Three weeks ago, Entertainment Weekly did the unthinkable: the magazine fired veteran film critic Owen Gleiberman, one of its best-known bylines since 1990, simultaneously letting go of music critic Nick Catucci and staff writer Annie Barrett in the process. What makes this turn of events so important, however, isn’t so much the “who” (though Gleiberman has enough defenders to make that case) but the “why”, and frankly, the online film community – made up of bloggers, critics, journalists, and movie buffs – should have seen this coming a mile away.
The dissolution of Gleiberman’s job is just the latest development in EW’s current fits and spurts of restructuring, seen not too long ago when they first announced the introduction of the Community. The Community is EW’s new platform for analysis and criticism (such as it is), a network of unpaid writers cobbling together TV recaps, top ten lists, and the like with the expectation that they’ll receive no compensation in return for their efforts, save exposure and prestige, neither of which represents an acceptable currency for buying groceries or paying student loans. C’est la vie; the Community is currently going through its beta phase of testing. The future is (almost) here.
So the unceremonious ejection of Gleiberman (and, so as not to lose his colleagues in the shuffle, Barrett and Catucci) from the industry giant’s staff doesn’t actually come as much of a surprise. The minute you start letting “superfans” take over the role of the critic, adding their personal discordant thrumming to the already cacophonous litany that comprises the legions of journalist hopefuls across the limitless span of the Internet, seasoned and educated critics like Gleiberman become less relevant. (At least on a per-outlet basis.) In a way, his release from EW’s clutches feels kind of like a “duh” moment, but that realization does very little to dull its sting.
Since this debacle came to light on April 2nd, the web has exploded in a combined barrage of sympathy for Owen and virulent outrage toward EW. Emotions have run high, nerves have been rubbed raw, and sussing out what Owen’s unceremonious firing really means for that aforementioned online film community has grown exponentially more difficult with each passing day. That’s something of a problem. For whatever personal feelings we all may have on the matter – I, personally, disagreed with Owen a great deal and sometimes found his taste suspect, but he’s nonetheless a great writer worth respecting, admiring, and learning from – the implications here are absolutely enormous.
So maybe it’s time to stop pouting, kvetching, shaking our fists, calling the time of death for film criticism, and otherwise engaging in the “sky is falling” doctrine of knee-jerk Internet reactionism. Maybe instead it’s time to contextualize EW’s slowly-wrought transformation, and what their shift in platform means for both EW as an entity, and film criticism and journalism as vocations. (Well, as a vocation, since the two overlap more often than not.) Is this the end of thoughtful, intellectual film analysis as we know it, or just the latest turn in the road for criticism as a discipline in the web era?
Let’s get the most obvious point out of the way first. Film criticism as a discipline has changed. Correction: it’s still changing, every single day, going with the ebb and flow of Internet culture. Reviews, the old weekly standby of every critic’s repertoire, have become more condensed, less relevant; when anybody with a Gofobo pass and a WordPress blog can post a review of Captain America: The Winter Soldier without having to suffer through a press embargo, the necessity of that critical staple becomes somewhat lessened. Audiences have to be bought with “content”, which means list posts, trailer write-ups, jaunts around the rumor mill, and so on ad nauseam, all to satisfy traffic needs and maintain a bottom line.
(Digression, in the interest of full disclosure: none of these things are strictly bad. I got my start by showing up an hour early for preview screenings with my Gofobo ticket in tow, all so I could get back to my rinky-dink starter blog to write up my thoughts. Here I am today, writing for Paste, Screen Rant, Movie Mezzanine, and several other sites, my scrappy DIY efforts rewarded. And if lists and newswire posts are fluff, that’s okay – entertainment has its place alongside serious interpretation and critical thought, and apart from that, they’re not mutually exclusive, either. People who stare down their noses at that kind of writing as a rule are, frankly, tiresome, and I discourage everybody from emulating or parroting them. End digression.)
More to the point, this change has been happening for a very, very long time. The rise of the blog, the advent of social media (from Twitter to Facebook), and the increased availability of content (as well as the increased amount of content) have all made change to film criticism inevitable. People want their content, in all its forms, and they want it now, and there are more outlets than ever – whether they’re professional or completely amateur – through which that content is available. As Devin Faraci wisely mused on his Twitter feed, “Has there ever been a time in history when so many people wanted to make their living writing about movies/pop culture?”
Put simply, no. Taken from that perspective, EW’s new directive sounds like a great idea on paper. Too many people want to write about movies and television, and they’ve just opened up a thousand new positions from which people can write about both, and from all angles. Win-win! Take that, niche saturation! Of course, if you have a head on your shoulders and more than two lone candy corn kernels functioning as your brain cells (or if you read Scott Meslow’s work at all), you know that they’re offering bupkiss, and their new directive is riddled with holes and rife with terrible ideas. (How do you make a living off of prestige? How do you distinguish yourself when writing in an adopted style? How do you get exposure when you’re jockeying for position against literally hundreds of other people who want to write the same piece as you? How does a publication rightfully serve its readership with a team of authors who lack experience, background, education, and training in writing as a craft, and in film as an artistic form of expression?)
