Hilary Scurlock

by Matthew Erickson

In 2007, Margo Drakos left a promising career as a cellist in the American String Quartet and Pittsburgh Symphony to start up the website InstantEncore. Billed as the "the world's leading resource for delivering and enjoying live classical music anywhere and anytime," InstantEncore.com can be used to keep up-to-date with artists, ensembles and concerts locally and nationally with the help of several online interactive tools.

For its efforts, InstantEncore was highlighted as a showcase project at the National Summit on Arts Journalism held at the Annenberg Auditorium on Oct 2. Organized by the USC Annenberg School for Communication and the National Arts Journalism Program, the inaugural event aimed to discuss the developments of journalism in an ever-changing world.

After the summit, I chatted with the down-to-earth Drakos, the website's official chief operating officer, to find out just how in tune InstantEncore is with the worlds of journalism and concert performance.  According to Drakos, the website not only provides resources to artists, orchestras and music festivals to connect with audiences beyond the concert hall.  It seeks to make a classical music performance a "living, breathing thing."

Click through this slideshow to learn some fun facts about InstantEncore.

We monitored real-time Twitter responses during and after InstantEncore's presentation for the National Summit on Arts Journalism on October 2nd.  Please click on the blue markers to read reactions from around the country.

View InstantEncore Tweets in a larger map

Click here to return to the main article. 

Yesterday, an American Journalism Review article by Paul Farhi made a case for returning to print-based news by eliminating all online news content. 

It is a shocking point of view, one that is ideal for a conversation between the journalist and his audience.  Unfortunately, there is no comment section or similar public forum associated with the article for the conversation to continue.  However, if you follow any of the "state of the media" specialists, or just did some savvy Google searching, you could see that this article prompted a maelstrom of tweets and blog posts that keep the conversation going.

So, first I am going to play the role of aggregator (a la Google news, though no fancy algorithms here) of some of the comments reacting to Farhi, and then I'd like to contribute to the conversation myself.