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Death Proof? | Sean Means says that when newspapers slash budgets, arts and culture coverage is usually the first thing to go.

Movie critic Sean Means keeps a list. Ask him about it, and he’ll laugh darkly and refer to the nickname he’s acquired as a result of it: “the Grim Reaper of film criticism.”

The sobriquet is inaccurate, though. Means, who reviews films for the Salt Lake Tribune in Utah, isn’t killing off film critics; he’s merely documenting a troubling trend that began in 2006, when a cluster of high-profile veteran movie critics at various print publications were either reassigned, bought out, or laid off altogether: Kevin Thomas at the Los Angeles Times, Jami Bernard at the New York Daily News, Dennis Lim and Michael Atkinson at the Village Voice. And the disappearances didn’t stop: in 2007, Michael Wilmington quit the Chicago Tribune, Jonathan Rosenbaum retired from the Chicago Reader, Eleanor Ringel Gillespie took a buyout from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and a host of lower-profile regional critics from places like Houston, Detroit, Tampa, and Minneapolis-St. Paul all vanished as well.

That was the year Means began keeping a list of “The Departed” on his blog, “The Movie Cricket.” Right now, there are 50 names on the ever-growing list, which in retrospect seems like a harbinger of the troubled state of the newspaper industry as a whole. When time came for budgets to be slashed, local movie critics (and arts journalists in general) seemed like some of the most expendable people on the staff.

“The bean-counters always go with the idea that local news reporting is their bread and butter and that arts coverage and feature writing is a luxury,” Means says. “But I tend to think the opposite is true. In any substantial market, you can go anywhere to find out where the accident was or where the robbery took place. Everybody covers that.

“I think the thing that makes a newspaper unique are columnists, critics, editorial writers, that sort of thing. And arts criticism is a big part of that — you don’t get arts criticism on TV stations. This is an area where newspapers can excel and be unique — and not just locally, but nationally as well. People come to the Tribune site from all over the country to read movie reviews.” (Here in Edmonton, I feel compelled to note, SEE Magazine is the only publication with an all-local team of film critics. The Journal and the Sun use syndicated reviews, and Vue Weekly’s lead critic, Josef Braun, lives in Toronto.)

Means, who’s been the Tribune’s film critic for 16 years and their film blogger for the last three and a half, bristles at the notion that syndicated movie reviewers can do the job just as well as a local writer. For one thing, Means says, those syndicated reviews tend to be either wire reviews written in a homogenized, generic style that adds little to the conversation about a particular films; or they’re written by a critic based in New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago and whose mindset inevitably feels disconnected from readers in other regions of the country. And can newspapers afford to let their readers feel even more disconnected from them?

“Another thing that concerns me,” Means says, “is that there is homegrown, regional cinema all over the country that is never going to get covered in the New York Times until it reaches a certain critical mass. And that critical mass doesn’t happen unless the regional critic takes up the cause and starts writing about it. Here in Salt Lake City, for instance, we have a thriving subgenre of Mormon-themed films, a few of which filtered out to other parts of the country largely because I and other critics in Salt Lake paid attention to them. That wouldn’t happen if my paper just ran wire reviews.”

Means says every addition to his list pains him — many of those names represent friends and acquaintances — but he was especially puzzled by the Los Angeles Daily News’ decision to drop critic Glenn Whipp from their roster in December, and then reassign critic Bob Strauss in February. “For a paper in a media capital like Los Angeles not to have a movie critic is astonishing,” Means says. “In Los Angeles, that’s not just a luxury; movies are your leading export. Movies are a business story, it’s a lifestyle story. If you’re a paper in Los Angeles and you’re not covering that, then you’ve forfeited a large part of the territory that you’re never going to get back.”

The unavoidable question at the end of all this is how long Means thinks it’ll be before his own name gets added to his list. He says he feels reasonably secure — his blog is one of the Tribune’s most popular online features, and he spearheads the paper’s extensive coverage of the Sundance Film Festival, which practically happens in the paper’s backyard.

“The higher-ups tell us we’re fine,” Means says. “But that’s no different from any other paper anywhere from here to Tierra del Fuego — everything’s great, until it’s not great.... But if you look at the papers who cut these film critic positions early on, you’ll see that they’ve had to keep on making cuts. Whatever the supposed benefit of that would be didn’t take. So I think maybe they’ve realized too late that what they gained in short-term savings is offset by what they’ve lost.”

Take it from the Grim Reaper. If he’s not an expert on loss, who is?