If we look at the fracas from this angle, Gleiberman’s departure and EW’s weird new priorities may not actually matter in the long run. EW’s brilliant, game-changing vision of the future for their brand is, put in short, “the Internet”, because what they’re offering is absolutely no different from what you get just by trawling the blogosphere for bathroom reading material. Go ahead and read the minute, vaguely drawn FAQ they’ve put together on their site to explain their intentions with the Community (which, honestly, sounds like the name of a religious cult); their opening scrawl could easily be interpreted as either an overarching description of the World Wide Web itself, or a summary of their superblog’s purpose.
The question of what Entertainment Weekly hopes to get out of this little social experiment is a loaded one; if you ask them, you’ll get a spiel about creating a place for enthusiastic young writers to cut their teeth, but if you ask pretty much anybody else, the move looks like a cynical, ruthless means of cutting costs and ushering in some bizarre new world order at one of entertainment journalism’s most prolific and long-standing outlets. The good news, at least for now, is that the Community appears to be tailored around television first and foremost, but it’s difficult to look at the timing interval between both the recent lay-offs and the inception of the EW superblog and not assume that the magazine plans to lean on unpaid bloggers for its reviews, rather than actual critics.
There’s no way to spin this kerfuffle in a sunny way. If Entertainment Weekly feels comfortable doing away with longstanding, well-proven writers like Gleiberman in exchange for the contributions of a sprawling, disjointed staff of faceless bloggers, what’s to stop other industry leaders – like Variety, or The Hollywood Reporter, or Deadline – from following suit? It’s a fair enough question, even if it’s frustrating to confront; movie and television and, hell, why not, music enthusiasts have proven that they’re willing to kill themselves writing about their favorite medium without earning a dime in return through their personal blogs, and if people are willing to write for free, why wouldn’t a major rag like EW be tempted to try to mine that untapped resource to cut corners?
And why wouldn’t those same writers, so willing to write for free on their own time, be just as willing to write for free for Entertainment Weekly on their own time? What’s better, writing through your Blogspot rag without receiving any compensation other than the satisfaction of doing it for the love of the craft? Or writing for Entertainment Weekly for the same kickback, but on a far, far more visible stage? If EW’s concept isn’t exactly innovative, it’s deviously clever, and worst of all, there’s a decent chance it’ll succeed, and if it does, well, that’s when that aforementioned “sky is falling” rhetoric starts to make sense. If the big boys can get entertainment writers to plug away at their keyboards for them at no cost, they will.
Would that kill film criticism, though? Good criticism, should that reality come to pass, may go the way of the dodo so far as mainstream recognition is concerned; it’s not that good criticism will be non-existent amidst this potential morass of ill-informed, poorly-trained, house-styled wordsmiths, it’s just that it’ll be rare, and most people probably won’t notice it when they see it. Good criticism will go underground, with smart writers who know their stuff taking refuge in – surprise! – the WordPress blogs they jump start as a safe haven where intellectual discourse and deep analysis are not only both welcomed, but prized.
I realize that I’m one weather-beaten leather jacket away from painting a picture of a post-apocalyptic wasteland where bona fide criticism has been all but eradicated by the victory of the non-intellectual proletariat, ushered to the farthest reaches of civilization for safekeeping. Or perhaps a dystopian tomorrow where genuine criticism is outlawed and real critics have become freedom fighters, bringing honest, thoughtful reviews of pop media to the masses while battling against the crushing grip of anti-intelligentsia tyranny. Either scenario sounds ridiculous, and I lack the predictive powers to say exactly what might happen should EW’s scheme end up working. But the basic result seems pretty self-evident: if EW doesn’t have to pay to put up content, then nobody will.
Of course, this particular outcome to EW’s new strategy is one possibility of many. The Community could prove disastrous, and if so, none of EW’s peers are likely to even consider funding a Community of their own; there’s also a chance that other major league publications do believe in the necessity of good criticism, and by extension that good criticism requires good critics who in turn deserve good compensation. It’s too early to prognosticate, and realistically, taking bets on where the die rolls here is nearly impossible, since EW is, in a very loose way, pioneering a new approach to providing content.
So this is where we are, a place where a rag like Entertainment Weekly has begun eliminating the need for hiring paid professionals to serve on its staff. Whether or not they actually pull it off and continue to sustain their brand is irrelevant. They’re trying it out, and that may be all it takes to cripple film criticism irrevocably. If the film critic’s station, and the film critic’s role in the business, is at risk, then maybe we should take that as a call to arms. If the major leagues are trying to figure out how to make critics non-essential, perhaps we need to figure out how to assert our necessity. Everyone’s a critic, so the old adage goes, and that’s never been more true than now; the challenge, then, is to sort the good from the bad, and to prove why we need the Owen Gleibermans, the Nick Catuccis, and the Annie Barretts of the world after all.