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Theatre on the Net 2004Dateline: 21st November, 2004The Electronic Press Office is a wonderful invention. It has been set up to enable theatres and theatre companies to distribute images to the press by a simple download from one place. An accredited publication (like the BTG, for example) can log on, go through the portfolio of images from a variety of sources including the RSC, the Royal Court, and various West End theatres, as well as opera and dance companies and touring shows, select what it needs and download them, along with other details. The National Theatre, incidentally, has its own equivalent which works in a very similar way. That's where many of the images you see on the BTG come from. As I say, it's a wonderful invention, but some companies - usually West End musicals - restrict the use of the pics. If you look at Philip Fisher's review of The Producers, for example, you'll see a publicity image, not a production shot, even though there are some very good production shots available. The reason is that they are marked quite clearly that they are not to be used on the Internet. Of course, we have to abide by that because otherwise we'd lose the facility of using the EPO. When I first began my online theatre jornalism career back in 1997, I came across a kind of journalistic apartheid when a well-known and important theatre company refused all requests for press tickets from web-based reviewers at the Edinburgh Fringe. Ironically the same company was making maximum use of the Internet to publicise its shows. Even today reviewers from websites have to play second-fiddle to their print counterparts when press tickets for productions are in short supply. It's happened to me recently, and when I've read the reviews from the local press I have winced! Recently in local papers I have seen Macbeth and Lear dismissed out of hand, with Macbeth being described as a not-very-good play. Not a not-very-good production, but a not-very-good play! And the reviewer concerned has been given tickets for productions I couldn't see because it was thought to be more important to get coverage in a local paper than on an internationally-read theatre website. Theatre on the Internet has come a long way in the seven and a half years I have been running a theatre site, but websites are still at the bottom of the pecking order. At the top is tele (of whatever stripe: Beeb or ITV, network or local), then the national press, then the local press and radio, and finally the Net. But, in the words of the Beatles, it's getting better all the time, and websites are now recognised as being an important part of the marketing mix for most theatres (to judge from the number of press releases we receive every week!) and it is recognised by many in the industry that the reach of website coverage is far more widespread than any other medium, except, perhaps, the websites of the nationals such as the Guardian. What is particularly interesting is that people use websites such as the BTG to find out what's on rather than going to individual theatres' sites and they then look at the reviews. Increasingly the Net is being used as a major resource by theatregoers and the industry itself. There are thousands of theatre sites out there, from sites for major companies and theatres (like the National and the RSC), through large sites like the BTG (we have around 4,000 individual pages online), to sites for individual actors, taking in theatre history, sites for productions, sites devoted to aspects of backstage work, manufacturers sites, amateur company sites and sites devoted purely to listing sites! Theatre on the Net has not quite yet come of age, but we're getting there!
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