Cultural journalism has a long tradition in daily newspapers and cultural magazines, but it has been systematically neither produced nor studied in local newspapers. This marked the starting point for a recent study that examined art and cultural reviews in the context of local journalism.

The Finnish Critics’ Association SARV conducted a subproject as part of the three-year project Shine on, Critique! that dealt with production of art reviews in local newspapers. I interviewed journalists and editors involved in the project to capture the potential and challenges of local-newspaper criticism – to find out what it is and what it could be. Based on an analysis of the theme interviews and articles that had been published during the first months of the project, I started drafting the concept of community-conforming criticism. This concept shows similarities with community journalism and solutions-based journalism but seeks to maintain the distinctive features of reviewing and criticism that take to some extent distance from some core principles of (news) journalism (more about this relationship can be read here).

The scientific peer-reviewed article titled “Community-First Criticism: Reviewing Art and Culture in Local Newspapers” was published as open access in Journalism Studies. It was my first attempt to collect ideas related to local cultural coverage and local journalistic practices.

In addition, a Finnish-language book chapter discussing the outcome of the subproject was included in the Kritikki näkyy! (2023), edited by Riikka Laczak, Vesa Rantama and Maaria Ylikangas. I also wrote an open-access article about the project for professional practitioners, “Local Reviewer at Your Service: The Possibility – and Impossibility – of Community-Based Criticism”, published in the critics’ professional magazine Kritiikin Uutiset – Kritikernytt.

The publications also preceded an English-language webinar trilogy “Re-newing Reviewing: New and Innovative Practices among Art Critics” produced by SARV in collaboration with Nordicom, with a thematic focus on inclusion and diversity, criticism and politics, and economic structures of arts criticism.

The overall aim of the project and the related study has been to re-think the professional practices and cultures in a way that makes us aware of the structural restrictions but also the possibilities available for such niched genres such as the review. As much as the review genre needs investment in its future, journalism in more general needs new ideas to keep the public connection vital and reach out to both existing and new audiences.