In the past few weeks, a couple critics I greatly admire have bitten the critical dust: David Ansen of Newsweek and Nathan Lee of the Village Voice. Lee was a pretty recent addition to the Voice, and his original voice was one I greatly admired. (Never have I felt more “I wish I’d said that!” moments than with some of his best work.) Ansen was a bit more mainstream, a bit more staid, but unerringly sharp and a master wordsmith. Anyone who’s seen This Film Is Not Yet Rated knows that Ansen’s wit and insight isn’t confined to his writing.

Sad, but not uncommon. Newspapers and magazines all over the country are offering buyouts (or simply firing, as the case was with Lee) to their critics and shuffling critical duties over to wire services. My own paper has two critics left: the servicable Chris Vognar and inoffensive-as-dry-toast Tom Marstaud. The rest of the critical workload is handled by agitator Roger Moore of the Orlando Sentinel and the less-than-amazing Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times. Oh, and the offensively mediocre Christy Lamire of the Associated Press, who pretty well personifies the movies-as-product approach to criticism. This past weekend, the Morning News couldn’t even spare the manpower to review Leatherheads, that quiet little indie with little-known George Clooney, Renee Zellweger, and that guy from The Office.

I’m sure the story’s the same where you live. The internet and 24-hour news networks are bleeding newspapers dry, so upper management (once-independent publishers now beholden to an increasingly shrinking pool of media titans) cuts costs by axing whoever is deemed unnecessary. Why have one thirty-year veteran critic when you can just use the wire reports you’re already paying for? Or, if you don’t want to be a total drone, a critic from another city whose paper is owned by the same media titan that owns you. It’s all the same, right?

For that matter, why have one veteran reporter with decades under his belt and the paycheck to match if, for the same price, you can have two hungry journalism grads? Oh, sure, they don’t know shit, but they’re cheaper…

The problem isn’t unique to print media; radio isn’t doing much better. My buddy Joe is something like the self-aware Rosencrantz of radio; he’s spent half his life in radio, in one of the top 5 largest markets of the country. He’s seen what happened when the FCC’s restrictions on ownership were deregulated, allowing one media company to own multiple radio stations in the same market. Intense homogenization resulted, naturally, and now radio stations are in the same tailspin as newspapers: cut every non-essential job, where “non-essential” is a shifting variable. Pretty soon you’ve got DJs doing their own HTML for the station website and running their own boards. Smaller-market stations are essentially re-broadcasting posts for nationally syndicated shows.

Research and focus groups have hobbled the radio industry, but that’s what happens when accountants who hadn’t been within 50 yards of a studio 10 years ago are put in charge. Radio has been reduced to pure formula—and you should hear some of the nicknames different DJ mixes have—as if Corporate has decided that, you know, these 50 people in Des Moines like this ratio of music to chatter per hour… therefore everyone in the country must like that same ratio. The ratings keep spiralling, but that sure as hell isn’t their fault. Fire more disc jockeys!

But that’s just in lockstep with the media-wide commodification of entertainment. Don’t get me wrong: I know there’s always got to be patrons if there’s going to be art. But it seems as if the balance has swung too far in the patrons’ favor, and the public seems to be playing along. Favorite blogger Jim Emerson puts it this way:

What has changed? The expectations of the audience, for one thing. The more people have become accustomed to approaching art and entertainment as consumers (trying to get the optimal return on their investment of leisure time and money), the more they’ve come to think of reviews as buying guides. (And DVDs have made paramount the idea of movies or TV shows as not only products, but possessions that take up shelf space in your life.)

Commodification. Viewing art (or entertainment, if you prefer) as product, its players as court jesters, and its aspirations as nothing but distraction and escapism. It’s actually not too hard to imagine why this approach to entertainment is so prevalent: It’s easy to have an opinion about Brangelina’s latest antics. It’s easy to watch VH1 and laugh about all those silly one-hit wonders. It’s easy to swallow that one-two punch of scorn and envy served up by channels like E!. It’s easy to opt for Shrek 5 because you know exactly what you’ll be getting. It’s easy to point to a wall of DVDs and present that as “proof” that you are the biggest movie lover you know.

