7.08.2003
Jodi Kantor watch
[Posted 11:39 AM by James Panero]
Remember when The New Criterion reported, in April 2002, that New York Times Arts & Leisure editor John Rockwell would be stepping down from his post after a significant cooling with Howell Raines over editorial direction? The issue for Rockwell, a former rock critic (and an appropriately named one), was not for want of pop culture coverage. On the contrary, Rockwell’s concern was the dumbing down of the Times’s art reporting under the Raines/Boyd/Pinch triumvirate. In a January, 2003, interview with Sridhar Pappu of the New York Observer, Raines gave his rationization:
I think our readers expect us to be as sophisticated and comprehensive on popular culture as on those traditional aspects of culture that you identify with The New York Times… to be as good on Hollywood and the music industry as we are on Lincoln Center…. We want to be as good at telling our readers the history of CBGB as we are about telling them about the Metropolitan Opera.
“A staffer in the culture department put it this way” reported Pappu, ” ’Especially with Arts & Leisure, we need less Peking Opera and more Britney Spears.’ ”
Well, even down and out, Raines may get his last laugh. In one of his final acts, pre-Blairgate, Howell hired a young turk named Jodi Kantor, Columbia college class of 1996, then associate editor of Slate, to fill Rockwell’s shoes. And what has been Kantor’s answer to high culture: the brit-angst-pop band Radiohead, which appeared on the A&L cover soon after her arrival. (Here is another piece on Kantor, this from the Post’s Page Six.)
Peking Opera… Peking Duck Sauce… Who’s to disagree with the Times’s indiscrimination, you may ask?
Sources in the music industry now tell Armavirumque that Lincoln Center disagrees–big time. Seats to this summer’s once-in-a-lifetime appearance of the Kirov Opera at the Met are going unsold and the performances unnoticed due in no small part to the Times’s cold shoulder. Call it the Jodi treatment. Or the curse of Raines. Or the Pinch Sulzberger death grip.
Call it what you want. And may we remind you that at The New Criterion, high culture coverage continues to run on schedule.