Sara Pearce Is Leaving the Enquirer

It is unfortunate news, but the Cincinnati Enquirer is no longer going to have an arts editor. They offered buyouts for many of their employees. So after 25 years Sara is leaving . I think a lot of people are leaving, including Jim Borgman.

I had just this week complained to the paper about how terrible the art blog is. Sara had originally set up a very nice blog, that was attractively laid out, easy to navigate and pretty fast. There was some fun discussion on there at times. The Enquirer had her move it to their painfully unattractive and slow site, with all of their other blogs. After that, the comments were slim to none, as the site was just not very good.
I am not sure why, as papers have to be struggling to compete with all the online news and blogs, they should at least make sure their online presence is a powerful one.

While I did not always agree with Sara's opinions (she likes a lot of "art"), she will be missed. She did write a pretty good review about my last show. Though, I thought the article "lacked bravura and polish" that can be found in some of her other work.

She will still be around on her personal blogs.
http://stateoftheartcincinnati.blogspot.com/ - it's a shell at the moment but she told me to keep looking, as it will fill up.
She also created a second blog about the local crafts scene called "craft lust". For some reason that title seems like a disaster waiting to happen. I generally think it is a bad idea to put "lust" in a website title. You are going to place yourself in some weird search results on google- some freaky people may end up at the site, like those that are sexually turned on by crafts (crafts can be pretty hot), but that will make for some interesting comments on that blog.
blogspot.com (http://craftlust.blogspot.com/) with a mirror site at wordpress.com (http://craftlust.wordpress.com/). Why two of the same blog? She wants to see which site she- - and we - like better.

I will do my best to post my opinionated comments on those blogs when they get running.

I'm not sure how it will work getting local news on the arts now. The Enquirer will probably just have a sports writer do an occasional article on the arts. That should be great. They can use cool sports saying to describe the art, like that it is a "home run", a "Strike out", or just say things like "Boo Ya!".
I suppose we should be happy we still have CityBeat, which is really pretty unfortunate. Unless you are a communist.