A long time complaint about arts coverage in newspapers has been that the writers seldom get it right. They don’t present the full story or employ fair criteria.

Of course, more recently the complaint has been that newspapers have completely eliminated their staff providing arts coverage.

Back in 2009, I wrote about an exchange between the communications director for the Guthrie Theatre and a writer for the Minnesota Star Tribute.

The former accused the newspaper of not engaging in substantive journalism about real stories and the latter accused the Guthrie of only participating in stories they liked and shutting down in the face of potential criticism. The incident was so noteworthy that even though the link to the communication director’s original letter no longer works, Minnesota Playlist reprinted it as part of a retrospective in 2014.

Even though arts organizations may not get arts coverage from local media the way they once did, I think the real value of my original post is in the discussion of transparency that arts organizations exhibit when sharing information about themselves in any forum.