Author, critic, composer and pianist Ted Gioia — the JJA’s Lifetime Achievement in Jazz
Journalism honoree so named in 2017 — has launched Culture Notes of an Honest Broker, a newsletter focused on the arts available for both free and paid subscriptions, on the platform Substack.
“Substack is growing at a remarkable pace, and for a good reason,” Gioia explains in a press release announcing his new effort. “It provides the most fair and supportive environment I’ve encountered for writers. And they empower writers on every front, from financial matters to questions of intellectual property. This is the right place for me to take my vocation to the next level.”
In a recent post on his platform (which debuted April 21) Gioia, whose many credits include record productions, co-founding the Stanford Jazz Workshop, and serving as editor/president of Jazz.com from its start in 2007 to 2010, makes the case for his approach. In opposition to a position he describes as “critic as celebrity,” he calls himself an “Honest Broker” — someone working without pay or other external obligation, and so a trustworthy observer, negotiator and guide. As he writes:
“I began measuring my own methodologies against ideal standards of fairness, and nagging myself when I strayed from them. I started paring away at exaggerations and posturing in my prose, and worked to find other ways of imparting color and vitality to my sentences. Above all, I started worrying about my reader—because, after all, wasn’t the reader the real person I was supposed to serve? Wasn’t the reader the beneficiary of my brokerage services?
Gioia is among the most prominent of writers across genres struggling with issues of the critic’s role and ability to earn income due to the Internet’s decades’ long disruption of traditional media and the previous century’s legacy of arts analysis, reviews, canonical histories and commerce-directed trend-setting. His move to Substack as well as his thoughtful, informative posts bear attention.
