What hope for music critics in click-chase newspapers?

In a thoughtful overview of declining fortunes, ex-NY Times critic Allan Kozinn surveys the gloomy aftermath of a contemporary critical debacle:

There is an extent to which the poor performance of reviews as click-bait is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Every day, I receive email summaries from half a handful of newspapers around the country, each promoting a dozen or more stories in that day’s paper, with links to their online versions. Those summaries rarely include links to their classical music reviews. Television and film, sometimes. Pop, yes, but rarely, and only if it’s a major festival. Classical music, hardly ever. An exception is The Wall Street Journal, which sends out an email devoted entirely to Life & Arts pieces. At The New York Times, where twentysomethings come up with new apps almost monthly to point readers to some of its specialties from editorials to cooking, it seems never to have occurred to anyone to build one for the paper’s arts coverage.

Perhaps if papers treated their reviews as if they thought they were worth looking at, and provided an easy access ramp, readers would tune into them.

Read on here.