The changing face of arts journalism: an embedding experiment with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

The origins of the idea for embedding arts journalists inside arts organizations or institutions where they’d work on staff or as part of paid fellowships covering the arts can most strongly be traced to Sasha Anawalt, director of USC Annenberg’s arts journalism masters program, and her colleague, Douglas McLennan. They have been developing the model since 2010, simultaneously with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO) whose press and marketing team was the first to implement the idea and hire an experienced arts journalist in 2013 to cover stories for its internal media outlet. In addition to the CSO, the concept has since been picked up by two other significant organizations—the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Geffen Playhouse. In both instances, Anawalt and McLennan played major roles in hatching this novel journalism experiment. Then, in September 2014, Anawalt succeeded in convincing the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) to take me on as an in‐house arts journalist, to produce stories that measured up to the standards of professional journalism that would mostly be published by its internal media outlets that were seen by the public. This thesis is a chronicling of what I learned about journalism while there (what worked and what didn’t), and an analysis of how my interaction with LACMA staff members shaped the content and quality of my work.