Cross-posted from Knightarts.org

On Wednesday, April 13 I was invited to be a panelist at a Christie’s panel discussion titled “A Second Look at the Future of Arts Journalism.” The auction house convened a pretty august group, including Lindsey Pollack, editor in chief of Art in America, a 98-year-old magazine and one of the big three in contemporary art and Eric Gibson, editor of the Wall Street Journal’s Leisure & Arts page, which has been become a must-read with for all things cultural with the infusion of Rupert Murdock’s money. The panel was led by Sree Sreenivasan, dean of student affairs & digital media professor at the Columbia Journalism School

The room was filled with some of the leading arts journalists in the world, including Blake Gopnik of Newsweek; Kelly Crow of the WSJ; freelancer Lee Rosenbaum, also know by her blog handle CultureGrrl; and Phoebe Hoban, author of the recently published and beautifully written biography Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty.

The discussion was far ranging, but landed quickly on the search for the elusive business model that would allow arts journalists to make a living wage.  Doug McClennan’s oft quoted statistic of the number of arts journalists in America dropping 50% from 5,000 to 2,500 in the last five years put the issue in perspective.

I whispered about a yet to be formally announced Knight initiative in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts called the Arts Journalism Challenge. The challenge will launch in July in the eight Knight resident cities of Akron, Charlotte, Detroit, Macon, Miami, Philadelphia, Saint Paul and San Jose. Together with the NEA, Knight Foundation will be seeking ideas for how to increase community arts coverage in those eight cities. Knight and the NEA will send out an RFP, select the best ideas and fund the development of an action plan for each of them. The best plans will receive up to two years of funding to be launched with the goal to create a series of sustainable models to increase the level of community arts coverage. The eight knight cities are acting as a beta, with the possibility of a national launch in 2012.

The crowd at Christie’s was quite interested and the Twitter traffic was significant. The panel was live streamed and you can take a look at the discussion here. I want to thank Mary Trudel of Trudel Macpherson for all her efforts in putting the panel together and including me.  And additional thanks to Toby Usnik at Christie’s for sharing feedback on Knight initiatives like Random Acts of Culture and the Knight Arts Challenge.