Launching The New York Times Critic Watch at NYTCriticWatch.com - Need your Participation

We're kicking off the first Microfund for Artists Project—

Welcome to The New York Times Critic Watch project—a reader-fueled experiment attempting to give some numbers to the seemingly unquantifiable. What does a review do for a production? What does it do for the play independent of the production?

Everyone’s a critic. Some, however, get paid for it, published in The New York Times, and have a huge amount of power in the life of a new play in America.

With that kind of leverage, we wondered what the temperature of theatre reviews in American really is. How subjective is the criticism? What language trends would we see? How harsh or supportive are the messages? What seasonal, topical, aesthetic, or stylistic trends would we find?

Most importantly: What would that temperature tell us about the state of both popular criticism and new plays in America? What would it tell us about the modern relationship between new play premieres and their reviews?

So we decided to map the tone and message of the most prominent theatre section in the nation—the prestigious New York Times—for one calendar. Thus: NYTCriticWatch.

So we decided to map the tone and message of the most prominent theatre section in the nation—the prestigious New York Times—for one calendar. Thus: NYTCriticWatch.

In the most basic sense we are reviewing the reviews.

We have no idea what we’ll find. But with the power and prominence of New York Times theatre section we thought it was worth a look. We hope to expand the project to include major publications in other cities. We’ll see how this goes.

But we need your help. This is a crowd-sourced fact-finding mission. So jump online, read the reviews, give it a second’s thought, and fill out the super short survey. You can review as many reviews as you like.

This project has no agenda other than getting some data to help us better understand the state of new play reviews.

We’ll be posting trends that we see along the way, as well as thoughts on contemporary criticism and reviewing, bright spots and best practices. If you have any thoughts—let us know. Thanks to HowlRound for supporting the project and thanks to you for your participation.

—Signed,

The NYTCriticWatch.com Team