Exclusive: The Met hires Times man to boost communications
NewsThe unhealthy relationship between America’s largest arts company and its local newspaper took a distinct turn for the worse last night when the Metropolitan Opera hired Daniel Wakin off the paper’s deathwatch desk to be its new senior director of communications.
A Times lifer of 22 years service and a stint on the classical beat, Wakin knows as well as anyone that the Met only communicates with one newspaper.
The Met already has an asssistant general manager for marketing and communications (Gillian Brierley) and a Director of Press and Communications (Lee Abrahamian).
Why does it now need a Wakin?
Here’s what the Times boss Bill McDonald told staff :
It’s my regrettable duty to report that Dan Wakin, a veteran reporter and standout editor at The Times for 22 years, is departing to become the senior director of communications for the Metropolitan Opera.
It’s a position, it should be noted right away, that he’s well-suited for, having had a groundbreaking stint as The Times’s first classical music and dance reporter — not to mention a heady George-Plimpton-like performance as a clarinetist with the New York Philharmonic, but more on that later.
Dan’s most recent role was as a key editor on the Obits desk, where, among other things, he was the tireless driving force behind the Those We Lost project, an almost yearlong effort to chronicle the coronavirus pandemic through a cross section of its victims worldwide. Dan produced some 500 Covid-19 obituaries written by 88 different reporters (a feat that put him onscreen in a Spike Lee documentary).
Dan came to The Times in 2000, having been a correspondent for The Associated Press based in Johannesburg and Rome, where he lived for six years. He was Jerry Gray’s first recruit to join the Continuous News desk, which had recently been set up to provide updates to a relatively new Times endeavor called a website.
Dan later moved to rewrite on the Metro desk and then the religion beat in Metro, producing exclusives on the clerical sex-abuse scandal in the Archdiocese of New York. He wrote features about where Muslim taxi drivers prayed, a crisis in the wig supply for Orthodox Jews, and factional strife in the ultra-Othodox Satmar sect. For City Weekly, he wrote Bending Elbows and Coping columns and cover stories, including one about that once-in-a-lifetime moment performing onstage alongside the Philharmonic’s renowned clarinetist Stanley Drucker. As Dan wrote, “I dressed and asked Mr. Drucker if he had any final words of advice. ‘Just don’t faint on-stage,’ he said.”
He was unlikely to. Dan is no wannabe clarinetist. On weekends he can occasionally be found performing chamber music with a classical group in bars, restaurants and even beer gardens around New York. (Beethoven, it seems, goes down well with a brew.)…
Q: What’s the difference between a NYT classical beat reporter and a Met senior director of communications?
A: Arthur Gelb
Do you ever getting the feeling that the whole set-up is there for them, exclusively?
They don’t need a director of communications, they need a director of “explanations”, to explain why they didn’t engage a black conductor for the important premier of Fire Shut Up in My Bones, which was conducted by Jannick. Excuse me, this was a big international event, with lots of press, with a black cast and production, but they couldn’t hire the composer or another black conductor? I haven’t seen anyone bring up this issue in any of the reviews, which were all excellent. So much for diversity at the Met.
The most important thing about the engaged conductor is apparently his skin color, not his musical performance… @Concerned opera buff, It seems to me you aren’t concerned about opera, you are concerned about race, to the point that you believe opera houses owe you personal explanations every time you feel like demanding one. Race and opera might be the same in your eyes, but I assure you it isn’t, primarily because people don’t listen to music with their eyes, they listen with their ears, newsflash. Second newsflash, in their spare time from listening to opera, audiences look at what’s going on on stage, not at the conductor’s back head in the pit.
Suggest the individual goes back and reads the article about the VPO during the Nazi era!
You are drunk on the Cool Aid.
So in your mind all the positives created with this production are to be negated because they didn’t live up to every single one of your expectations.
My expectations Toney? What about all the black folks in the audience? The Met’s decision for Jannick to conduct is the Met’s statement that there is not a single black conductor in the world deserving of the event.
If the Met’s music director had not conducted the premiere run of that opera — which was opening the season, and therefore leading the company’s return to live opera after the lockdown (in other words, it was a very big deal for the house) — it would have signalled (whether or not this was actually the case) that he, and perhaps the Met’s management, did not have faith in the piece.
That would have been a bad thing.
The Met can hire black conductors for subsequent runs in future seasons.
Yanique conducted precisely because it was an international premiere. He is the music director. Besides, they should be pursuing diversity and all productions.
