66 REPORTING THE ARTS II

ike the larger-than-life city it belongs to,Houston’s arts scene has always made abig statement, touting some of the

nation’s most reputable arts institutions and nur-turing emerging artists. But bad things some-times happen to good people, and looking backon the last five years, one can’t help but recall thebiblical story of Job. Like the devil’s hapless vic-tim, arts organizations in the nation’s fourth-most-populous city have been hit with a series ofcalamities.

First came the flood. When tropical stormAllison drenched downtown Houston in June2001, hundreds of millions of gallons of waterpoured into the underground network of tunnelsthat connect venues in the city’s theater district.The torrent destroyed the Houston Symphony’soffices as well as its entire music library. “All wehad left were a pencil and a piece of paper,” sayssenior public affairs director Art Kent.

His neighbors did not fare much better. TheHouston Grand Opera, considered one of thenation’s top five opera companies, lost $1.5 mil-lion worth of costumes, wigs and props. Theflood destroyed the Alley Theatre’s NeuhausStage, production shops and a rehearsal hall.Total damage came to $6 million. The Houston

Ballet was relatively lucky, sustaining $300,000worth of damage when water swamped its dress-ing rooms.

The deluge did not stop there. Just threemonths later, September 11 arrived. And soonafterward, in the midst of the nation’s economicdownturn, Enron unexpectedly collapsed. Thescandal left the city financially and emotionallydevastated, and Enron’s formerly sizable philan-thropic contributions disappeared. Subsequentmergers between Houston’s other energy compa-nies further diminished the availability of grantmoney. And as financial uncertainty sweptthrough the city, individual giving dropped andticket sales plummeted.

The war in Iraq completed the confluence ofevents some Houstonians like to call “The PerfectStorm.” The Symphony, with its long history offinancial trouble, had the added misfortune of aprolonged musicians’ strike, which interruptedits 2002-03 season. The organization ended2003 with a $5 million deficit and was forced tolay off 11 percent of its administrative staff. Itsfellows in the arts followed suit. A new mantraprevailed in the theater district: Cut staffing,cancel shows and shave production budgets.

Arts organizations were also forced to return

Houston, Texas

L

“In terms of

state funding

for the arts,

Texas is dead

last.”Victoria Lightman

Houston commissioner

Texas Commission on the Arts

Pho

togr

aph

cour

tesy

of g

reat

er H

oust

on C

onve

nti

on a

nd

Vis

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NATIONAL ARTS JOURNALISM PROGRAM 67

unveiling of the shimmering Hobby Center forthe Performing Arts was the biggest opening ofthe last few years. The Center added 3,150 seatsto a theater district that already boasted 12,000.The Hobby has also helped fill Houston’s needfor an intimate downtown theater by renting its500-seat Zilkha Hall to small and midsizegroups for $2,500 a night. Suchu Dance alsoopened its more affordable 120-seat venue lastyear.

Houston’s alternative pride and joy, InfernalBridegroom Productions (IBP), meanwhilemoved into its own space in 2001 after being

to safer programming and increase fundraisingactivities. Since then, cutbacks, cancellations andcreative marketing have paid off to a certaindegree. “People feel like the city is turning a cor-ner,” says Lindsay Heinsen, the HoustonChronicle’s arts and entertainment editor. “Wecan see them loosening up, taking risks andscheduling more adventurous events.” Across theboard, arts groups are starting to bring back pre-viously canceled shows.

The Alley Theatre has actually managed toturn tragedy into opportunity. When Allison hit,theater officials had already been planning torenovate the Neuhaus, so they pushed up theirplans, rebuilt the 300-seat house, and reopenedit in January 2002. Later that year they alsounveiled the impressive $10 million Alley Centerfor Theatre Production. That the theater man-aged to complete both projects amid Houston’seconomic crisis speaks not only of its clear visionbut also to the fact that Houston is a city dedicat-ed to the arts.

