“Doping scandals, dubious economic benefits of hosting, and nail-biter badminton finishes aside, the Olympics are really the world championships of #content. Small wonder, then, that some media narratives emerging from the games are more tired than Katie Ledecky’s competitors in the pool.”
Category: AUDIENCE
Met Opera Posts Balanced Budget Despite Falling Box Office, But Major Challenges Loom
“Despite a record low in paid attendance last season, the Metropolitan Opera is on track to balance its budget for the second year in a row, company officials said. … Below, a breakdown of the opera’s biggest challenges.”
NPR Website Drops Reader Comments
“NPR introduced public comments to its website eight years ago, when many of today’s most popular venues for digital interaction didn’t yet exist or were in their infancy. Since then, we’ve explored and developed many options for strengthening those connections. Some of these methods have proven invaluable. Others less so.”
Oops! We Went All-Out To Become The UK City Of Culture, But We Have Nowhere To Put The Tourists
“Nearly a million visitors are expected to attend events in Hull as part of the landmark culture festival, which includes theatre, dance, music and other arts performances. However, the city centre’s hotels only have about 1,000 beds – so residents are being encouraged to rent out their spare rooms to tourists.”
Getting Italy’s Most Popular Museum Under Control
“Overseeing the Uffizi, with its world-class holdings and public-sector staffing, is a bit like running the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority at the same time. … As [new director Eike Schmidt] fights to manage the crowds, generate more revenue and improve the museum experience – including its chaotic ticketing system and long lines – will he continue to marshal popular support and prevail against a morass of bureaucratic restraints, vested interests and political intrigue?”
Women-Centered Hollywood Hits Were Once The Norm
“Ghostbusters and Ocean’s Eight don’t mark a turning point for Hollywood so much as a return: From the 1920s to the ’50s, women drove box-office revenue – in drama, comedy, and ensemble films.”
Chamber Opera On The Buenos Aires Subway
In Opera Periferica’s adaptation of Pergolesi’s La serva padrona, “Serpina, the ‘servant turned mistress,’ launches her plan to seduce her master, the aging millionaire bachelor Uberto, first on one end of the H Line – which runs north and south through the capital connecting the richest area with the poorest – and then on the other.”
Willem Dafoe And Charlotte Rampling Star In Movie For One Viewer At A Time
“Sculpt [is] a $1.5m feature film by the 38-year-old French artist Loris Gréaud. It will be shown at LACMA’s Bing Theater, an auditorium that normally seats 600 people, but with an almighty caveat: Gréaud has requested that all of the seats be removed except for one, which will sit in the centre of the space, forlorn and exposed.” (Rampling, by the way, plays Grumpy Bear.)
A Video Game For When You’ve Had It With ‘SimCity’: A Dystopian Business Simulator
“In The Founder, there is one goal, and that’s to grow your startup and please those investors until there’s nothing left to give. Along the way, you appease preferably low-payed [sic] employees with perks like office kegs and butter coffee, join the lucrative industries of biotech or defense, and run your competition into the ground with sponsored music festivals and ’causewashing campaigns.'”
Audience Insight: This Week’s AJ Stories About Understanding Audiences
This Week: Cyber-fan bullying makes us scared about who the audience really might be… It’s not enough to “reflect” diversity of a community to be diverse… If you want to build an audience try investing in your community… Pay-as-you-wish ticket schemes seem straightforward but they’re not… Are the arts failing at delivering the audience experience?