Revisiting reviewing: The need for a debate on the role of arts journalism in South Africa

Abstract

Revisiting reviewing: The need for a debate on the role of arts journalism in South Africa

Witnesses of a cultural crisis: Representations of media-related metaprocesses as professional metacriticism of arts and cultural journalism

“…The unwillingness of cultural journalism to change is additionally seen as an ethical problem, because the imperative of social responsibility associated with the journalistic function in society is overlooked. This is clearly indicated in Wasserman's (2004) analysis on the state of cultural journalism in South Africa's post-apartheid context, where cultural journalists are expected to have an ethical obligation to a society in transition. In the same way it is presupposed that cultural journalists should intervene in inauspicious tendencies in artistic and cultural production, such as coverage of the consequences of the market economy.…”

“…The media industry and journalism have recently confronted economic, technological and cultural reconfigurations (McChesney and Pickard, 2011). Rather than discussing these actual changes in cultural journalism (see Janssen, 1999;Kristensen and From, 2011;Wasserman, 2004), the focus of the following analysis lies on the reception of the alleged external impulses, and the representations of the crisis in professional metacriticism, discourses that are analytically separate from the actual developments.…”