ArtsATL: How a Determined Few Saved a City's Arts Coverage

It’s no secret that the decline of newspapers, from international to local, has dealt a particularly severe blow to arts coverage. Today, only a handful of newspapers and their websites employ writers—staff or free-lance--with a specialist’s knowledge of any of the artforms. Presenters, aficionados, audiences, and local businesses suffer for it.

As to the laid-off journalists, some have continued their beats on blogs; others launched websites: Oregon Arts Watch, San Francisco Classical Voice, The Arts Fuse (Boston), CultureMap (Texas), and Ludwig van (Toronto and Montreal) to name a few.

When the axe fell on The Miami Herald’s arts coverage, classical music critic Larry A. Johnson launched South Florida Classical Review in 2008, a venture whose success has spawned seven other sites under the “Classical Review” umbrella.

Things started in much the same way, when, in 2009, the corporate bosses of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) chose to eliminate the entire arts section. Undaunted, AJC music and visual arts critics Pierre Ruhe and Catherine Fox decided to take their gifts elsewhere and launch ArtsATL, an independent website to fill the void, and the city's arts community breathed a sigh of relief.

For a decade, ArtsATL did well—until, in 2019, as Executive Editor Scott Freeman put it in an interview last year, "we essentially ran out of money. … It was a journey, but we did make it. Then the pandemic hit."

With the arts community reeling from the cascade of misfortune brought on by COVID-19, and with, at that point (the summer of 2020), no end to the pandemic in sight, ArtsATL's board of directors decided to, in its euphemism, "sunset" the website.

Board gives up, editor presses on

"ArtsATL is not closing on my watch," declared Freeman to Fox. 

Luckily, earlier that year, veteran Atlanta marketing consultant Patti Siegel had approached both Freeman and the board: the latter never responded, but she and Freeman stayed in touch. When the decision came down to close the site, the two leapt into action, recruiting a new board of directors, raising funds, and, essentially, taking over the enterprise.

"Every person we talked to — from arts leaders to patrons — was horrified at the prospect of losing ArtsATL," Freeman recounted. "I think people saw that this could be ArtsATL 2.0 and wanted to embrace us. Patti was the missing element…steady as a rock."

Today, ArtsAtl is comfortably back in business.

A key element of that is its partnership with its founders’ former bosses at the AJC, to which, for a flat fee, ArtsATL licenses its news and reviews of the local Atlanta arts scene at a rate of around 20 articles per month. Coverage ranges from classical and jazz to theater, books, and visual arts, and forms what both outlets call the "backbone" of the AJC's arts coverage. It provides about a fifth of the site’s revenue and promotes ArtsATL and its writers (who get an additional fee when their articles run in the AJC) in the process.

That the AJC fired its arts section and then essentially rehired it several years later is a kind a poetic justice.

"We tried really, really hard not to gloat," smiled Siegel.

Former employer comes courting

"They actually reached out about a year or two before COVID," said Freeman over Zoom, “and again in 2021 to recharge the conversation."

“We did test the partnership before we inked the deal,” said Siegel, admitting they were “a little wary” at the start. “We wanted to see how it would work, if it would add a lot to Scott's week. We made it official and signed a contract with a start date of January 2022 and [agreed] to keep going until somebody says stop."

"They are a fabulous partner,” she added.

"It's beneficial to them because they get our expertise,” said Freeman, “and it puts us in front of their readers, an audience that we didn't always have before." 

Is there any particular sort of content the paper seems to prefer? "Not really,” said Freeman, who works primarily with the AJC's arts and entertainment editor, Shane Harrison. "We have a pretty eclectic mix, and they take all of it."

Could the partnership be a model for other metros? While the structure is somewhat different, The Dallas Morning News and public radio/TV station KERA launched a joint venture called Arts Access, and it's possible that something similar will arise from the recent merger of the Chicago Sun-Times with Chicago Public Media. Siegel thinks such partnerships only make sense: "I'm sure if there were more publications like us that were city-specific, newspapers would be interested in exploring that. Because they're all hurting, you know?"

Pictured: Scott Freeman, Patti Siegel