That’s a good thing, because when it comes tostate funding for the arts, Texas is dead last. In2003 the legislature reduced the TexasCommission on the Arts’ budget by 22 percent.As a result, the TCA has suspended its decentral-ization program, which gave hundreds of thou-sands of dollars to city arts councils. WithoutTCA funding, the Cultural Arts Council ofHouston and Harris County (CACHH) has hadto rely primarily on the city’s hotel occupancy taxto fund the 160 groups it sponsors. Yet in 2003the tax money it received dipped to $7.9 milliondue to a decline in tourism.

As the largest art museum in town, theMuseum of Fine Arts, receives some city money.But it is its strong private-funding base thatallows it to pursue capital projects like the newBeck Building, which opened in 2000 and occu-pies an entire city block. Fund-raising effortshave also helped battle the 20 percent drop themuseum’s sizable endowment experiencedbetween 2000 and 2002.

Just up the road, the Menil Collection runsentirely on private money. John and Dominiquede Menil built the museum in 1987 to show theirexpansive collection of surrealist, tribal andancient art. But after the death of Mrs. de Menilin 1997, the Menil started having financial andstaffing problems. Museum officials hope thatthe appointment of new director JosefHelfenstein will help turn things around.

Also wholly funded by private entities isHouston’s newest 800-pound gorilla. The 2002 Houston Chronicle

68 REPORTING THE ARTS II

homeless for its first eight years. The experimen-tal theater company has become the poster childfor small-group success. It may seem remarkablethat the group has managed to grow so muchduring a difficult economy, but IBP’s experienceis typical of many troupes its size, which rely lesson wavering corporate support and more on con-sistently reliable individuals and foundations.

Da Camera of Houston, which presentschamber music performances, jazz events, multi-disciplinary productions and new works, isanother midsize gem that has continued to shine.In fact, Da Camera’s single-ticket sales were up15 percent last year, and the group ended 2003with a slight surplus.

That’s not to say that smaller organizationshave come through Houston’s Perfect Stormunscathed. Groups that did not apply for a grantbefore the recession may be hard-pressed to findone now. But like their larger counterparts,grassroots organizations have come up withinnovative plans to bring in audiences. In 2002,15 small and midsize entities banded together toform the Fresh Arts Coalition, which marketstheir work on a common Web site and through e-mail newsletters.

The contemporary arts center DiverseWorksis another vital showcase for performing, visualand literary art. It is also one of several galleries

helping to make Houston one of the nation’smost significant visual-arts centers. “At a timewhen everything is down, the artists seem to bedoing okay,” says Victoria Lightman, HoustonCommissioner for the Texas Commission on theArts. “A lot of artists come to Houston from allover the world and stay because the cost of liv-ing is low and there is a lot of support here.”

Houston likewise has a vibrant Latino artscommunity. Tejano music floods Houston’sclubs, while Talento Bilingue de Houston pro-duces bilingual theater programs and providesarts education to Latino youth. Houston’s largearts groups also cater to the city’s biggestminority population. The Museum of Fine Arts,Houston has established a center for LatinAmerican art, and the Society of PerformingArts often brings in Latino music and dancegroups.

Strong players in almost every creativegenre contribute to Houston’s cultural life. Andthe arts scene continues to evolve and growdespite floods, corporate scandal and financialdownturns. “My sense is that it was tough, butthere is a resilience in this community, and peo-ple seem to manage,” says CACHH ExecutiveDirector Maria Munoz-Blanco. “We have a veryhealthy artist community, and it’s doing betterthan people think it is.”

By Lily Tung

“We have a very

healthy artist

community,

and it’s doing

better than

people think

it is.”Maria Munoz-Blanco

executive director

Cultural Arts Council of

Houston and Harris

County

seriousness with which the Chronicle treated TV was demonstratedby the volume of reviews. No other newspaper we monitored considered TV to be a more review-worthy medium than music orthe performing arts.

Weekend supplements are usually the prime venue for moviecoverage, yet the Chronicle was one of only two metropolitan news-papers to assign less than 20 percent of its weekend articles-and-listings newshole to movies. It should be noted that the weekenddeclines at the Chronicle are overstated in our reporting since wewere unable to obtain one of those sections. Thus, of the month’snine weekend supplements (four issues of Zest and five of Preview),this database represents only eight.

