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Linking the arts world to the world
Seattle writer hopes to turn instant success of his Web-based journal to radio, TV
Tuesday, January 4, 2000
By R.M. CAMPBELL
Every weekday morning, Douglas J. McLennan begins surfing at 5 a.m.
His Internet journey covers more than 100 publications -- newspapers and print magazines with Web sites as well as Internet magazines from around the world.
The veteran arts journalist is sending out a classical music news program for radio this week and expects to produce a pilot this spring for a weekly Arts Journal designed for public television.
The Web site, which provides Internet links back to the original stories, was launched three months ago as "something tangible" to show to potential backers of the TV show.
When the Canadian-born pianist/critic/entrepreneur finished his early postings about 7:15 a.m. yesterday, Arts Journal included links to a Philadelphia Inquirer story on Charlie Brown's last day in the daily comics, to a report in Toronto's Globe and Mail on the financial woes of cultural colossus Berlin, to a Variety story on the Y2K bug bust.
While most of the publications he checks are American and Canadian, many come from the United Kingdom and other English-speaking countries. There are also French and German papers with English editions.
The topics covered yesterday ran the gamut of the arts, from a stolen Cezanne to an old Graham Greene interview, from pop music highlights to reviews of touring orchestras, from TV to movies.
As the day goes on, McLennan dips into the Web for updates and winds up his day at the computer with a check of European and East Coast sites between 9 and 11 p.m.
Each week, he selects 80 to 120 items, including reviews, commentary, analysis and news stories.
McLennan's Web site isn't the first of its kind in the electronic world, but it is so diverse in its interests and deft in its choice of stories that it is attracting hundreds of readers daily from 45 countries and 20 different time zones.
One of his innovations is to group different viewpoints together on the same subject. For instance, McLennan gathered a wide range of news stories and reviews regarding the controversial Brooklyn Museum of Art's "Sensation" exhibition, so a reader could get a good feeling of what was being said. Likewise, he did a sweep of major American papers and their critics' responses of the recent premiere of John Harbison's "The Great Gatsby" at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
His home page has a connection to a similar site, Arts & Letters Daily (www.cybereditions.com/aldaily).
Within weeks of creating his Web site, McLennan said, two prestigious American foundations expressed a strong interest in helping him develop the site and expand its format onto public television.
And last month he received a multimillion-dollar offer for the young enterprise, a deal he is still pondering.
In a two-year search for funding for his proposed Arts Journal for public television, McLennan had been in touch with several foundations. And while some money was forthcoming, it was not enough to cover the high costs of such a project. So he began developing Arts Journal on the Internet.
His monthly production costs are less than $100. Because his digest does not reprint the original stories, but only provides links to them, he pays no royalties. But his costs will be going up soon as he plans to hire an assistant.
Of course, things don't always go smoothly. He woke up as usual at 5 a.m. one recent morning to discover his car had been stolen and an e-mail virus had rendered his computer useless for about five hours and gobbled up some of his data.
McLennan credits his year as a fellow in the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University, in 1996-97, as the jumping off point for his Arts Journal.
"A year in New York was a chance to meet many of the leaders in cultural journalism from around the country. It was pretty clear what was being done and not being done. Early television made a concerted effort to bring art to the masses. Commercial television today does very little, and so people who rely on television for all news miss the connection between the arts and the greater culture. Public television is about the only place where the arts are seen.
"Because the technology of television is changing at such a tremendous speed, the broadcast universe is splitting into many fragments, which gives the world of the arts a new opportunity for finding a niche."
McLennan's concept for the televised Arts Journal is a weekly 30-minute arts news magazine, with certain parallels to Nightline.
He envisions his Web site becoming the "nerve center" for the TV program, providing such features as interview outtakes and background information for viewers of the "interactive TV" expected in coming years.
"The walls among the various media are coming down and converging, which makes Arts Journal particularly relevant now," he said.
McLennan is developing a news program devoted to classical music that would be supplied to classical radio stations around the country, of which there are about 150.
"The music service would be offered free, along with a general arts report. Radio stations could subscribe to one or both."
He plans to provide three-minute daily and weekly versions, recorded in his home studio and e-mailed to the stations as sound files. He expects to send out the first shows this week.
Given the range of his background and interests, McLennan is well-suited to his self-appointed task. Born in Winnipeg, McLennan left the Canadian prairies for the United States as a teenager. He went to New York to study piano at the Mannes College, where he received his bachelor's degree, and then the Juilliard School for his master's, with a year in Italy in between. He did doctoral studies at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, and, in 1985, moved to Seattle.
He has covered the arts for nearly every newspaper in the area, beginning with the Journal American (now the Eastside Journal) in Bellevue, followed by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, The Weekly and The News Tribune in Tacoma. Although music was his expertise, he developed critical skills in theater and dance.
The 41-year-old McLennan also taught piano, privately and at institutions, including Seattle's Cornish College of the Arts and Beijing's Central Conservatory for a year in the early '90s.
Unlike many critics, who prefer to stay away from the news, McLennan developed a reputation as a bold investigative reporter. His last print journalism assignment was as a weekly arts columnist for the P-I.
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
From them, he selects reviews and stories for posting on Arts Journal (www.artsjournal.com), his Seattle-based Web site and the start of what he hopes will become a multimedia arts-news operation.
Pianist, critic and entrepreneur Douglas J. McLennan's new online arts digest is called Arts Journal. He has also created a classical music news program for radio, and is working on a pilot arts program for television. Scott Eklund/P-I
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