It has been a tough summer for cultural critics. The Associated Press said it would end its weekly book reviews, citing “a thorough review of AP’s story offerings and what is being most read on our website and mobile apps as well as what customers are using.” Chicago Tribune film critic Michael Phillips took a buyout, leaving the paper without a chief film critic for the first time since the 1950s. Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday also took a buyout, while Vanity Fair parted ways with chief critic Richard Lawson. The New York Times reassigned four of its critics — television critic Margaret Lyons, music critic Jon Pareles, classical-music critic Zach Woolfe, and theater critic Jesse Green — to new roles, drawing an outcry from those who felt the paper was shrinking its arts coverage. In response to those moves, The New Yorker’s film critic Richard Brody wrote an impassioned essay titled “In Defense of the Traditional Review.”

There has been no single cause for these upheavals. The AP’s reviews were historically syndicated by daily papers, many of which no longer exist. Vanity Fair has a new editor, Mark Guiducci, who has decided to move away from trade-style reviews that are the bread and butter of industry-focused publications like Variety. The Times, for its part, insists that the shake-up at the “Culture” section is just that, not indicative of a broader shift. “Lost in the static around reassignments of four critics is the very welcome news that the Times is hiring four new critics,” said Times assistant managing editor Sam Sifton, who oversees the paper’s cultural coverage. “We’re taking valued colleagues who’ve done incredible work on their beat and moving them into new assignments where they can really benefit the report, and we’re taking that opportunity to inject some new voices and some new critics into the report.”

Still, the flurry of changes can’t be separated from the larger contraction of the media industry, which is forcing outlets of all sizes to make difficult decisions about how cultural criticism contributes to the bottom line at a time when there is no shortage of opinions or platforms on which to air them, from album reviews on YouTube to movie takes on Letterboxd. Other traditional functions of the review — telling readers what a book is about, say — have also been usurped by the internet. Criticism has been in decline for so long that you can count the full-time staff positions in certain critical fields on one hand — which makes every loss reverberate even........

© Daily Intelligencer