Portland and Oregon have witnessed their artists and cultural institutions severely challenged over the past couple of years. Now that the region is opening up again, it’s important for our city and region to be informed, celebrate and rejoice in the vast array of cultural offerings available in this area. There also needs to be a serious effort to discover—and include—new forms of art and new kinds of artists.

Other news agencies are covering them less and less, but we want to increase our arts and culture coverage to give readers like you more and more. WW’s print and digital platforms reach a huge audience of younger and engaged citizens who value our local and independent coverage of arts and culture, both our listings of events and our reviews and profiles of the most talented and interesting artists and art organizations throughout the region. The ability to increase our arts and culture coverage will make an immediate impact, particularly in a region where media companies have been reducing their cultural coverage.

Over the next five days, you’ll be hearing from Willamette Week staff on the importance of expanding our arts and culture coverage. Today, Bennett Campbell Ferguson, WW’s assistant Arts & Culture editor.

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From Student to Intern to Editor

My life (so far) in arts journalism.

By Bennett Campbell Ferguson, WW’s Assistant Arts & Culture Editor

The story of my journalistic education felt like it was over before it began. One minute, I was getting to know my new classmates at the Excelsior Inn Ristorante; the next, one of my mentors, Prof. Tom Wheeler, was scrutinizing my résumé in the wake of graduation.

Back then, it was not so long ago that I had moved to Eugene, becoming one of seven students who joined the University of Oregon’s journalism master’s program during the 2015-2016 school year. No journalism experience was required; the program was a breathless crash course. And as I sat in Tom’s car, listening as he gave me pointers about how to present myself on paper, I had no idea if I was truly prepared to face an unforgiving job market.

A dashing chap who had written for Rolling Stone, Tom was one of my most steadfast supporters (even when, stricken with the graduate school equivalent of senioritis, I did truly appalling work in his magazine course). Boisterous and bearded, he brimmed with passion for artists and art, from Paul McCartney and Prince to On the Waterfront and Ex Machina.

In 2018, I learned that Tom had passed away at age 70. It seems impossible that a man so vibrant ceased to exist, and so wrong that I never properly thanked him for everything he did for me.

You see, the résumé Tom helped me write was the one that earned me an internship at Willamette Week. Then, four months later, I became a freelance film and theater critic for the paper—and six years later, I became WW’s assistant Arts & Culture editor.

Conventional wisdom is that I arrived too late—that in a world with aggregators like Yelp and Rotten Tomatoes (and without tastemakers like Roger Ebert), no one cares what a journalist has to say about art. Anyone who’s paying attention knows that’s not true, but even if it were, I wouldn’t care.

Why? Because democracy will not survive without arts journalism. A nation that cannot think critically about film, theater, music, dance and visual art will never learn to thoughtfully make decisions about the things that really matter (like, say, who to vote for or how to stop the devastation that the human-created climate crisis has wreaked on oceans, wildlife, forests, mountains and homes).

That’s the truth, but it makes writing about the arts sound like a solemn burden, which it isn’t. To convey the ecstasy of experiencing a great image or story is a privilege and a thrill—something I learned from “Defending Goliath,” New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis’ 2007 article about blockbuster movies.

With aplomb, Dargis offered a series of visuals to illustrate the essence of what epic-scale entertainment is. “It’s Tom Cruise hanging by a thread in Mission: Impossible and Christian Bale standing amid a cloud of bats in Batman Begins,” she wrote. “It’s Leonardo DiCaprio’s wild eyes in Titanic and Kirsten Dunst’s sad ones in Spider-Man.”

I was 16 when I first read and was awed by those words. At the time, I never imagined I would write for a living; I didn’t even want to. But I’m grateful that’s what I’m driven to do—and that there were people like Tom (as well as my family and friends, who have never stopped challenging and inspiring me) to help me along the way.

Tom is not my only teacher I didn’t get to say goodbye to. The year before he passed, I heard that Alex Tizon, who taught the final reporting class I took at UO, had died at 57. As suave as he was skilled, Alex had a Pulitzer to go with his supreme confidence. But what I remember most is him telling me that a critic must be armed with more than an opinion, citing The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane (who is renowned for his diligent background research on the films he reviews).

Whether you’re investigating a political scandal or your own feelings about a production of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time at Portland Center Stage, to be a journalist is to be a reporter. You may as well be a damn good one.

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Read some of Bennett’s work here »