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.

The idea of those fan pages on FB is that you add yourself as a fan of something and they then attach you to advertisements. I saw one a while back that showed Karina Longworth’s profile with a film and a company I was sure she wouldn’t advertise (post). Here is when it works the “right” way (Zellner and his brother made the film advertised, which premiered at Sundance):