David Carr reported yesterday in The New York Times that several newspapers across the country are laying off film critics. He starts off the article with comments from distributors who seem to lament the loss though the tone of the article overall seems to be a snide commentary on online film writers, or maybe I’m projecting?

The paper owners claim poverty and in the age of instant syndication, why can’t they make it work with a handful of national critics? After all, your 21s, Drillbit Taylors and Leatherheads are the same no matter where you see them, right? Welcome to the Clear Channel phenomena where local voices are purged in favor of corporate homogenization in the name of profits.

Carr’s article claims that, what David Poland and S.T. VanAirsdale call “serious films,” which seems to mean independent and foreign films from the context of the article, will suffer at the box office for lack of print film critic champions. It seems to me that there are a lot of issues wrapped up in this discussion and unfortunaly Carr’s article barely scratches the surface. Eugene Hernandez opened another discussion forum on his blog, rightly, particularly since indiewire is cited as one of the spots where folks can go online to find movie news.

Should we only take film writing that appears in print seriously? To be honest, I get a bit tired of reading the same critics all the time. I enjoy the diversity of writing on the net. Why should online critique of a film should be taken less seriously than print? Maybe because the print critics mentioned in Carr’s article have been around a long time? The up and coming critics couldn’t get full-time gigs because paper revenues have been falling for a long time. They took up the DIY spirit so prevalent today and started self-publishing so they could do what they love, and hopefully find an audience. Why does that make them less serious? It’s a question of economics over talent in at least some cases.

Glossed over in Carr’s article is the number of releases in a year. They keep coming from all sides, not even Karina Longworth (obliquely cited in the article by her outlet - Spout) can keep up with everything that comes out. And hell, if she can’t, who could? It’s up to editors to decide what is of interest to their audience and focus their coverage. This helps movies find their niche audience, which is all there can really be when there are so many movies. Hollywood dominates the multiplexes, so folks interested in film beyond that limited scope are finding other ways to see their films and if they type a title into Google, chances are they will find a lot of information about it. If you have trouble distiguishing between good writing and bad, that’s another issue.

The last thing I’ll say about this is about laziness. In the hay days of print media, Studios could control who was writing, when they would release coverage and they had (and still have) a lot of sway to ensure their material is covered. There are so many blogs and no centralized way of reaching them, which requires a whole new PR strategy. What is the genre? Which websites are most popular for that genre? Where is the writer located and how will s/he see the film? Do we deign to send an email via a contact form on a website? It’s hard to put together press lists these days and even harder to discern who the key people are that will tip your publicity effort. Not easy, but like the example in Carr’s article–The Lives of Others–if a film is good, the low murmur will continue until it blows up. If the film is no good, yeah, you don’t get your flash-in-a-pan day-of-opening national coverage to bank a few million and then pull the film.

I think I’ve ranted about this before and I’m not sure that it’s productive. I write about films; I know that through this blog and the other outlets I write for, I’ve been able to meet a lot of great people I might not otherwise have met so I whole-heartedly believe in this method of communicating. It helps me connect to my community and no one, yet, has told me they think I’m a hack, so I’m going to keep doing it. I guess the article ruffled my feathers because I don’t think that writing online should be taken less seriously than print; nor do I believe that there is any film that at the end of the day should be labeled as so serious, it needs a full-time newspaper employee to review it. Art is art. It helps us understand our world in new ways (hopefully) but it’s not millions of people dead through war, disease and famine each year; it’s not suffering daily life with ALS or MS; it’s not the heat and drought that are coming in a generation or two as a result of our blase attitudes toward the world we live in–that’s serious, at least in my book. Move online and be happy that we can still watch and write about movies and get paid for it.