USC Annenberg's Getty Arts Journalism Fellowships program celebrated its 10th anniversary with a collection of innovative experiments in reporting on the arts, with the goal of inspiring similar projects around the country.
For the first nine years of the program, six to nine international arts journalists came to LA to meet artists and journalists and learn from one another. This year, program director Sasha Anawalt and her team issued a call for proposals for projects focusing on the transformative changes in arts journalism currently underway. Six projects were competitively chosen and 29 alumni from previous fellowships were invited to form teams around them.
The projects were organized around a "pop-up" arts journalism lab called Engine29. Fellows conducted their six Engine29 experiments assisted by an assortment of web developers and graphic designers, documentarians, video and audio editors.
"Conceived and implemented by the fellows, Engine29 Projects imagine new models, probe arts journalism’s future and ask urgent questions," Anawalt said. "This is a particularly rich and active time in Southern California’s cultural life, with the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time initiative exploring the history of the region’s art in full bloom."
These experiments were conducted across the backdrop of Los Angeles’s art and culture with the assistance of the extended network of USC Annenberg/Getty fellowship’s professional colleagues.
"The projects are open source," Anawalt said, "and are generated, documented, housed and available to serve the larger cultural and journalistic community."
