Project URL: http://www.artsjournal.com/culturegrrl
Your Name: Lee Rosenbaum
Organization (If any): none
Tell us about yourself/your team: CultureGrrl is Lee Rosenbaum—a one-woman “team.” I’m a veteran cultural journalist, critic and editor—frequent contributor to Wall Street Journal’s “Leisure & Arts” page, frequent arts commentator on New York Public Radio (WNYC) and author of numerous articles on the New York Times’ and Los Angeles Times’ Op-Ed pages and in ARTnews and Art in America magazines, among many others. I’ve also appeared as an art-market commentator on BBC-TV. I am author of The Complete Guide to Collecting Art (Knopf) and have lectured on artworld issues at the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University Law School, Seton Hall University, the University of Iowa, the annual conference of the Museum Association of New York, and a conference sponsored by UNESCO and the Hellenic Ministry of Culture at the New Acropolis Museum. I was recently a guest speaker at American University, describing my work as a blogger to the American and foreign journalists who were inaugural fellows in the NEA International Arts Journalism Institute in Visual Arts. I hold a B.A. degree from Cornell University and an M.S. degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. I’ve won several awards: My articles for ARTnews magazine won a Society of the Silurians Award for Investigative Reporting and a George Polk Memorial Award for Cultural Reporting. CultureGrrl itself recently won the Best Blog designation from the Front Page Awards of the Newswomen’s Club of New York. That citation stated: “Her original reporting had a great impact by breaking a big story about the National Academy Museum that was later picked up by other media outlets. Her work is an example of how traditional journalistic standards can be applied to the new media format.”
Description of your project: CultureGrrl is a three-year-old blog of journalism and commentary (including occasional exhibition reviews), focused primarily on the visual arts and architecture, with a special interest in museums (exhibitions, collections, management practices), the art market, legal and political issues and international controversies surrounding the ownership of cultural property. I occasionally touch upon my other areas of cultural interest—music, theater, literature. Part of what distinguishes CultureGrrl from other blogs in my field is that it’s informed by my long career as a cultural journalist in the mainstream media. This gives me the ability to provide context and in-depth analysis—a long-view perspective on current events and controversies in the artworld that not many other journalist/commentators in my field can match. CultureGrrl is also appreciated by its growing, devoted audience for the polish of its writing and an irreverent wit that keeps readers engaged and entertained, as well as informed. Unlike most other visual arts blogs, it is generating significant income this year, which I hope and expect will continue to grow. (More later.)
Date your Project Launched (will Launch): April 23, 2006
How your Project works/What it does: CultureGrrl consists of frequent posts analyzing the latest news in the artworld, reviewing major exhibitions and, perhaps most significantly, breaking news that is later picked up by the mainstream media. My series exposing secret sales from the collection of the National Academy in New York (which won the “Best Blog” award mentioned above) was picked up (and directly acknowledged) by the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, among others, and had a lasting impact on the field. (I broke that story here: http://www.artsjournal.com/culturegrrl/2008/12/stealth_deaccessions_at_nation.html) Most recently, the New York Times’ “ArtsBeat” blog (on Aug. 12) picked up my commentary on the new chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, linking to CultureGrrl three times in this post: http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/12/with-first-interview-nea-chairman-stirs-the-online-pot/. I publish select readers’ comments as BlogBacks, and I recently began posting links to my blog poses on Twitter, to further my reach. When important news in my field breaks, I often publish it faster (at all hours!) than more cumbersome mainstream media operations. This happened on Aug. 14, with the late-day announcement of the appointment of a new interim director at a major museum—the Cleveland Museum of Art. I got my post up minutes after the announcement hit my inbox, and it was soon circulating throughout the artworld. The New York Times finally published the news on its “ArtsBeat” blog the following afternoon.
