The Nerds cast demonstrating good cheer in the immediate wake of their show’s shut down.

The recent flurry of conversations surrounding theatre chat rooms, prompted in large part by a blog post from Patti Murin in the wake of the premature shutdown of the musical Nerds, have been fierce. The uproar was deemed sufficiently important to rate coverage in The New York Times and there has been a flood of commentary on Twitter, on Facebook, and yes, in chat rooms themselves since the impassioned dialogue began. In the wake of Murin’s essay, BroadwayWorld.com has announced some new approaches to its chat room policies and implemented changes on its site, some of which it says were already in the works but were accelerated by the impact of Murin’s writing.

Many have applauded Murin, but plenty of others have dissented from her opinion, saying she’s advocating an effort to control what can be said about theatre productions and those who work on them. There has been criticism of BroadwayWorld for its rather quick accommodation of some of Murin’s requests. Some devotees of the chat rooms, on Broadway World at least, feel they’re being unfairly deprived of their opportunity to give voice to all of their thoughts.

Mentioned within those conversations at various points are the terms “free speech” and “censorship,” terms that also seem to figure rather prominently in some of our current political discourse. But whether in the national political arena or in the somewhat more narrowly defined community of theatre fandom, the terms are being applied somewhat indiscriminately. That suggests a refresher is in order.

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The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution reads as follows:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

In an essay on the website of the National Constitution Center, Geoffrey R. Stone and Eugene Volokh write, “What does this mean today? Generally speaking, it means that the government may not jail, fine, or impose civil liability on people or organizations based on what they say or write, except in exceptional circumstances.”

It should be noted that the Constitution does not give everyone the right to say anything they want wherever they want and whenever they want. What it speaks to is the fact that the government may not inhibit people’s rights to express themselves. That means that if you own a theatre, you have the right to present the work you choose, or even the right to simply stand upon your stage and state your opinion, and the government cannot interfere. It does not mean, however, that you have to give over your venue to anyone who wishes to use it, to present their own work, or to express their own opinions.

When the government tries to stop someone from writing, or speaking, or performing work, that is an act of censorship. Censorship is, at its core, act of wielding power against speech; of using governmental authority, or some other manner of power, to shut down free expression. The definition on FindLaw.com cites it as an “institution, system or practice” against unfettered speech.

This is not to say that absolutely every form of speech is protected in absolutely every scenario or that every policy which controls speech in every circumstance in censorship. You may have heard such terms as libel, slander and defamation, for example, which are forms of speech that may be deemed intentionally and maliciously injurious to reputations. This doesn’t necessarily restrain free speech, but it can be grounds for penalties for certain speech meeting stringent criteria. You can’t, for example, engage in speech that directly incites or produces imminent lawless action.

This is hardly a comprehensive survey about the laws protecting and in some cases limiting speech. None of us have the time for that, unless one is currently in law school. But this will serve for the subject at hand.

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Thank you for your patience. Now back to show biz.

No arm of the government has leapt to the defense of Patti Murin, the cast of Nerds or any artist or production that may have been spoken about unfavorably, or even cruelly, in a chat room. What has happened is that Murin made a plea, struck a chord, and Robert Diamond of BroadwayWorld – who Murin happens to know and who I know casually as well – took her words to heart and decided to take some steps to ameliorate the situation. Because he owns the company and the site, he’s entirely within in his rights to do so; BroadwayWorld is neither a public right nor a public utility. It’s all Diamond’s. In so far as how he chooses to administer BroadwayWorld, there’s nothing anyone can really do about it, unless he was, for example, fostering defamation or providing a platform for individuals to advocate illegal acts.

Those who don’t like new policies at BroadwayWorld can head to Reddit, or All That Chat, or probably any number of other places online, or set up their own theatre chat site. They haven’t had the Internet taken away from them; they’ve just had one online resource, that they’ve gotten used to using in certain ways, changed. Like any consumers faced with a product change, they can take their business elsewhere if they wish. Perhaps if too many of them do, the economic model of Broadway World will take a hit. But that’s Diamond’s decision and should it happen, Diamond’s problem. There’s no abrogation of free speech here, just the assertion of a business’s rights in order to maintain its brand.

