This item on Culture Monster (the L.A. Times blog on the arts and culture) announces the expiration of The Arts Blog from the nearby Orange County Register, which had been running contributions from three well-regarded arts journalists since 2006. Does this signal the beginning of the end for blogs focused on the arts and culture?
It's easy to dismiss this development because of the location. People must be thinking, “Well, in Orange County nobody cares about the arts.” This is far from true. I happened to have grown up in the area and know from relatives and friends still living there that OC has a thriving arts community: theaters large and small, numerous concert venues, museums, you name it. So the explanation must be that the writers were no good, right? According to one of The Arts Blog's farewell notes , contributions by classical music critic Timothy Managan “made it one of the most widely read blogs about classical music in the world.” So why pull the plug?
Apparently the readership levels simply didn't justify continuing The Arts Blog. According to Rebecca Allen, the Register's deputy editor for features, the blog's demise was due to a lack of reader activity on the site. Allen wrote that the arts blog "hasn't gotten much traction online.” The three OC Register writers assigned to the arts will continue to produce columns and reviews for the paper's print and online editions.
Is a signal of things to come for blogs in general, not just those focused on arts and culture? Are readers already bored with the phenomenon - despite the quality of the writing and relevance of the content - and abandoning the blogosphere in search of the next new thing?
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