By the way—have you been listening to the Hell Gate Podcast? This week's episode will drop later today. For the latest on the mayor's race, you won't want to miss it. You can listen here, or wherever you get your podcasts.
When I heard that earlier this week that the New York Times had abruptly reassigned four critics on their culture desk, I naively assumed that the new gigs for Jon Pareles (pop music), Margaret Lyons (television), Jesse Green (theater), and Zach Woolfe (classical music) would still be in criticism. Perhaps the Times just wanted to, say, encourage the 71-year-old Pareles to do TikTok trends; maybe they just wanted him to write less and dwerk more.
But reading the Times culture editor Sia Michel's memo to her staffers quickly disabused me of that notion. In her memo, she justified the move by writing that readers need "trusted guides" creating criticism in "new story forms, videos and experimentation with other platforms," that "go beyond the traditional review."
Michel continued, "Smartphones have Balkanized fandoms even as they have made culture more widely accessible than ever, and arts institutions are facing challenges and looking for new opportunities," and the Times was seeking new critics to meet the moment.
According to Lachlan Cartwright, the new roles offered to the four were as follows: culture section correspondent roles for Pareles and Green, an editing role for Lyons if she relocates from Chicago to New York, and an option to join the obituary desk for Woolfe.
Notably, the critics targeted here are those who actually focused on writing traditional reviews—critics who have embraced (or been forced to embrace) non-written forms, like art critic Jason Farago, whose Close Read series pairs observations on paintings with interactive imagery, and pop music critic Jon Caramanica, who now hosts the "Popcast" podcast and car-ride TikTok series Song of the Week, or who write with a focus on politics like James Poniewozik in his television coverage, were spared. When Hell Gate reached out to the Times, a spokesperson shared Michel's full memo, which emphasized these "new story forms," like the interactive feature "5 Minutes," which is "helping people discover jazz and classical music" in, what else, just five minutes.
The news seems like the killing blow to the traditional form of criticism that the Times's culture desk once represented: written expressly to an older New York City print reader, guiding them on operas or plays that're playing in town. (A reassignment of the classical music critic to the obituary desk seems particularly savage, though it must be said as someone who checks the music page often that it's already mostly obituaries on some days.)