typical cultural coverage.

While the visual arts get little ongoing attention, museums have figured out the art of the blockbuster. When a local museum runs a high-profile show, it can count on prominent coverage of the type usually devoted to the Hollywood publicity machine.

The study found that newspaper arts coverage defied characterization as elitist or populist. Mass entertainment was often fodder for critical reviews, while so-called high art was often the subject of extensive free publicity.

"High art -- if it was produced, presented or marketed in a way that made it engage a mainstream audience -- attracted the most comprehensive and prominent coverage of all artistic categories," concludes the report.

The New York Times is the most comprehensive source of cultural coverage nationally. In October 1998 -- the month chosen to monitor media cultural coverage -- The Times ran 19,000 column inches of writing about the arts. That's almost 2 1/2 times the 8,000 column-inch average of the 15 local newspapers in the study.

By comparison, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today devote less space to the arts, but make serious efforts to report on them.

Nightly network television news is the black hole of arts coverage. Though early-morning shows feature about one-fifth of their segments on arts -- mostly celebrity and author interviews, with the occasional movie review thrown in -- coverage of the arts is almost non-existent in the evenings. In October 1998, arts stories made up less than 1 percent of the nightly news lineup.

The full report can be found on the Internet at www.najp.org

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