I agree with Nicholas Laughlin that focus and background are part of context — that in order to give the kind of clear and accurate and informed assessment several people have brought up here, a writer often needs institutional memory. This is the kind of vital investment that’s extremely hard to document: knowing people, trends, histories.

I work with two arts and features editors who have held their jobs for thirty years. They know every artistic director’s philosophies and successes and failures and probably dental records. It takes time and financial support to build up that kind of knowledge. it also takes focus and persistence.

A group of people, with different focuses, can create still more context, because they overlap and balance each other.

There’s also distribution. In my relatively developed town, a lot of the population has more access to a fifty cent newspaper than to a regular internet connection. It’s changing; but our printing press still lets me reach more people, more quickly, than our page of blogs.

There’s authority. This too is changing, and it varies from place to place, but people in my community clearly believe that it is my job, and my colleagues’ jobs, to speak for them. I hear it daily. And in turn, they will very often speak to us. Being able to walk up to anyone and say ‘will you talk to me’ and know that they have reason to want to is one of the great perks of this job.

Web logs gain authority too, both individually and in groups. The distinction I think I’m making is that the U.S. has a set of laws and codes and expectations about journalism, and our current disillusionment hasn’t done away with them. Stories should have at least two sources, to give balance. Godd reporters look for all sides, and they’re supposed to answer their phones if they screw up and let you yell at them… they are answerable to their communities; they become public property.

Blogs may be, at least in their conception, inherently the work of an individual and answerable first to their writer — private property. This can change, is changing, I think.

I’ve lived in the newspaper world a long time, when I count on my fingers. I’ll tell you simply, There are parts of it I value, the way I value the structure of old town meetings and the talk in coffee shops and local historians and poets. And dairy farms. Things change. But I hope whatever the new media turns out to be, it won’t lose the work of knowing the neighbors and talking face to face.

Arts criticism, and serious cultural coverage, written by professional critics able to build up a wide and deep knowledge of their respective fields over many years–which means paying them comfortably and investing in their consumption of books/exhibitions/performances.

There are lots of amazing arts blogs, many of them written by critics who are amateurs in the literal sense (unpaid). But acquiring the body of knowledge and experience and expertise that the best critics draw on is a slow and sometimes expensive process. And though there’s no shortage of well-funded scholars working on every conceivable form of cultural production within the academy, issuing a vast stream of monographs and articles, that’s a very different mode of thinking and writing from what goes into writing serious, intelligent, but accessible arts criticism for a wide non-specialist audience. (I’m trying to remember who it was that said book reviewing is the primary mechanism for conveying ideas from the academy into the outside world.)

Scott McLemee, a superb literary critic himself, describes newspapers’ support of this kind of criticism as a “debt of honour”:

http://insidehighered.com/views/2008/07/23/mclemee

Which is a moving but not very compelling argument; he’s preaching to the choir here. (For the record: do-re-mi.)

There’s a lot of discussion of the decline of book reviewing etc. at the National Book Critics Circle blog, Critical Mass:

http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com/

But much of the argument follows the “debt of honour” line. More practically, I suspect one way forward is to clearly reposition arts criticism as an artform in itself that deserves strong support from the same institutions–whether foundations or corporate donors or private philanthropists–that fund galleries and residencies and non-profit presses etc.

It would be a huge pity, though, for this kind of arts coverage to be hived off to specialist sites or publications. This goes back to your serendipity idea. In a big newspaper that still takes cultural coverage seriously, let’s say the NY Times, it’s entirely possible that an eye-catching headline or photo in the arts section will manage to stop someone leafing through to the sports or business section–and perhaps for that reader open a window, even just a chink, to something new.

And the bigger question, of course–or one of them–is: what do we believe a well-informed, well-rounded citizen ought to be interested in, or ought to know about? Remember Arthur Miller’s notion of a newspaper as “a nation talking to itself”. Is it still possible to conceive of a single, vast conversation of this kind? Was it ever really possible?

(If newspapers want to quit staffing the “Margarine is good for you”/”Margarine is bad for you” beat, that’s fine with me.)