One musician uses his platform to call for philanthropic renaissance

Meta media coverage of journalism is typically reserved for cutbacks, sales and scandals. Another billionaire bought a media outlet, an untold number of journalists lost jobs and often a media merger hangs in the balance. But the summer of 2025 may be remembered as the one when mass market publications (as well as a few Substacks) spoke out about the challenges facing arts and culture journalism.

The New York Times announced it would reassign four of its most prominent staff critics, Vanity Fair’s new editor said more celebrity content would replace criticism and The Chicago Tribune bought out its staff film and television critics, even though their content was published across newspapers owned by Alden Global Capital.

Quite the summer suckerpunch. Fellow cultural journalists mourned the approachable erudition of Michael Phillips’ film reviews, the video-driven  “Five Minutes With…” features by Zachary Woolfe, and other coverage riding off into the sad-news media sunset.

Thankfully, a few venerated outlets brought the woe-is-arts journalism debate out of an indie coffeeshop and into your neighborhood Starbucks. That discourse is the silver lining for me, as an RJI fellow who is spending the year looking for ways to fund arts journalism’s future.

“Mass media layoffs have targeted arts and culture desks disproportionately,” a columnist noted in The Observer. The New Yorker argued that videos can supplement — but not replace — the traditional written review. And in The Atlantic, writer/composer and singer/songwriter Gabriel Kahane wrote a love letter to local listings, that is, he begged news outlets to restore the short blurbs about an array of area concerts, plays and off-the-wall performance art like “that obscure thing that happening on a loading dock in Tribeca.”

Q&A with Gabriel Kahane: Saving the symbiotic relationship between listings and local arts communities

I’ve long admired Kahane for his artistic output, such as his “Craigslistlieder,” sung by the likes of Audra McDonald, and his talent for humbly communicating the ontology of own work. His pop music collaborators include Andrew Bird, Phoebe Bridgers and Sylvan Esso, while on the classical side he’s been commissioned by more than a dozen symphony orchestras.

I spoke with Kahane to find out how The Atlantic piece came about, how it’s been received and why he thinks the vitality of arts communities depends on newsrooms bringing back listings, one way or another. 

Ritzel: How did this piece come about?

Kahane: I actually began reporting the piece several months ago, when I interviewed Steve Smith [the longtime former Time Out editor who wrote about me often early in my career]. Then I set it aside. When news broke that Jesse Green and Zach Woolfe et al were being reassigned, I decided that I was gonna pitch it. Atlantic editor Honor Jones is an Instagram follower, and she was the first person I thought of. I knew it couldn’t be one of the outlets that I was sort of obliquely — or not so obliquely criticizing — and The Atlantic felt like the place to go. I just got very lucky that she said yes,

Ritzel: A 2025 survey by Greater Public found that the number two thing people expect from local public media sources is “a calendar of events or things to do.” Communities want listings. What potential models do you see to restore them?

Kahane: There are lot of people who are still doing this work, like Steve Smith on his blog, but it’s not centralized, and that’s part of the problem. One model, I think, is for a consortium of performing arts institutions to get together to underwrite some kind of listings. This didn’t make it into the piece, but I asked Steve, “Would it be problematic to have Lincoln Center and the Met and the Public Theater and BAM underwriting the site?” He pointed out that in the heyday of Time Out, those were the biggest advertisers to the magazine. So essentially, they were underwriting it. This could happen city by city.

There’s also a model where a foundation underwrites listing editor positions in the same way that nonprofits have underwritten a music criticism position at the Boston Globe [and other regional newspapers]. Increasingly, we see philanthropists underwriting certain areas of journalism, and it’s not impossible to imagine someone saying, “This is going to happen if I pay a quarter of a million dollars a year to underwrite three positions to write and edit listings.” That could be transformative for a city’s arts economy.

Ritzel: What’s at stake for the arts economy — nationally and in individual communities — if no one steps up and does this work?

Kahane: The lack of listings is destructive on a community level, and it’s also economically destructive.

I did a couple interviews with folks who are on the arts presenter side that didn’t make it into the piece, and they were able to describe a direct correlation between listings and ticket sales. For example, one executive director said that things that were box office successes pre-pandemic, they continue to sell out. But anything that is up and coming, it’s just harder and harder to break through. That extra 20 to 30% of ticket sales was being made up by the presence of listings, and just the general awareness that comes from a more robust local arts coverage ecosystem.

Ritzel: Many of the independent online arts newsletters and local websites that have cropped up are genre specific, like listings for dance. That’s great, but they are not reaching people who want to choose between seeing a play, or going to a concert or seeing a movie. What do you think? 

Kahane: That’s correct. And I still think that without too much effort, you can bring a lot of those [genre-specific newsletter] folks under one roof to make one publication.

Ritzel: Some people who I talked to about my RJI project — helping newsrooms seek out funding for arts journalists from arts philanthropists — are worried about journalists competing for the same dollars as arts organizations. Do you agree? 

Kahane: I don’t totally buy that argument. I think it’s an all-boats-rise situation. Those same organizations can probably trim their marketing budgets if you return to a more robust arts journalism sphere. Just the amount of money that is spent on digital ads now, that would be obviated by people having an obvious and central place to look for what’s happening.

Ritzel: Overall, what has been the response to your The Atlantic piece since it came out?

Kahane: I was very moved by the fact that it seems like so many people feel this loss so deeply. I’m not the first person to have written about the loss of listings, but sometimes when a journalist writes these things, it sounds like sour grapes. I was in the right place at the right time to say something that was fairly obvious and it was just nice that a lot of people seemed to read and respond to it.

Editor’s note: This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

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Cite this article

Ritzel, Rebecca (2025, Sept. 10). Saving the symbiotic relationship between listings and local arts communities. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Retrieved from: https://rjionline.org/news/saving-the-symbiotic-relationship-between-listings-and-local-arts-communities