It has been a scant three years since, in a season’s-end article devoted to a number of things, I reported the accession of Zachary Woolfe to the position of Chief Music Critic at the New York Times, succeeding Anthony Tommasini (see Where Are We?, 6/10/22). While noting that classical music criticism had long since been “stripped of rank” at the NYT, I expressed cautious optimism about an improvement over the then-recent standard, tempered by the news that, first, a new Culture Editor had also been appointed in the person of Gilbert Cruz, whose background had been entirely in pop entertainment genres with a strong promotional bias, and, second, that it seemed unlikely that any writer, however strong-minded, would be able to seriously address major artistic issues (thick on the ground) given the paper’s elevation of social justice initiatives of predictable sorts.

Now comes the revelation of an internal memo to staff from Culture Editor Sia Michel (Gilbert Cruz, we hardly knew ye) who after a turn as Editor of Spin, a rock magazine, started at the Times as Pop Music Editor, then rose to Editor of Arts and Leisure (that would be the Sunday section), to Deputy Culture Editor, and finally to her current position. ^(I)Here’s what Ms. Michel announced: a “reassignment” of Zachary Woolfe and of Chief Drama Critic Jesse Green, Pop Music Critic Jon Pareles, and TV critic Margaret Lyons to other positions. For Green, Pareles, and Lyons, these would be vaguely defined “culture section correspondent roles” and, for Woolfe, “an option to join the obituary desk.” I can’t play faux naïf by pretending to be shocked by this development, but I am shocked by the manner of it (though all these are demotions, the obit option for Woolfe is a pointed insult, not only to the individual writer, but to the arts of classical music and opera themselves), and by its lack of transparency. (Unless something has escaped my scrutiny, the Times has so far published nothing about these “big changes.”)

Michel offered the customary hypocritical  “thank you for your service” tributes we usually associate with the bum’s rush out of a political post, but only bits of camouflage for what she has in store, e. g., “different perspectives to core disciplines,” and a “search for critics on their [that is, the drummed-out incumbents’] beat in the weeks to come.” Which is to say that nobody’s lined up for these jobs, they’re just cleaning out the raccoons. The Times will be going beyond the traditional review format and, hand-in-hand with opera’s drift (well, no, shove—toward the visual and away from the aural), video will play a prominent role. We can only speculate as to how this will play out in terms of the coverage of opera and music, but I’m guessing that it will start to resemble the Times’ sports section. I like to keep up with doings in baseball and tennis,  but it can’t be done with the Times, which years ago stopped any day-to-day reporting (scores, box scores, standings, drawsheets and results, etc.) and instead furnishes “personal interest” stories, analysis of trends, and commentary on the politics of sports. These  articles are sometimes interesting, but are in the place of, rather than in addition to, hard news. The one live performing arts beat left standing for now is dance—Gia Kourlas, dance critic since 2019, remains, and writes frequently about dance’s closest equivalent to opera, classical ballet.