That said, how this manner of supervision – which was always BroadwayWorld’s purview –will be administered could be tricky. Will Diamond have someone monitoring the site at all times – 24 hours a day, seven days a week? Given the potential volume of messages to be surveyed, and queries or complaints fielded, what will be considered a reasonable response time? “Snark for snark’s sake,” as stated in the site new message on its practices, isn’t a carefully articulated definition of what will and won’t be permitted to remain online, so what kind of policy manual exists or will be created, and how can it be insured that its guidelines are interpreted consistently by what will presumably be a tag team of arbiters? That’s entirely Diamond’s business too. The ongoing vitality and utility of the BroadwayWorld chat rooms will surely be judged by them. Even when the blocking of speech on a privately owned medium is entirely permissible, its equitable application in the real world can prove extremely thorny.

Part of what allows all manner of internet chat to flourish is the privacy and even anonymity the medium affords. Those who relish their incognito strafing of performers and shows have a great deal of protection, but they may do well to look at what constitutes libel, slander and defamation. If the subject of a verbal assault has a mind to really take exception to something they deem too harsh, too cruel, too just plain wrong, combined with the resources to do something about it, they may yet challenge chat room denizens and the operators of the boards. Take note of the way James Woods is currently bringing suit against a pseudonymous Twitter user for defamation, and seeking monetary damages for online remarks. What happens there could prove informative and influential.

We can always benefit from honest, open, candid, entertaining, and yes, critical conversation about the theatre. With that, there will probably always be people who have those conversations about theatre in ways that can be hurtful, cruel, and ugly. That’s regrettable to some, but that is the byproduct of living in a country founded upon the idea of open speech, and living in an era where everyone has the means to broadcast their opinions. If individuals and companies choose not to provide a forum for such dialogue (or diatribes), that’s well within their right, just as others have the right to build theatresnark.com, if they’re so inclined.

With Murin’s blog post and BroadwayWorld’s response only days old, there’s much to still play out. Some people have made some adjustments and others may have to. That’s just the way it goes when there’s effective advocacy; it’s to be seen whether a well-meaning response proves feasible and even desirable in the long term. But the bottom line is that no one’s rights have been trampled on and no one has been censored. At least so far as that aspect of this issue goes, while you’re welcome to claim your rights are being denied for as long as you like, maybe it’s time to chat about something else.

Howard Sherman is director of the Arts Integrity Initiative.

Civil and respectful comments on all aspects of this topic are welcome; all comments are moderated before they appear.

Are you still grumbling about “tweet seats”? Oh, that is so 2013. Time to get with the program and start worrying about the newest development in mobile tech, which could have a vastly more significant impact on the live performing arts.

At this year’s SXSW Festival, a new app, Meerkat, saw a frenzy of adoption by attendees, so much so that Twitter moved to quickly curtail the app’s access to Twitter data. The reason for that draconian move came clearer yesterday when the app Periscope, which is owned by Twitter, was launched as a direct competitor to Meerkat.

So what do they do? Both apps allow you to stream live video from your phone. Now, instead of taking something so pedestrian as a photograph via Instagram, or so cumbersome as shooting a video and then uploading it to YouTube, anyone with an iPhone and a dream can relay what they’re seeing in real time to their connections on these services. This will of course result in streams from countless teens doing teen oriented things for the entertainment of other teens, but it will also turn everyone who wishes to be into an instant broadcaster into one. Yesterday, Periscope immediately became a source for realtime video of the tragic explosion and fire in New York’s East Village.

