How important are local concert reviews?

I was in Nashville, TN, earlier this month, where there were two nearly sold-out concerts, one featuring Keith Urban and the other featuring Stevie Wonder. Both got great reviews from writers at The Tennessean. I love music and other arts, but I’m too busy to attend many concerts. Still, I love to know what it might have been like had I attended.

At The Telegraph, we hire freelancers to review some Macon Symphony Orchestra performances, but we tend not to review pop or country acts, or local theater productions. The argument has been that it is more useful to preview events so that people can attend than to write a review that, because of our print deadlines, wouldn’t be published in the newspaper until a couple days after the event anyway.

The review of Urban’s Friday night concert appeared in Sunday’s edition of The Tennessean and the review of Stevie’s Saturday night concert appeared in Monday’s paper, so deadlines must be an issue at that paper, too. (Of course, newspaper Web sites would allow more immediate publication of reviews.)

One of the reasons The Telegraph has curtailed reviews is that it is hard to find reliable, experienced freelancers who are also good writers and critics. But that isn’t the only reason; it requires an editor’s attention to assign and manage a freelance rotation, and to edit the stories. That resource is now devoted to covering daily news stories, so I can't promise that we can add a lot of reviews to our workload.

Still, as we assess the content we are able to provide readers, we'd like to know what you think. Do you find reviews newsworthy, and would you like to see more? Was there a concert you attended that you believe readers also could have enjoyed vicariously? If we published more reviews, would it make you buy the paper or would you more likely look for the review online?

What about the events we do preview? Do you find the previews useful? Do we do enough? What would you change?


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