With Press Forward funding, The SHOUT pioneers stand-alone arts culture coverage in Wichita

The SHOUT, Wichita’s go-to site for arts journalism, was born in Waterford, Connecticut, a coastal town almost as far east from Kansas as founders Emily Christensen and Teri Mott could be.

It was summer of 2023, and Christensen had just spent a weekend at the National Critics Institute. For nearly 60 years, the institute has offered training for arts journalists at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, a Long Island Sound retreat named after one of America’s most famous playwrights. As Christensen and a cohort of arts journalists gathered to watch new plays and workshop reviews, she realized that Wichita had no outlet for the type of writing she wanted to publish, and the coverage she believed her community wanted. 

“There really are some phenomenal people that are covering arts and culture in Wichita and around the state of Kansas, but no one’s doing it full time, and no one’s running reviews,” she said. 

On her last day at the O’Neill, Christensen boarded a shuttle with Chris Jones, the Chicago Tribune’s longstanding theatre critic who runs the program, and shared her pie-in-Wichita-sky idea: What if they launched their own local arts news website? 

Jones agreed that she should, especially if her co-founder was Teri Mott, another Wichita-based alumna of NCI. Five months later, Mott and Christensen were chosen to receive one of three $30,000 grants from the Wichita Foundation, using money allocated by a nationwide effort to pull resources and boost funding for journalism. The SHOUT also received a membership to Tiny News Collective, an umbrella organization for nonprofit start-ups. 

“At the National Critics Institute we really try to work with super-talented arts journalists from across the country who can bring criticism and cultural reporting to cities that are in need of smart and independent coverage,” Jones said. “Emily and Teri are two of the best fellows we ever had, and we couldn’t be more excited about this project.” 

Growing The SHOUT, with growing pains

Since launching in April 2024, The SHOUT has emerged as a hub for all things creative in south central Kansas, publishing up to four reviews and features each week. Unique monthly visitors are up to 7,500. The Wichita Foundation renewed (and increased) The SHOUT’s seed funding grant for 2025, and Christensen and Mott have proudly put 75 percent of that money into paying their editors and contributors, offering higher freelance rates than The Eagle, Wichita’s daily newspaper.

“We want to really be covering people’s labor,” Christensen said.  

Coverage in The SHOUT ranges from image-heavy reviews of art exhibits, to a light-hearted essay on fonts and lettering spotted around Wichita, to unexpected hard news: The November arrest of an actor accused of “aggravated indecent liberties with a child” who was affiliated with the theater. The theater’s artistic director subsequently resigned, saying he was wrong to give the actor “a second chance.”  The case has roiled Wichita’s arts scene and expanded The SHOUT’s role at a time when Wichita artists are realizing their community needs more accountability. 

Wichita has a larger cultural footprint than one might think, in part due to support from the aviation industry and philanthropic efforts by the Koch Brothers, Wichita’s hometown billionaires. Music Theatre Wichita attracts more than 50,000 patrons each year. Spanish artist Joan Miró designed the only glass mosaic of his career for Wichita State University’s Ulrich Museum. There’s also professional ballet, a symphony orchestra, a film festival, a second art museum and robust gallery spaces.

Mott and Christensen met while working in arts-related communications jobs at Wichita State: Mott at the museum and Christiansen for the School of Art, Design and Creative Industries. Christensen has balanced journalism and communications work for most of her career and was a 2022 recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, the largest monetary award in the field. Mott’s resume includes jobs in writing, acting, radio and record stores. (True story: She once sold albums to Prince.) When The SHOUT launched in April 2024, she was onstage playing Frȁulein Schneider in the musical “Cabaret.” 

These arts-adjacent gigs may raise eyebrows; it’s not ideal for journalists to work in industries they cover. Because achieving that level of arms-length editorial independence isn’t feasible for an arts-news outlet in Kansas, Christensen says she constantly wrestles with ethical questions. 

“We have a paragraph on our website acknowledging that we’re a small community, so we are writing about people that we know sometime,” Christensen said. They require contributors to abide by some “obvious things,” she said, like not writing about romantic partners or people with whom they have financial relationships. She adds that The SHOUT would also, “never, in a trillion years, run a good review because somebody took out advertising.”

But beyond those principles, “we sometimes shoot from the hip,” she admitted. During one mentorship conversation, an advisor from the Tiny News Collective suggested a helpful guiding principle: “At the end of the day, you have to know that you are a person of integrity, and people will always have issues with how you go about doing your work. They have a right to.” 

“That has really stuck with me,” Christensen said.

Because of their direct ties to major local institutions, The SHOUT founders cede decisions about gallery and museum coverage to Genevieve Waller, a writer, artist and curator who grew up in Wichita but is now based in Denver. They also offer an informal appeals process if someone in the community dislikes another editor’s decision. For example, one arts organization recently complained to Christensen about “negative” coverage. Mott played “good cop” and took the disgruntled arts leaders out for coffee. 

“I am happy to have that conversation anytime,” Mott said. 

Many local arts news websites that have sprung up in recent years focus on supporting communities at the expense of not providing accountability. Jones said that’s one reason he’s so proud of Mott and Christensen as National Critics Institute alumni. 

“Supporting an arts community does not mean pollyannish enthusiasm or cheerleading,” he said. “The best cultural communities thrive from a keen critical voice that tells the truth and from reporting that respects their presence as a cultural asset as much as, say, a sports team. …“The SHOUT will do all of that and become an essential part of the Kansas journalistic ecosystem.”

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Cite this article

Ritzel, Rebecca (2025, Dec. 16). In the aviation capital of America, an unexpected art journalism outlet takes flight. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Retrieved from: https://rjionline.org/news/in-the-aviation-capital-of-america-an-unexpected-art-journalism-outlet-takes-flight/