Of course, as I experimented with Periscope (I’ve loaded Meerkat, but not tried it yet), I realized how significantly this could have an effect on live entertainment. Now, anyone adept enough at manipulating a smartphone from an audience seat might well be streaming your show, your concert, your opera to their friends and followers. If they can do so with a darkened screen and sufficient circulation to keep the blood from leaving their upraised hand and arm, the only thing stopping them would be vigilant ushers, chastising nearby patrons and battery life. For however long they sustain their stream, your content is on the air – and unlike YouTube, where if you find it, you can seek to have it removed, this is instantaneous and so there’s no taking it back.

I should say that I’m not endorsing this practice, any more than say, a play about graffiti artists is exhorting its audience to go out and start marring buildings with graffiti. I’m just pointing out that there’s a big new step in technology which could serve to let your content leak out into the world in a way that’s much harder to control than before (while also offering many new creative opportunities for communication) – and since these apps are just the first of their kind, they and competing apps will be rolling out ever more effective tools to stream what’s happening right in front of you, just as cell phone cameras and video will continue to improve their quality and versatility.

Scared yet?

Some will quickly say, as they have from the moment cell phones started ringing during soliloquies and operas, that there should be some way to simply jam signals inside entertainment venues. But the answer to that remains the same: private entities like theatre owners cannot employ such technology (which does exist) because they would be breaking the law by interfering with the public airwaves. No matter that the photos, video and streams may be violating copyright. That kind of widespread tampering with communications wouldn’t be allowed – and if it ever were, it could very well have a negative effect on patrons’ willingness to attend.

The quality of streams via these apps would leave much to be desired (think of your stream also capturing the heads of those in front of you, and the couple on your left whispering about their dinner plans). They’d hardly capture the work on stage at its best, but if your choice is $400 a ticket for Fish in the Dark or a free, erratic stream, you just might choose the latter.

Movie companies have been fighting in-theatre bootlegging since the advent of small video cameras, and one hears stories about advance screenings with ushers continually patrolling the aisles in search of telltale red lights (sometimes wearing night vision goggles) and assorted laser and infrared technologies designed to mar the surreptitious image capturing. But does that seem desirable or even feasible at live theatres?

I’m not shrieking about this problem because I expect plenty of others will. That said, I’m also not about to just instill fear in your hearts and run away. Having just chastised others for enumerating arts problems without offering ideas on how to address them, here’s my thought on how to try to stave off the onslaught of Meerkat and Periscope and their ilk: we have to solve the issues that are preventing U.S. based organizations from cinecasting on the model of NT Live.

Yes, the Metropolitan Opera has built a strong following for their Met Opera Live series. But we’re not seeing that success translate to other performing arts in a significant way, with theatre the most backward of all. I know it may seem counterintuitive, but if people have the opportunity to access high quality, low cost video of stage performances, they’re going to be considerably less interested in cheap live bootlegs in real time. It won’t stop the progression, but it will offer a more appealing alternative.

Video is now in the hands of virtually every person who attends the theatre, the opera, the ballet and so on. Short of frisking or wanding people for phones and having them secured in lockers at every performance space (can you imagine?), the genie is out of the bottle. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not keen on the ramifications of these advances either, but there’s no point in damning reality. The question now is how do the arts respond – by seeking to police its audiences as if attending a performance resembled an ongoing TSA checkpoint, or by offering alternatives that just might make the newest developments unappealing or irrelevant?

But the field, commercial and not-for-profit alike, needs to get a move on, because even if this is the first you’ve heard of Periscope and Meerkat, it won’t be the last. Just wait until smartphones can record and stream in 3D.

P.S. Last week when I saw the Radio City Spring Spectacular, there was a caution against flash photography – not all photography, just flash. There may well have been a warning about video, but all it would have taken was a fake Twitter account and one of these apps to start sharing parts of the show with you as an untraceable scofflaw. Just imagine if I had activated Meerkat a bit sooner.

