Mile-High Musings on Arts, Culture, Creativity and Philanthropy

Much has been written about the decline of cultural journalism in America, an outgrowth of the larger challenges being faced in the journalism sector. The now defunct Columbia University National Arts  Journalism Program published a study in 2003 " Reporting the Arts II " that followed the original "Reporting the Arts" that was published in 1999. RTAII found that during this period when the number of arts organizations was growing, editorial coverage of the arts was flat or shrinking in most markets. Philadelphia was one of the cities studied and here is the link to the Philadelphia section of the report. The big news at that time was a dramatic decline in the average length of arts and culture stories, though the number of stories remained steady. And perhaps it is not a coincidence that the National Arts Journalism Program itself at Columbia now longer exists Now the Knight Journalism program has partnered with the National Endowment for the Arts  to launch the...

This past Friday, our local PBS station, WHYY , profiled the work of me and the Office of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy on its monthly arts news-magazine program, "Friday Arts". The episode also featured a segment on the wonderful Wharton Esherick Museum , The Fruit Guys (a business devoted to promoting fresh fruit as an alternative to junk food in workplaces and schools), and Orchestra 2001 (a contemporary/new music ensemble that is associated with Swarthmore College. The embedded video below only features my segment but I encourage you to click through and watch the entire episode. Watch the full episode . See more Friday Arts. It may seem like shameless self-promotion, but since many may have missed the episode, and since those outside of the Philadelphia market were not able to tune in, I thought it would be helpful if I included the segment in my blog. I do think it captures pretty well the work that we are trying to do here. It also highlights some ...