It’s less easy to identify, for example, why the eroticism in Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution wasn’t actually all that erotic. Or why Michael Haneke’s Funny Games was a colossal failure—or a bold statement. Or whether Kevin Smith’s name is worth mentioning in the same breath as Richard Linklater’s. That stuff takes work and thought, and a lot of people are so drained by their work and social life that they don’t have the energy to care about the junk food they shovel into their eyes and ears. Couple this unkind reality with the reflexive (and distinctly American) distrust of expertise and you have a fatal dose for anyone whose job description is critical analysis of “mere” entertainment.

But here’s what happens when you cut all your unique voices voices in favor of “product” text that can be found in two, five, ten, or dozens of other sources: you give the average consumer less reason to pick up your product. The great thing about the internet is that it’s free, yes, and it’s true that this impacts a newspaper’s bottom line. But you’ll notice it’s not the dumbshit bland movie bloggers and internet critics that get the audiences, at least not in any great number. It’s the ones who offer a distinct voice that likely can’t be found anywhere else, which is Ain’t It Cool News’s sole saving grace: if you want to read dumbass fanboys compare genre movies to oral sex, there is no finer venue.

Which is, I think, the central irony: the media titan approach to staunching the flow is to cut out everything that makes their papers unique, thus giving consumers (ack, now who’s commodifying?) less reason to buy their product. They are in many ways guaranteeing their own slow death. It’s true there’s nothing new under the sun, but the one thing a Roger Ebert or a Nathan Lee or a Lisa Schwarzbaum or an A.O. Scott can give you that no one else can is Ebert, Lee, Schwarzbaum, and Scott. Once upon a time, a paper used to be proud to offer voices you couldn’t find anywhere else.

But no, that’s not enough anymore; you should see what the new tactics are for hooking younger audiences. Frex: the bloodless and embarrassing Dallas Morning News has in the past few years started up a publication called Quick. Quick is a free weekday paper, which is about right, as it is worthless. (Take a look at that print staff: one staff writer and seven people with the “copy editor & page designer” job title. I am betting not one of them was born in the 60’s.)

Every issue contains: dumbass lists that wouldn’t make the cut in Entertainment Weekly j.v., Dallas Morning News stories pared down to almost-worthless news bites, and truly insipid “nightlife” and “humor” columns by 25 year-olds who have nothing interesting to say. What’s worse is that Quick clearly wants to be the paper of choice for white-collar white people in their late 20’s and early 30’s with no kids and tons of disposable income, of which Dallas has plenty. But those people don’t read Quick. Working-class folks read Quick, because hey, it’s free, and it’s at every bus stop, tram station, and street corner in the city. Quick isn’t even hitting its demo; is not, in fact, hitting anywhere near its demo.

“Okay, Ken,” you say. “Clearly you feel very protective of your fellow critic. But could you please tell me why critics matter? Do we really need them?”

Thanks for asking, straw man!

“Need” is a strong word, but I’m going to assume we’re not talking about Maslow’s Heirarchy of Needs and say yeah, we do need critics. In their ideal state, critics help an audience make educated decisions about how they’ll spend their time and money; more, they help audiences get more out of those decisions, so entertainment can go from being a passive mind-numbing experience to something enriching; you know, like art is supposed to be. A good critic benefits artist and audience alike, just as good art benefits critics and audiences, and just as an educated audience makes the whole exercise worth a damn. The ideal critic makes the audience smarter, which in turn keeps the artist honest.

So what is an ideal critic? Not someone you agree with all the time, heavens no. (How boring would that be?) Someone who knows what they’re talking about but isn’t elitist or aloof. Someone who writes with wit and humor. Someone who writes criticism useful to the converted and the casually interested alike, whether or not those audiences intend to view the art firsthand. A good critic is, in a way, a kind of reporter paid to be as subjective as possible: He or she keeps you abreast of trends and movements within films and the industry that creates them. Read enough of these critics and you can triangulate your own position on whatever today’s topic might be. And sometimes it’s just fun to nod your head enthusiastically or gripe at your newspaper or computer screen. Remember fun? Yeah.

This isn’t the death of all critics everywhere, of course; maybe just the death of the living-wage critic. Entertainment-as-commodity means the “middle class” critic, like the middle class reporter or DJ or band will be phased out in favor of dozens of small-time “copy editor & page designers” and titans of the field, like Ebert or Scott. Those middle-classers will migrate online if they haven’t already, and the conversation will continue.

It’s just too bad newspapers seem to want no part of it. But I’m sure they know best.

ADDENDUM: I have been pointed to this article, which also went live today, about similar circumstances among TV critics. Well worth the read, especially for the “critics talk back” section at the bottom.