I am going to take it for granted that, since you’ve opted to read this article, you care about the arts. I’m also going to save time and typing by assuming that you appreciate media coverage of the arts and that you realize that without the attention of the media, it will be ever harder for the arts to share their news, their work and their value locally, nationally and internationally.

Since we are agreed, I will proceed directly to my point.

If you want to see intelligent, comprehensive coverage of the arts – features and reviews alike – then you’ve got to start clicking. Journalism is well on its way to being a numbers game for most outlets. How many people clicked on a story or video, how many times was it liked or shared, how much time was spent looking at it? We are already seeing journalism sites paying writers base salaries with bumps or bonuses based on online metrics; outlets say they are dropping certain types of coverage because it’s simply not generating enough traffic. It’s not enough to be happy that arts coverage exists, you have to actually engage with it to insure its survival and the job survival of those who create it.

Clicks mean eyes and eyes mean advertisers. As print becomes an ever-harder sell, online advertising grows ever more important to outlets. Even back in the days pre-internet, I encountered cuts in arts coverage because the arts didn’t generate enough advertising revenue (whereas advertisers loved sports sections and we get regular features about new cars because auto dealers buy big ads). Even now, arts spending online is a small sliver of online advertising, so our best means of supporting arts coverage is by actually reading it.

Let’s face it: anyone with a WordPress blog knows how many people read each piece they post (yes, I’m watching you). But that’s amateur hour compared to the realtime and cumulative algorithms and analytics applied at big media outlets. There are teams of people looking at clicks, links and likes for every story, and media empires are being built on click-bait methodology (why, hello BuzzFeed). It’s running the show in many places and it can’t be ignored.

So here’s what I propose. Every morning, when you get online, go to the arts section of your local media outlets, seek out their arts and entertainment stories, and click of them. Don’t click on each in rapid succession, but spend 30 to 45 seconds on each one (remember your multiple browser windows). You have to wait a bit because one analytic is stickiness or hang-time or whatever it’s called now, namely whether people are really engaging with coverage. A click on and immediate click off looks like you got there by mistake. And needless to say, it certainly won’t hurt in the least if you actually read a story or watch a video while you’re at it.

I should also note that just liking or retweeting a story isn’t enough: you actually have to look at it. Sometimes you’re just liking a friend posting about a story, not the story or video itself, and that’s an important difference. There have been studies that show that many people retweet items without ever actually reading them, and anecdotally I know that to be true: I often see my own tweets with embedded links that have more retweets than clicks. You’ve got to stop and look. That said, on Facebook likes and shares feed into an algorithm that’s sure more people might see the post featured in their feed, and retweets do the same, so be liberal with those too.

You need to share this idea with your staffs, your audience, your donors. This can’t be an effort by a couple of thousand core die-hards; this has to be a movement and it has to be sustained. I do my part every day in curating the articles I share on my twitter feed. You don’t need to be as exhaustive as I am, but whether you seek out a story or if it comes across your social media feed, click on it (often click on opera and symphony stories even though I rarely attend them). If the arts generate eyes, if they generate numbers, you’re going to have a direct impact on how the arts are viewed by the media decision makers. Clicking on the occasional ad next to an arts story matters too.

I’d like to give this idea some snappy name that the field can adopt, but I’m only coming up with corny and possibly inexplicable ideas like “Click 10 For The Arts,” which in my mind is shorthand for remind you to click on 10 arts stories daily. I hope that if people buy into this idea, someone will come up with something clever.

But unlike the world of journalism 25 years ago, where outlets only knew how many papers they sold, it’s now exceedingly easy to know what gets traffic and what doesn’t. No need for audience surveys when our every move online is recorded. If we don’t actively work to pump up the stats for arts coverage, it’ll continue to erode.

To quote Joni Mitchell, “you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til its gone,” and we’ve lost too much already. So next time you want to take a quiz about what Shakespeare villain or what Sondheim character you are, at least spend the equivalent amount of time reading articles about Shakespeare plays or Sondheim shows. Because while the former may be fun, it’s the latter that will actually sustain arts journalism and sustain the arts.

