Learn a lesson from NY Times readers

A while back I reported that the WaPo has decided to cut its galleries coverage by half - at least until January 2005, when a final decision will be made. I also suggested that readers write letters to the paper's editor asking Downie to cancel that decision (if he is even aware of it).

A while back, the New York Times decided to end its cultural listings section; not end or reduce their arts coverage, but just their cultural listings.

Daniel Okrent writes in the NY Times:

It landed on my desk a few weeks ago with an echoing thump that could have awakened Brooks Atkinson. On the cover it said "Save the Listings: Restore the 'Arts & Leisure Guide' to the Sunday New York Times." Inside, 615 pages carried 5,000 Internet-gathered signatures, many of them accompanied by bits of testimony variously beseeching, enraged or tearful.

Just a few weeks earlier, The Times had tossed the venerable columns of agate type that had filled so many pages of the Arts & Leisure section for so long, with as many as 300 cultural events acknowledged, however briefly, in a single edition.

Okrent then admits that:

Editors reacted to the petition, I soon learned, the way editors almost always react when readers rise against a long-planned, well-intended innovation: a little dumbfounded, a little defensive, a little dismissive.

And Okrent discusses editorial surprise at how upset readers were:

In this case, the editors had helped more than enough to earn the readers' disapproval. At a time when most American newspapers are slashing arts coverage (according to a study conducted by the National Arts Journalism Project at Columbia, from 1998 to 2003 the space given to cultural coverage in major American papers dropped by roughly 25 percent), The Times had gone in the opposite direction. The revamped cultural report now included more than seven additional pages per week. Twenty staff positions were created to produce the new content and improve the old. Full-time reporters had been put on the architecture, classical music and theater beats, and additional reporters will soon supplement the art, movie and television groups. Critics have been newly assigned to experimental arts, the Internet, and "nonart museums and exhibitions" (there must be a better phrase than that), and some lustrous new hires - notably Manohla Dargis on movies and Charles Isherwood on theater - have brought an added gleam to existing positions.

But he notes that still "all that the readers seemed to notice was what was gone." He adds:

There's an unfortunate tendency in the newspaper business to disparage a petition like this one as an "organized" effort, as if only random, disconnected cries of pain from despairing readers should be heeded. I've also heard this particular protest dismissed as "commercially inspired" by self-interested arts presenters and promoters who are worried that the box office will suffer, and have disingenuously conspired to rouse the masses.

I guess that would be me...

Result of the complaints:

Here's the good news, Listings Protesters of America: uncharacteristically for an institution that is slow to change and usually inflexible once it has done so, the editors are prepared to alter their course.

Read the whole NYT article here, and then read this and write the WaPo a letter.