Jennie Dorris

I’m sad to see theater critic John Moore and music/visual art critic Kyle MacMillan are taking the Denver Post‘s buyout. I’m not here to evaluate their decisions. I’m here to worry about the decline of newspapers supporting full-time arts writers and the effect that this has on the community. Especially a community like Denver, which is fighting a cow-town image in the national arts scene.

I’ve been on both sides of the issue. I used to write arts features regularly as a freelancer for Boulder’s Camera. I was a weekly columnist, and it was made known to me that I was the highest paid columnist on staff. I wrote 600 words a week, and I received $100. When I augmented my monthly freelance contract to include four columns, a Friday Magazine cover story (the weekend magazine you can get for free all over town), and two other centerpiece stories for other sections, I was hopeful that I could negotiate a sum that could keep me afloat financially.

For the four columns and three beefy stories, I had to first find my ideas, pitch my ideas, and then, of course, report. I’d crank out 6,000-7,000 words a month. All of this for $800. (Before taxes.) And I was told, repeatedly, it was one of the best contracts that a freelancer had.

I quit after a year. $640 a month, after taxes, was hard to live on. But I still think a lot about the stories I wrote then, about the contemporary ballet company, the men who grew their white beards long to sit as Santa in the malls, the arts festival where small children dressed as fairies among tulips. (Yes, it’s Boulder.)

When it was my turn to start an arts organization, I learned what it was like on the other side of the equation. My group, Telling Stories, took classical music and funny essays out of the concert hall and into coffee shops. And the media liked that. At many of the publications, I talked with overworked reporters who wrote about everything, so I found myself having to explain who Benjamin Britten was and how piano trios worked. But there were a few “real” arts critics still left, and I invited them with great pride to our shows. At our third official concert, the music critic for the Rocky Mountain News attended, and wrote a nice piece about us. I did an interview with him, and I got to talk about my musical training. He understood the works we performed, and could (to our terror) compare our performances to other professional groups.

Then the Rocky closed, and we were featured by Kyle MacMillan in the Post. He did a great three-part series about organizations that were saving classical music, and he included Telling Stories in all three articles. Not only did it give us a huge boost of pride, people from around the nation noticed us.

I worry for artists now that both Kyle and John are gone from the Post, with the Rocky long shuttered. I worry that artists won’t be able to find a writer who is well versed in their discipline with whom they can really talk to about their project. I’m worried that without the critics’ expertise, they aren’t able to shout Denver’s achievements to the larger art community. I’m worried the papers will hire young freelancers, like I used to be, and pay them cheaply to grind out a lot of work. I’m worried those writers aren’t passionate about the acoustics in the symphony hall, the architecture of the new wing of the art museum, the summer series that attracts national attention. I’m worried they don’t feel, like Kyle excellently wrote, “The arts are not a luxury but an essential part of life. They probe the very essence of what it means to be human, taking us on emotional journeys that bring us face to face with our weaknesses and sorrows, but that also lift us to incredible heights of joy.”