The Salt Lake Tribune‘s Sean P. Means continues the lament about dead-tree film critics being shown the door by major newspapers and syndicates. “It seems like every week we in the news business hear about another paper cutting staff,” he writes, [“and] every time it happens, it seems, at least one of the jobs cut is the movie critic’s.”
Besides the obvious economic reasons, a key reason for this, as I said to the Hollywood Reporter‘s Gregg Goldstein a few days ago, is that today’s moviegoers are far less interested in meekly accepting the word of the lofty know-it-alls. It’s all about the conversation, the community talk-back. And like I said, there’s a small group of online critics who genuinely matter and are, in the parlance of the trade, ‘conversation starters.’
This is where it’s at, where it’s all going. Obviously not among the moviegoers of Hillary Clinton‘s and John McCain‘s generation, but among the GenX Barack Obama crowd and younger.