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Caught in the Web, print and new media writers debate the pros and cons of online, where everyone's a critic.
In introducing the Critical Symposium on "International Film Criticism Today" in our Winter 2005 issue, we maintained, with a certain resigned pride, that "critics at independent film magazines have virtually complete freedom, and a generous amount of space, to express their opinions if they are willing to endure the relative (or, in some cases, total) penury that results from being unaligned with the corporate media." In recent months, American critics, having been fired, downsized, or bought out by a host of publications, are realizing that even making compromises with their corporate employers does not guarantee them a job.
Given the current economic malaise, the role of online criticism has become increasingly prominent. There has also been, at least in certain quarters, an intensification of the occasional friction between print critics and the denizens of the blogosphere. In a typically ungracious broadside in The New York Press, Armand White wailed that "Internetters... express their 'expertise,' which essentially is either their contempt or idiocy about films, filmmakers, or professional critics. The joke inherent in the Internet horde is that they chip away at the professionalism they envy, all the time diminishing critical discourse."
One goal in coordinating this Critical Symposium on "Film Criticism in the Age of the Internet" was to chip away at some of the hyperbolic rhetoric exemplified by White's jeremiad. Although the twenty-three respondents to our survey represent a host of critical stances, they all consider the relative virtues and flaws of both print and Internet criticism from a nuanced perspective that is indeed alien to vituperative anti-Internet critics such as White. Some of the participants in the symposium confess that they know little about Internet criticism, while a few bloggers take gentle jabs at their print brethren. Yet civil discourse prevails.
In addition, it soon becomes clear that there are very few critics in the current environment who are exclusive inhabitants of either the print or Internet realms. A certain number of longtime print critics have either been forced-or chosen-to become full-time bloggers, writers who started out as bloggers or Web critics have found print jobs, diehard Internet critics occasionally make appearances in...