Music was unscathed by the overall cutbacks in A&C journal-ism. As a result, the beat received more space than movies inOctober 2003, a radical shift from five years earlier. The number ofmusic articles increased, with pop and rock averaging at least twostories a day.—AT

By drastically cutting the average length of its arts and culturearticles, the Houston Chronicle was one of those anomalous newspa-pers in this study that increased the total number of articles inOctober 2003 compared with five years earlier, while institutingmajor cuts to the size of its newshole.

Massive cutbacks were made in the newshole for journalism inthe Chronicle’s weekend arts supplements Zest and Preview. In itsdaily arts-and-lifestyles section, entitled Houston, listings were cutback dramatically. Back in October 1998, Houston’s listings were larg-er than in every other A&L section we studied but one. So five yearslater they were scaled back from gargantuan to bigger than normal.

Arts and culture coverage at the Chronicle was still skewed heav-ily to television, even though both the volume of TV articles and thegrid have shrunk since October 1998. The Chronicle’s TV grid wasthe biggest we found in both phases of our study, and television jour-nalism here suffered smaller cutbacks during the five-year periodthan at any other metropolitan newspaper we tracked save one. The

70 REPORTING THE ARTS II

it did when Reporting the Arts covered it fiveyears ago—with writers following the typical pre-view/review format—the paper has actuallyincreased the number of arts articles, although ithas cut their average length by more than 30percent. Circulation has remained fairly stableduring this period, rising at the daily from542,414 in late 1998 to 549,300 in late 2003,and on Sunday staying virtually the same at740,134 in 1998 and 740,002 in 2003. Arts andlifestyle stories currently share a daily featuressection called Houston. On Thursdays thePreview section devotes itself primarily to popu-lar arts and listings. The Sunday tabloid Zest,which is aimed at a slightly older audience,focuses on the fine arts.

In March 2004 the paper also announced itwould once again divide the arts-and-entertain-ment editorship as well as hire another televisionwriter. Despite the reinstatement, arts editorLindsay Heinsen still worries about how she isgoing to fill the growing features page. With theHouston arts scene expanding and her staffremaining stable, Heinsen has responded by put-ting her efforts into cultivating more freelancewriters, especially to cover the city’s thriving visu-al-arts community.

She will have to continue doing so. With onlyone full-time correspondent covering each of theart forms—except for film, which has tworeporters, and architecture, which doesn’t evenhave one—it is virtually impossible for critics andreporters to cover their beats in any comprehen-sive way. Most of the writers are overwhelmedand have little time to search out smaller artsgroups and lesser-known artists. Fortunately,notes Heinsen, the financial support is there tofind good freelancers: “There is more moneyacross the board.”

Although most of the Chronicle’s arts cover-age is event-driven, there is also a mandate toincrease reporting. “We want to do more break-ing news,” says deputy managing editor KyrieO’Connor. “Features is news. It has to haveurgency, energy and excitement.” There is like-wise a push to appeal to younger readers andHouston’s burgeoning Latino community, whichaccounts for more than 30 percent of the city’spopulation. A regular freelancer covers Latinomusic. The Chronicle also publishes zonedinserts in Spanish and a new Spanish-languageentertainment tabloid called La Vibra.

Employees say they are pleased with theimprovements that Cohen has brought to thepaper. Yet despite small signs of change, mostprofessionals in the arts remain unsatisfied with

Arts Coverage in Houston: A Critical View

When the Museum of Fine Arts, Houstonopened its exhibition “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend”in 2002, it had high hopes for extensive presscoverage. Its expectations were understandable;after all, the show comprised a groundbreakingcollection of folk art. Created by the women of anAfrican-American community isolated for cen-turies in rural Alabama, the quilts were appear-ing together for the first time in a comprehensiveexhibition. But to the surprise of museum offi-cials, the Houston Chronicle sent its home-designeditor to cover the show. A lifestyle feature ran;an art review never did.

Two months later the exhibit moved to theWhitney Museum of American Art, where NewYork Times art critic Michael Kimmelman calledit “the most ebullient exhibition of the New Yorkseason” and dubbed the quilts “some of the mostmiraculous works of modern art America hasproduced.” The omission of such an importantcritique was typical of the Chronicle, whereunderstaffing has often resulted in inconsistentcoverage of the arts. The fact that it overlooked amajor national exhibition born in its own home-town was strangely reminiscent of the big newsstory it had missed the previous year—Enron.

