What are the most active arts venues in town?
The PBJ has a list this week of the area’s arts centers, ranked by the number of people who walk through their doors annually. Here’s the top five:
1) Symphony Hall, with 350,000 attendees at 250 performances
2) Mesa Arts Center, with 300,000 attendees at more than 1000 events. (The venue has four theaters and other event spaces.)
3) US Airways Center: 300,000 attendees. (No events total is given.)
4) Chandler Center for the Arts: 286,000 attendees at 250 events
5) Grady Gammage Auditorium: 284,000 at 43 events
Cricket (260,000) and the Dodge (200,000) are right behind. A note at the bottom says that Jobing.com Arena didn’t participate in the survey, which seems a bit churlish. Unmentioned is the Celebrity Theatre.
11:58 PM
Are readers getting the information they need from local news?
One of the things I’m interested in journalismwise is the quality of local news. We all have the internets available to us now, so few of us are dependent on our local news sources for anything but local news, right?
At the same time, many of those local news sources, particularly the print ones, are quite vulnerable right now, given the state of the industry.
Part of the reason I pick on local papers so much is that, in this context—and please excuse my French—to keep printing the same shitty stuff you always did is to sign your own death warrant.
Here’s some examples.
One’s minor. You might have noticed how the Republic is reviewing the big stories of the decade, year by year, this week. There’s a list of national stories on the front page, local stories on the Valley & State page, biz stories on the business page.
It seem crazy to me the paper wouldn’t put the local stories on its front page. That’s the insight it has no other publication can compete with.
In what context is the idea “Boy, we think the tsunami was one of the biggest stories of 2004!” front-page news in a local paper?
All local newspapers are going to turn their interests sharply homeward in the coming years; the Republic is still acting as if it’s a prime source of national and world news for its readers. It’s not.
Put it in a fucking sidebar.
Here’s another example. The Phoenix Business Journal has a story plugged on its front-page today about retail sales in the month between Christmas and New Year’s:
Retail sales climb 2.3 percent
Retailers got some good news at the end of the holiday shopping season with sales up 2.3 percent from last year, according to figures released Tuesday from the International Council of Shopping Centers.
A few grafs down, the story cited similar figures from MasterCard. The trouble is that the story didn’t say what most national news stories on the topic did, namely that there was an extra shopping day in the period this year, which means that the actual increase in sales was only about 1 percent.
It’s a small thing, but in an information age, information matters. Why should I subscribe to the PBJ—which is supposed to be displaying some expertise in business issues—when even a casual reader of business news like me immediately spots deficiencies in its reporting?
The PBJ story gets worse. The second sentence of the story makes no sense:
The [council] described the increase as significant and said procrastination by holiday shoppers, coupled with a crippling Northeastern blizzard, proved strong for retailers.
Note that the council is telling us the increase was significant when in fact it wasn’t. And how was the blizzard “strong for retailers”? Am I missing something?
Another: In my Northeast-Phoenix-zoned local-news tab this a.m., there’s a story about … some crappy bar on Camelback. Here’s the hed and first graf:
Sip Tiny Tinis on big night out at updated HB Hanratty’s
HB Hanratty’s Pub in central Phoenix has started serving Tiny Tinis, 4-ounce pours for $4.
As usual, for some unknown reason the story doesn’t come up on AZCentral.com, though I noticed another story, here, that plugs the same drink.
The question, again, is why a newspaper wastes staff time assigning, writing, editing and publishing press releases.
(Not to mention the question of how this particular press release—about a bar on Camelback—came to be included in a zoned section devoted to northeast Phoenix news.)
7:00 AM