Variety‘s Anne Thompson led a discussion yesterday at the Seattle Film Festival about the migration of film criticism to the web, but she hadn’t included a report on her blog as of 2:20 pm Pacific. Amazon.com essayist Tim Appelo also took part. I asked Appelo to send me a recording of the discussion, but he wrote me today to inform that “the recorder died so there’s no record of the event.”
Appelo had asked me to tap out a thought or two about the topic at hand, which I sent to him yesterday morning. He says he read it “to the panel audience in stentorian tones and it was a hit.” It’s no big deal, but here’s what I sent:
“Any film critic who’s not writing directly for an online audience, or at least is putting his/her stuff online so the under-35s can read and react, is writing his or her own obituary. Print is dying, collapsing, downsizing. The old models and old configurations don’t work any more, and even the most old-school media reactionaries are admitting this.
“That said, I am sentimentally distraught at the prospect of newspapers like the New York Times or the San Francisco Chronicle or the Boston Pheonix not being as available for a good, mid-morning read at some cool-ass cafe in Manhattan, San Francisco or Boston. An all-cyber, all-the-time world is not comforting to me. But we are in the middle of a revolution, and, as we all know, revolutions can be brutal and unkind.”