Critics contend that it was the Chronicle’sslow response to the Enron story that promptedthe Hearst Corporation to overhaul the paper’stop editorial team. In June 2002 it installed JeffCohen as editor. For the most part, both staff andreaders welcomed the management change, hop-ing it would usher in better times for Houston’sonly newspaper and the nation’s seventh-largestdaily.

The arts section shares some of the paper’soverall notoriety. Although it has talented writ-ers, many arts professionals say stories are rarelyincisive and mainly cover what’s new and high-profile. Some of the section’s problems stem fromcutbacks prior to Cohen’s reign. Back then thedepartment lost two writing positions and for-feited an additional staff spot when it consolidat-ed a dual editorship into one post handling botharts and entertainment. With a smaller staff, edi-tors were forced to give perfunctory treatment tosome important stories and to use more wirecopy and syndicated columns.

Cohen has so far brought about gradualchanges, calling for higher journalistic standardsand promising a greater commitment ofresources. And while the arts page looks much as

“We want to do

more breaking

news. Features

is news. It has

to have urgency,

energy and

excitement.” Kyrie O’Connor

deputy managing editor

Houston Chronicle

NATIONAL ARTS JOURNALISM PROGRAM 71

sively. In fact, music has a much more dominantpresence in the publication than visual arts ortheater. Last year, the Press expanded its calen-dar section by three pages, filling them withquick, pithy arts pieces.

Houston has more than 60 radio stations,but few cover the arts in a systematic fashion.University of Houston’s public radio stationKUHF produces a one-hour daily culture pro-gram called The Front Row, and also presentsregular broadcasts of local classical concerts andopera performances. Pacifica station KPFT offersseveral specialty music shows covering every-thing from blues to hip-hop. Its show 24 PMinterviews local artists daily, while LivingArt airsonce a week. Arts coverage on television is limit-ed and sporadic. Houston’s two morning newsshows and ABC-13’s weekly public-affairs pro-grams offer some, as does a weekly communityshow on Houston PBS.

As for magazines, Texas Monthly includesthe arts in its statewide coverage. The smallerniche publication Arts Houston takes a fun, light-hearted look at culture, while the more criticallyoriented nonprofit quarterly ARTL!ES chroniclesTexas’ visual-arts world.

Online, GlassTire.com dedicates itself toHouston’s active visual-arts scene throughthoughtful reviews, previews and profiles. TheHouston Chronicle also has a Web site that runsstories, reviews and listings from the newspaperas well as material generated in-house.

By Lily Tung

the paper’s coverage. They view the Chronicle asa publication fed by a public relations machine,one that possesses little investigative drive. Theyalso point to the fact that in this sports-obsessedtown the paper has been known to publish twosports sections in one day while relegating thearts to second-class status. “There is an obscene,inordinate coverage of athletics,” says BudFranks, president and CEO of the Hobby Center.“If the Houston Chronicle did a better job stirringup interest in the performing arts, I think youwould find more people coming to more events.”

Apart from the Chronicle, the only otherwidely read publication in town is the feistyalternative weekly Houston Press. The Press liq-uidated its main competition, Public News, backin 1998 when its parent company, New Times,bought the paper. Some arts professionals accusethe Press of being “salacious” and “muckraking,”while others are grateful that it does “more hon-est journalism compared to the HoustonChronicle” and covers “stories the mainstreammedia can’t.” Press associate editor CathyMatusow admits the paper does not shy awayfrom the controversial or the edgy; it has beenknown to run biting reviews, veering away fromthe politeness often found in the Chronicle.

Like most alternative weeklies, the Press doesa better job than a daily paper in covering theyoung, alternative scene. Although it pays littleattention to classical music, it covers the localclub- and popular-music scene quite comprehen-

“If The

Houston

Chronicle did

a better job

stirring up

interest in the

performing

arts, I think

you would find

more people

coming to more

events.”Bud Franks

president and CEO

Hobby Center for the

Performing Arts