By Barry Johnson
Wow! I know I've been gone a LONG time, and I should have explained myself LONG before now.
Mostly, I've been working on a new arts and culture journalism site, Oregon Arts Watch. A lot of other people have been working on it, too. And a couple of weeks ago, we launched a "starter kit" website, while our ace web designer builds a more functional and distinctive site for us. I hope you'll make your way over there. So far, the primary contributors are Brett Campbell, Lisa Radon and I, but more writers are working on stories as we speak.
For starters, we're going to focus on theater, dance, classical music and jazz, and visual arts, though we've already lurched into film and TV. If things work out, we'll deal with almost anything cultural.
The prime driver of Oregon Arts Watch is the observation that journalism (broadly speaking) as a profession is starting to disappear, especially journalism aimed at the cultural life we share together. The struggles of American newspapers and the news departments of radio and television stations is well know. At the same time, we observed that the practices of journalism needed to change, too, that the inquiry at the heart of all good journalism needed to be more open-minded, transparent and rigorous than what it had become. Oregon Arts Watch is a non-profit, and we couldn't in good conscience ask for public support without reforming the way we did business.
What about Arts Dispatch? I'm going to try to keep it going. For starters, I'm going to post the little columns I'm writing for Oregon Public Broadcasting's Arts & Life page here each Monday. Those are little wrap-ups of what I ran into over the weekend. After that, we'll just have to see. Right now, I can imagine a lot of things that I'd want to put into a personal blog that I would NOT want to post on a more general journalism site. The question is time: Getting Oregon Arts Watch started has consumed a lot of that, and I just know that keeping it going will, too. As I said, we'll see.
For those of you who have visited, my deepest thanks. And if I think I can't do a better job of keeping this site operational, I'll let you know, and we'll give it a little vacation!
Showing posts with label Oregon Arts Watch. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Oregon Arts Watch. Show all posts
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Accounting for missing posts: I'm blaming something called Oregon Arts Watch
By Barry Johnson
We have some pretty long pauses here at Arts Dispatch -- maybe you've noticed. That's not because we don't have stuff on our minds just begging to escape to the free world. No, sometimes business intervenes and the old brainpan gets pretty clogged with fragments of half-remembered thoughts!
Sometimes that business is a freelance assignment or two. I've written a couple of short articles for my old colleague Randy Gragg at Portland Monthly, for example, the first, on choreographer Mary Oslund, is due out in January. But mostly I've been plugging away at starting something I'm calling Oregon Arts Watch, as I've written here before, an arts journalism non-profit.
Very soon, I'm going to post the details of that project here. But you can get some idea of what it's all about from two reputable sources. The first is a series of six columns that Michael "Portland Afoot" Andersen and I wrote for Launch Pad, an entrepreneurial journalism feature of the on-line version of the Columbia Journalism Review. We discussed our efforts to get our journalism projects off the ground, devoting each column to a separate issue, from the technical (Michael has the goods on useful software for journalism start-ups, believe me!) to the philosophical (where I hold forth in my typically gassy way), and several points in between. I especially liked our collaboration on failure. The format is just a conversation, back and forth, Michael to me to Michael, which we conducted on Etherpad, an excellent, open-source, online tool for this sort of thing.
The second reputable source is the result of some good fortune: Oregon Arts Watch was lucky to receive a New Voices grant this year. New Voices is an initiative of J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism, which funds "innovative, participatory news experiments," and it is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Part of the grant is a regular report on the progress of the project, and J-Lab has just published the first one on Oregon Arts Watch, written by Lori Grisham. Because it's the first, it also includes some of the basic ingredients of the model we're trying to launch.
I'm intending to give you a fuller account of the project in a few days, primarily because I want your thoughts about it all. And maybe even your support, if you agree with me that it's necessary and might even work! Meanwhile, I'll try to keep a better flow going to Arts Dispatch, if only because I'm worried that those jagged shards of thoughts will migrate to my vital organs...
We have some pretty long pauses here at Arts Dispatch -- maybe you've noticed. That's not because we don't have stuff on our minds just begging to escape to the free world. No, sometimes business intervenes and the old brainpan gets pretty clogged with fragments of half-remembered thoughts!
Sometimes that business is a freelance assignment or two. I've written a couple of short articles for my old colleague Randy Gragg at Portland Monthly, for example, the first, on choreographer Mary Oslund, is due out in January. But mostly I've been plugging away at starting something I'm calling Oregon Arts Watch, as I've written here before, an arts journalism non-profit.
Very soon, I'm going to post the details of that project here. But you can get some idea of what it's all about from two reputable sources. The first is a series of six columns that Michael "Portland Afoot" Andersen and I wrote for Launch Pad, an entrepreneurial journalism feature of the on-line version of the Columbia Journalism Review. We discussed our efforts to get our journalism projects off the ground, devoting each column to a separate issue, from the technical (Michael has the goods on useful software for journalism start-ups, believe me!) to the philosophical (where I hold forth in my typically gassy way), and several points in between. I especially liked our collaboration on failure. The format is just a conversation, back and forth, Michael to me to Michael, which we conducted on Etherpad, an excellent, open-source, online tool for this sort of thing.
The second reputable source is the result of some good fortune: Oregon Arts Watch was lucky to receive a New Voices grant this year. New Voices is an initiative of J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism, which funds "innovative, participatory news experiments," and it is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Part of the grant is a regular report on the progress of the project, and J-Lab has just published the first one on Oregon Arts Watch, written by Lori Grisham. Because it's the first, it also includes some of the basic ingredients of the model we're trying to launch.
I'm intending to give you a fuller account of the project in a few days, primarily because I want your thoughts about it all. And maybe even your support, if you agree with me that it's necessary and might even work! Meanwhile, I'll try to keep a better flow going to Arts Dispatch, if only because I'm worried that those jagged shards of thoughts will migrate to my vital organs...
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