The Arts beat
By KateLynn Savidan
There is a lot of pressure being an arts editor.
Fielding calls about art galleries, student plays and local bands while facing deadlines and limited space, arts editors must try to give their sections a balanced feel. The stories must appeal to readers. Out of, say, a dozen great stories, you can only do a few.
You are left with that feeling of wishing you could have given coverage to just one or two more struggling artists. This, of course, is something you can’t do anything about. There are limits to your power.
I was excited to hear that Metro, an arts and entertainment paper, had moved into town last month. More arts coverage! Or would it be a showdown — like a scene from High Noon?
Two free weekly entertainment papers, one small town. Is Ottawa’s arts and entertainment scene big enough to hold them both?
It’s easy to confuse Metro with the X Press. The two papers are roughly the same size, they have similar front covers and they cover roughly the same things. The only major difference is Metro uses really big fonts. That means short stories are being stretched out to two-page features.
Aside from the pretty obvious faults sure to appear in the first edition of a new paper, Metro isn’t bad. It is hoped that Metro’s appearance in Ottawa will give the local arts some help with more free publicity.
Why, you ask, is more publicity needed? It’s because Ottawa has a great arts scene that doesn’t (or can’t) get the attention it needs. The X Press surely can’t cover everything, nor can the two university papers, the gay and lesbian Capital Xtra!, the Sun, the Citizen or the numerous suburban papers. Each paper sticks to arts stories that interest its particular niche market.
This means a lot of groups are overlooked or ignored. One can only take so much before getting tired of reading the X Press’s newest update on the trials and tribulations of local bands Bertha Does Moosejaw and Polaris, for example. We also want to know what is going on with other local bands like Nectar, and with galleries other than the SAW.
That is where Metro comes in. It has the opportunity to give a voice to a whole new group of artists and entertainers. It has to avoid trying to emulate X Press — so it can become a genuine alternative to the alternative.
This town’s arts scene is big enough for the both of ’em.