Another longtime film critic for a major daily newspaper lost his job recently, when the 150-year-old Rocky Mountain News closed its doors.
Robert Denerstein covered movies for the Rocky for 27 years. Denerstein, like other lifer film critics facing similar fates, has soldiered on with his own blog, Denerstein Unleashed, on which he does much of what he did before, reviewing movies and providing commentary on the art and the industry of filmmaking.
(No, I don’t know Denerstein, and we’ve never corresponded).
I particularly enjoyed what he had to say about the ethics (er, the lack thereof) of parents who knowingly subject their children to the horrors of movies like The Last House on the Left, an odious exploitation film that features a graphic rape of a young woman and other explicit acts of extreme violence.
Here’s what Denerstein wrote (click here to read): “I’ve said it before. I’ll say it again. To my way of thinking, taking a kid to this kind of movie constitutes a blatant form of parental irresponsibility. Theaters only can caution parents about potentially objectionable content in a movie. The same goes for publicists who run preview screenings. Kids accompanied by adults can’t be kept out. I wish it weren’t that way, but it is. So unless a movie has been given the more restrictive NC-17 rating, it’s up to parents to protect their children from big-screen terror. Shame on those who don’t.”
My sentiments exactly.
Blogs are nice and all. But Denerstein potentially has an even brighter future, thanks to his participation in an innovative journalism experiment.
He’s one of a group of former Rocky Mountain News writers and editors who are collaborating on a subscription-based news service based in Denver.
The initiative, called the InDenver Times, works like this: Subscribers pay a minimum of $4.99 month for access to the site and its ancillary multimedia features. If/when at least 50,000 people have pledged to subscribe, the site will fully launch. The deadline: April 23.
Will this model of newspapering (minus the paper) work? Who knows? But if it does, it would mean very positive things for other newspapers desperately seeking a life preserver.
And, if it does, I suspect that many news organizations would seriously and very quickly reconsider their so far self-destructive strategy of providing free content online.
There IS some precedent to the InDenver Times approach, though, although there are substantial differences between the two entities.
MinnPost.com, a nonprofit online newspaper in Minneapolis, launched in summer 2007. Earlier this month, the site reported a 31-day tally of one million page views. Still, word came that the organization doesn’t expect to break even until 2012, according to a report in Minneapolis CityPages.
“When we launched we had no full-time staff or contract writers,” MinnPost founder told CityPages. “It was 100 percent freelance by-the-piece. Now the substantial majority of the site is written either by staff writers or contract writers.”
More posts, of shorter length, have been key to MinnPost’s growth in readership, Kramer said.
“I’d say the most dramatic thing we learned was that having regular writers writing very frequently has a huge impact on traffic,” says Kramer. “Having interesting, lively content with a lot of frequency by the same writers, that’s really what’s made the most difference.”
It’s my view that Democracy works best when the press is around to keep watch on what the politicians are doing in the name of the people.
The country only stands to suffer when professionally staffed news organizations fail. So here’s to the success of InDenver Times and MinnPost.com.
