I just think it’s the wrong way to understand this crisis, to expect to keep the same privileges in an entirely different context. Maybe commenting movies was never an activity worth earning a salary…
A.O. Scott drawing the line between paid critics and amateurs is symptomatic of the irrelevance of this professional discrimination! A salary doesn’t make a good critic. The wide circulation of a newspaper (or a website) shouldn’t make the influence of a critic either.

Cultural awareness and critical education of the audience are far more important issues for critics to confront and improve. I’m more worried about the global state of artistic productions in cinema in the long term, than about the jobs of a few individual critics in the short term… When cinema will do without reviews there will be no job at all for ALL critics!

This said, I agree with your comments on the “great divide”, the absence of “level conversation” and “the pyramid”.

Josh: I know you didn’t. I was just trying to say that that was going to be an unfortunate and difficult-to-avoid side effect.

I’m sure it’s been true for a long time in the print world, but it seems true now more than ever that the people making money in publishing are rarely the writers.

Building a reputation online helps but it seems like a very different proposition than building a reputation as a print critic. Some of the print critics resent how someone can build up online credibility in what they consider a very short amount of time. Unfortunately, credibility doesn’t pay the rent.

For those of you trying to make your living writing about film, I wish you good luck, but all I can see is a future of rapidly diminishing returns.

Print — and TV — reporters seem very hostile to political blogs especially in regards that the “common folk” can criticize their work. I don’t understand that attitude of ever thinking that I’m above it all because I’ve earned the prestige for being associated with a brand name.

So, I don’t agree with Josh at all that there needs to be any kind of “system” that anoints certain people with authority that they can wave around with their airs of superiority. I liked David Hudson’s commentary on this post in which he talked about Roger Ebert, who is probably at the very top of the heap because he’s always seemed so accessible, particularly in regards with having a strong Internet presence. He created his own “brand” independent of the Sun-Times. He’s earned respect not because the Sun-Times or PBS bestowed it on him, but by just being visibly out there. What other A-level critic out there has a URL of just their name?

And one last note to Karina, to paraphrase an old saying: Your career is what happens while you’re making your plans for one.

More than just giving a voice to people who don’t hold the keys to the kingdom, I think the internet also is helping to break audiences into smaller camps of fandom. With the exception of the increasingly desperate blockbusters (about which critical opinion is meaningless), audiences for movies are shrinking below a level that can attract the giant readership required by the old-school monolithic publications. Are even the audiences of modestly successful critical darlings like No Country For Old Men big enough to support Time magazine or the NY Times?

The internet provides exposure for smaller movies and communties for people to talk about them, to say nothing of the raft of movie alternatives that are available. If distribution truly goes the way of the digital download, I think that’ll really be the end of the old fashioned critic.

I don’t think professional critics are going to go away though. Their mass influence may decrease, but the good writers who can adapt to the community aspect of the internet (and the lower pay resulting from smaller readerships) will thrive.

In fact, with the increased fragmentation, a good critic is more valuable than ever.

That was kind of a long, unplanned ramble. Sorry about that.

I see no defensible reason for Scott (whose writing I like) being unwilling to comment on a blog post. Everybody is busy and overextended these days, including bloggers, and everybody’s time is as valuable as Scott’s, so that’s no excuse. “Royalty and rabble” sums it up well. And in fact, some of the best film criticism around is online-only or jointly disseminated by print and cyber. Ever check out the “a_film_by” yahoo group? Great stuff, though admittedly not mainstream.

Something to think about, too (though it may be anathema to the dream), is that for some of us, having a day job and writing film criticism on the side is a pretty good deal. Only a handful of people (a statistically insignificant number, undoubtedly) can make a full-time living doing this.

Thanks again for the post, Karina.

huh? like most discussions about critics, this is pretty ridiculous.

But now people at that level are being laid off and bought out left and right, and as much as I like reading A.O. Scott, I don’t see more inherent value in reading him than in reading Karina Longworth. Both are providing valuable, interesting insights into film, both are cogent and smart writers, both have opinions I respect. Does it matter that one has the NY Times stamp of approval?

(To put it another way, is there more value in Matt Seitz’s reviews for the Times than in his reviews for The House Next Door? Or in Jeannette Catsoulis’s reviews for the Times over her reviews for Las Vegas CityLife? I know I prefer the latter in both cases.)

But at the same time I’m somewhat sympathetic to Scott’s desire to keep the barbarians outside the gates, so to speak. Scott and Longworth may be roughly equal, but what about Scott and random IMDb commenter? Or Longworth and random IMDb commenter, for that matter? Karina, Spout is giving you a stamp of authority similar to Scott’s, even if it’s considered less prestigious (for now, at least). I think if we don’t have some system that we can trust to validate content, then we’re completely lost. (That doesn’t have to be the NYT, of course - when Matt Seitz publishes a writer I’ve never heard of, I trust that person will be worth reading.)

Anyway, I don’t have any answers either, and the only way I avoid existential freak-outs about the future of my career is not to think about it. But it’s interesting that in the last few years, full-time print critic and full-time film blogger have become about equal in their appeal to me as possible future goals, and the way things are going, the latter may surpass the former very soon. I’m not sure what that means, but I’m glad that people like you and A.O. Scott are at least attempting to have a dialogue about it.

This whole argument between the old guard and the new upstarts reminds me of similar struggle in the arena of filmmaking itself. There are the ‘old fogeys’ who stand by the sovereignty of their tried and true methods even as the young bucks (often inadvertently) circumvent them.

I love meeting the kids who share their predecessor’s woes; the kid who wants to be the next A.O. Scott and worries that, thanks to his peers, there won’t be a pyramid to ascend to the top of.