Simply producing that piece of nothing and doing out of time was debacle enough! GELB can hire HR folk, and now more “communications” people, but he couldn’t pay the REAL professionals during the closing and demands concessions from the people who make the MET great. Fire GELB! Save the MET!
Sounds like he’s well suited to the job. I don’t believe the Met has a strained relationship with the NYT (any more than any other institution). The snarkiness of the headline and lead in doesn’t exactly beggar belief but hopefully SD isn’t becoming the Daily Mirror…………..
This is yet another area where Chicago is light years ahead of New York.
In the same manner in which Chicago’s top echelons shrugs off any reasonable ethical standards as not applicable to them (in Michigan Av., Jeff Zucker style resignations are for losers), they have only disdain towards general managers for marketing and communications or expensive communications directors.
Muti shows us how it’s done; he invites hand picked “journalists” (over the years, the Howard Reich, Nancy Malitz, Valerio Cappelli, Hedy Weiss, Manuel Brug of the world) to fancy events, interviews in the inner sanctum, and/or expensive dinners) and receives back glowing reviews with the inevitability and punctuality of best performing Swiss watch.
Journalists who dare to express an honest opinion are ostracized, forever (we know what Muti thinks of Mr. Johnson, for instance; he is not invited to dinners and would be disbarred from the profession, if the choice was up to the Italian Stallion).
When will New York ever learn how to do things properly?
When it starts living outside its own orifice.
A “key editor of the Obits column”. Gosh no wonder he wanted to move.
I hesitate to say that he fails downward because I still have an ember of affection for what the Met once was, but it’s hard not to see it as one more step down for Wakin.
This is very funny. Early on in the Gelb era, Daniel Wakin, journalist, cold-called Met staffers for dirt on the boss. Of course, few–if any–talked.
Seems he goes both ways. Watch your backs, EVERYONE.
Surely some mistake!! Only Rupert Murdoch does things like that. Explain please.
This rundown of his past accomplishments underscores how prepared journalists at the Times are to do their jobs. He sounds as if he is a well-rounded, affable person to do what needs to be done, and, maybe, offer some advice to leadership there, at the MET, about how the MET is perceived these days.
I’m trying to think of any Beethoven chamber work with clarinet other than the Quintet Opus 16
Septet Op.20
Trio Op. 11
Octet Op.103
Rondino. Woo
Sextet for winds
Trio arrangement of Op.20
To name a few…
Clarinet Trio, Opus 11.
Septet Op. 20.
Trio Op. 11. Not that the off-hand comment implied this or any other work.
“A Times lifer of 22 years service and a stint on the classical beat, Wakin knows as well as anyone that the Met only communicates with one newspaper.”
The New York Times is the only major daily newspapers in New York City that has an arts beat. How do you expect the Met to communicate with the Daily News and New York Post when there’s no one on staff who writes about culture (and never mind that the readers of these tabloids don’t care about opera)?
And if your gripe is that the Met provides limited access to out-of-town and international media, I don’t see how you can blame them for wanting to focus their attention on the media outlets that most of their ticket buyers follow. I doubt the London Symphony Orchestra, for example, is granting many interviews to the LA Times.
What a cynical choice. Daniel Wakin was a master of “Gotcha” journalism. Do you have an opinion to express? Daniel Wakin could twist your words to make you say what he wanted you to. A real scumbag.
A typical member of the fourth estate, very sadly.
Dan was their last good music writer, so of course he would want to leave. Transferring him to Obits was a huge insult. And, at least in the past, the Daily News did review classical music, Bill Zakariasen was on their staff.
The artistic community obviously hasn’t yet realized what most people know; that the mainstream media is despised and mistrusted by a large section of the population. Activism will do that to your credibility every single time.
This is extraordinary given that Wakin wrote the piece about Gelb banning Opera News from reviewing the Met!
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/22/arts/music/opera-news-will-stop-reviewing-metropolitan-opera.html
“Dan’s most recent role was as a key editor on the Obits desk….” The lowest of the low. Wait, maybe crime reporter would have been worse.
Watching a pre-Gelb production of Fidelio with Mattila, Pape, Struckman, Hepner, across the board first-rate talent, I am reminded that you can’t go to the Met today without hearing very uneven casting. In addition to hiring Lincoln Center favorites like Bartlett Sher, who doesn’t get opera, and promoting thin, pretty/handsome talent that’s not always talented, the Met is a mess. NY Times talent is unlikely to help the situation.
Well-stated. Once HD took over the Met, musical priorities moved down the ladder, including directors who understand the art form.
Adding more senior administrative staff is just applying more band-aids to a festering wound.