P.S. Thanks for clicking on this story. Now would you be so kind to like it, favorite it, share it, retweet it and so on? And yes, I’ll know if you did.

While the arts are often notoriously slow adopters of new technology, the rapid rise of social media would seem to dictate that commercial theatre jump on the bandwagon and hold on tight.

But social media may be best suited for use by subsidised companies, rather than the shows that populate the West End and Broadway.

Certainly, every show has the basics in place, a Facebook page, a Twitter feed and so on, in addition to the now de rigeur website. But producers and their marketing teams seem to view most social media as an extension of advertising or PR, feeding out casting announcements, special ticket offers and ‘exclusive’ photos and video all directed at driving sales.

The problem is that for most productions, especially early in their runs, there aren’t necessarily enough people who have followed or liked the show to read what’s on offer, and the content is often repurposed for other uses, diluting the impact that ‘exclusivity’ might still carry.

Shows appear drawn to the media portion of this new manner of communications, when it is the social aspect that is most innovative and compelling. Social platforms offer rapid and direct communications with individuals, but the fact is that people engage most with those who actually engage with, or entertain, them. It may take place on an overwhelming scale when it comes to major celebrities, but in the theatre, it’s quite easy for fans to strike up conversations with stars, writers, designers, directors and even critics – something virtually unimaginable a decade ago. So, if shows don’t actually engage with their audiences beyond tarted-up press announcements, they’re dropping the ball.

Of course, the challenge is how creative on an ongoing basis any one show can be, since they’re a relatively fixed offering (people, on the other hand, can have remarkably varied day-to-day lives) and how much  they’re willing to invest to be socially rather than sales-oriented, focusing on the long game rather than immediate gain. Except for a very small portion of the audience,  attendance at a commercial show is a one-off event, not an ongoing commitment, seemingly at odds with the basis of social media. The building of relationships afforded by social media can create a stronger bond for an ongoing company producing an array of works over months or years.

In 2009, when social media was still working its way into public consciousness, the Broadway production of Next to Normal garnered great attention and achieved a remarkable million followers through two initiatives. It offered one night “live-tweeting” the plot of the entire show for anyone who cared to follow. Shorn of songs and even most dialogue, they were serialising an outline in real time, but it was a distinctive effort that marked the show as creative and tantalised people with the framework of a show they might then choose to see in real life.

Next to Normal also ran a campaign in which Twitter followers were encouraged to make suggestions for a new song for the show, creating a connection directly with the authors, who did indeed write a song based on suggestions. While it wasn’t added to the finished work, fans could hear it online. It’s a shame that, since the account still has 946,000 following (though it is closed), it hasn’t tweeted since April of last year, leaving a huge untapped base of potential ticket buyers for other productions.

Despite the efforts and success of Next to Normal, social media still seems an afterthought for most Broadway shows. In a survey of Broadway theatres in early May, prompts to interact with the show through social media activity (primarily Facebook, Twitter and Instagram) were on display at 15 theatres – yet a nearly equal number (14) had no such reminders in their front of theatre or box office lobby displays (a number of theatres had no tenants at the time). A few showed real initiative in advocating social media use (a photo backdrop outside the Lunt-Fontanne for Motown; a ‘photo stop’ in the upper lobby of the Gershwin for Wicked).

Unfortunately, others simply displayed social platform logos without the specific names used by the shows in those arenas, so one would have to seek them out; it’s akin to posting ‘we have a website’ instead of giving a URL.

If productions don’t feel that social media gives them sufficient bang for their buck, perhaps they shouldn’t establish a presence only to give it short shrift. On the other hand, as some shows are demonstrating, with a little thought, a show can build its profile at a proportionately low cost, amplifying the power of the ever essential word of mouth, so long as they’re willing to commit to subtly promoting their presence by offering intriguing content and damping down the urge to shout “BUY NOW”.