Very little digital programming by cultural orgs has ever been expected to contribute directly to earned revenue, so is the rush to release free content going to turn out to be a bad idea? Chris Unitt raises the most challenging questions facing arts organisations now.
I’ve been wanting to write something about the digital aspects of how cultural organisations have reacted to the shutdown, but…
Well, firstly, there’s just too much going on. Every ‘what if…’ thought experiment from the past twenty years is currently playing out allatonce. There’s been a flood of helpful and not so helpful prognostications (sometimes they’re one and the same think piece), and I’m wary of adding to the wrong side of that pile.
Plus I have got a toddler, a business, and a personal life to keep up with.
And anyway, in complicated situations you want to be sure that you’re asking the right questions. So here are some that have been pinging around my brain the past few weeks. Answers to some of them are forming, but I’ll try to keep those out of this for now.
Here we go…
1. With furloughs, layoffs and restricted activity kicking in at cultural orgs, what constitutes an effective skeleton crew when visitors/audiences can (temporarily?) only access them digitally? Or is the cash from the job retention scheme more important than all of that in the very short term? '... Keep reading on Cultural Digital newsletter