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Why is your Project a model for Arts Journalism?: My strong journalistic background has enabled me to break news, pursue major stories and get access to important sources. I’m not only fast and pointed; I’m also accurate and thorough. My words matter to the people whose professionalism I most respect, because they respect my professionalism (not to mention my high ranking on Google searches of people and places that I cover). This is replicable by anyone who takes the time to develop journalistic expertise, sources and experience. Several subjects of my posts have specifically told me that they admire my accuracy and fairness, even though they don’t always agree with my opinions. I have a devoted following, particularly among museum professionals, and what I say carries weight and has impact. While all this can happen in the mainstream media, there are several things that make CultureGrrl in some ways a better model for arts journalism than traditional newspapers and magazines: My breezy, irreverent voice, with frequent quips (not to mention my signature “irreverent photo essays,” adorned by my own amateur snapshots), make CultureGrrl a fun read, with a feisty style that wouldn’t fit easily into a more sober publication-of-record. Far more importantly, I pursue hot-button stories with greater persistence and relentlessness than would ever be possible in the mainstream media. If you write for a major newspaper, you might be able to follow up on President Obama’s economic recovery plan every day, but you couldn’t do that with a museum story. Last December alone, I devoted some 19 posts to National Academy—news developments, my commentary on those, related revisions of deaccession regulations by the NYS Board of Regents, proposed NY State legislation regarding deaccessioning. I was able to post entire documents (i.e., the text of the Association of Art Museum Directors’ censure of the Academy), and I posted my long Q&A with the Academy’s director, Carmine Branagan. It was all National Academy, all the time. No normal newspaper or magazine (and maybe no normal journalist!) would do this.
Explain (briefly) your business model [Please be specific - this is an important question]: Until this year, it would probably not have been possible to have a viable “business model” for CultureGrrl. Before you can get the money, you’ve got to build the critical mass of credibility, audience and influence. That doesn’t just take excellence; it also takes time. My exposure and clout have been greatly enhanced by my presence on the widely read ArtsJournal site. I can now state with some confidence that most major U.S. art museum professionals and art journalists regularly read my blog. That’s my core audience among the 40,000 to 50,000 hits that I now typically generate per month (549,000 last year). Having had virtually no income from CultureGrrl for most of its existence, I am now on target for blog earnings in the low five figures, this calendar year. Part of this income is from ads on my site; part is from speaking engagements and paid broadcast gigs that I’ve gotten as a direct result of my blog posts. And a good chunk of my revenues is now coming from devoted readers who are increasingly supporting the blog (sometimes more than once) by clicking the PayPal button that I just added in January. To date (Aug. 14), I’ve had 67 contributions; 21 of those have been $50 or more; several were $200. The momentum of contributions is increasing: On the blog, I acknowledge each new contributor by geographical location (not name) and these repeated mentions seem to encourage more support. In the future, I hope to ramp up my speaking engagements (with a formal announcement listing topics I’m prepared to discuss and linking to the video of an hour-long talk I gave this spring at the University of Iowa). The big untapped potential (difficult to exploit in the current economic environment) is advertising. The task of soliciting ads for my blog is one that I hope to delegate later this year to someone more knowledgeable, who is unencumbered by the editorial conflict-of-interest I would have in personally making pitches to museums, galleries, publishers, etc. To attract advertisers looking for an audience like CultureGrrl’s, I may sign up next month with the free service, Quantcast.com, where (as I recently learned) potential advertisers go to get information on audience data for online sites, in order to find those most compatible with the numbers and demographics they are seeking.
Anything else we should know? : Thanks to my increased prominence, I was recently profiled on the “Art Beat” blog of PBS’s “NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/blog/2009/08/the-art-of-blogging-about-art.html). CultureGrrl has greatly evolved over the last three years and will continue to grow and improve. I began by doing a lot of aggregating (listing links to others’ coverage) and by trying to allude to almost every news development that I thought might be of interest to my readers. I’ve now learned that the best use of my (and my readers’) time is to focus largely on developments and issues to which I can bring added value, by virtue of my unique insights, experience and original reporting. I started out with no images on the blog. Now almost every post includes one or more pictures—often my own photo journalism, which best illustrates my eccentric (and sometimes comic) commentary. I’m hoping to improve my multi-media offerings, having attended alumni workshops at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism to hone my skills. I’m planning to increase my use of audio, slideshows and video. And I will continue exploring ways to develop new income streams, including value-added offerings for a fee. Donors to my blog of $5 or more get e-mailed links to my posts as soon as they’re up. For $50 and up, they get advance notice of what I’m working on, in addition to links to my just-published posts. I’m experimenting with micro-donations for small batches of recent links that I discover during my daily scouring of the web—not links that are commonly found on conventional art-news aggregators, but items and documents that my readers would not easily find elsewhere. I’m always conscious of working towards perfecting a new hybrid genre—straight journalism (laced with links to primary sources), insightful commentary, personal voice and entertaining presentation. I believe this is where arts journalism may be headed. When the future happens, I’m hoping (with NAJP’s help) to be well positioned to be a part of it.
