Bright lights? Big deal.

Half-court press
“With the advent of Broadway in Chicago,” says Carrie Kaufman, editor of Chicago’s entertainment industry trade paper Performink, “downtown tends to get a lot of press coverage.”

That’s putting it mildly. As high-profile New York shows continue to find homes downtown, journalists are obligated to write about them. But now, as independent artists are forced to compete with marquee shows for the ink and column inches of arts journalists, these same reporters have less ink and column inches than ever to spare, something almost everyone interviewed for this story lamented.

SLINGS AND SPARROWS The House Theatre’s Nathan Allen takes outrageous fortune in stride.

Photo: Anna Knott

“It’s happening to arts coverage almost everywhere,” Rich says. “You have more theaters competing for less space and the ones with the biggest money, i.e., the biggest advertisers and biggest hype, get more of that space.”

Gone is the heyday of Richard Christiansen, the distinguished former chief drama critic of the Chicago Tribune, who retired in 2002. Famed for his willingness to visit unheard-of companies in makeshift spaces, Christiansen drew attention to the storefront movement and set the standard for the city’s theater journalists. (You won’t find a Chicago theater artist who doesn’t speak reverently of him.)

But Christiansen, notoriously humble about his contribution, is quick to share credit with other publications who helped shoulder the burden of coverage. “The only attention these impoverished theaters could count on was from publications like the Reader,” Christiansen says.

The Reader’s once-liberal editorial policy of reviewing every play that opened in town, no matter how below the radar, is no longer something any publication can accommodate (including this one). But at its height in the ’90s, the free press nurtured the city’s storefront community by creating a media-theater feedback loop; the more plays received reviews, the more butts there were in seats, the more plays got produced, and back again.

But Craigslist changed all that. Because the service site is free, the classified-ad sales that helped finance the Reader have dwindled, and major cuts in length and number of reviews followed, as has been extensively chronicled by that paper’s own ace media analyst Michael Miner. Meanwhile, as the arts continue to sag as a national priority, the Tribune has slimmed down from two on-staff writers to one (and a handful of freelancers) to cover theater. The same goes for the Sun-Times, which has only one full-time theater writer on its masthead (who is also required to cover dance). Consequently, arts writers are asked to pull treacherous double duty—acting as both reporters and critics.

But while the theater community definitely feels the pinch of reduced coverage, the average reader isn’t likely to notice the problem.  “Nowhere in this country has the distinction between journalism and publicity,” Rich says, “been blurred more than the entertainment industry.”