We anxious few

The melancholy news that Scott Cantrell, a critic of wide and deep experience, has accepted a buyout from the Dallas Morning News led me to update the critics' listing here on the blog. Every time I do this, I remove a few more names. If, as seems not unlikely, the News fails to hire a staff critic to replace him, the state of Texas will have no full-time classical critic — the Houston Chronicle has had none since the departure of Charles Ward — and there will be, by my count, fewer than ten newspapers in America with dedicated classical critics on staff. In the magazine world, the picture is even sadder: I am the only full-time classical critic at a national American magazine. (My superb colleague Justin Davidson, at New York, divides his time between music and architecture.) This is not, of course, a classical-music problem. Critics in all fields have been falling by the wayside, as American journalism abandons its historic mission and flails about desperately in search of new readers. Fortunately, free-lance and blog activity remains lively.