Rooney on His Ousting

Time Out lands an exclusive interview with Variety's last staff theater critic. Money quote:

We all have reason to be concerned about this ongoing erosion of arts coverage. In every way the critical voice is being undervalued. And if people feel they can take away editorial supervision and replace it with random freelancers filing to a copy desk where whoever happens to be there is editing that copy with no expertise and no experience in that field—you know, you start to wonder, Where is the authority in this coverage? What is there to set any paper apart as the paper of record? How is it different from people just filing random articles on blogs?

Some fascinating (and a tad prickly) responses from theater folks, who are quite used to working as freelancers, show up today at the American Theatre Facebook page.