Bill Marx tells us how he’s working to keep local arts journalism and book reviews alive

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I are back from summer break and talk with Bill Marx, the editor-in-chief and founder of the The Arts Fuse. For four decades, he has written about arts and culture for print, broadcast and online outlets, most notably at The Boston Phoenix. He has regularly reviewed theater for public radio station WBUR and The Boston Globe. He is a co-founder of Viva la Book Review, a new organization that aims to foster thoughtful, well-crafted book criticism in community news media across the country.

Bill also created and edited WBUR Online Arts, a cultural webzine that in 2004 won an Online Journalism Award for Specialty Journalism. Until recently, he taught a class on writing arts criticism at Boston University.

I’ve got a Quick Take about the funding crisis in public media and how that relates to the need to fund reliable sources of local news and information. It’s not just a matter of your local public television and radio station needing more support from its audience than ever before. It’s also a matter of the limits of philanthropy. Can we find the money to support hyperlocal nonprofits too? I wrote more about this dilemma recently for CommonWealth Beacon.

Ellen dives into a recent update from Joshua Benton at Nieman Lab on The Republican in Springfield, Massachusetts, and the MassLive website, which has become a web traffic powerhouse as it expands. A previous podcast discussion we had with MassLive’s president, Joshua Macht, and editor Ronnie Ramos can be found here.

You can listen to our conversation here, or you can subscribe through your favorite podcast app.