With the blogosphere exploding and a myriad of free film reviews just a keystroke or two away, times are tough for critics who work in the print mediums. Budgets are being cut, space for reviews is shrinking, and requests for additional writing on company blogs without additional pay are multiplying.

Magazines and daily papers are struggling with diminishing readership, while alternative weeklies are dealing with a bigger problem: conglomeration. National chains have spent years buying up independent papers, and now the chains are selling groups of papers to even bigger chains. Every time it happens, they say that they're not going to make any substantial changes before firing people for budgetary reasons. In order to lower the cost of each paper, they are taking the local angles out of them.

The latest substantial casualty in the realm of film critics is Minnesota City Pages film editor Rob Nelson.

For more than a decade he worked for the City Pages, not just writing reviews but helping to support a film culture in Minneapolis. You see, the thing about local papers, both dailies and weeklies, is that they are best when they are talking about local issues, or, in the case of the arts, writing about local events.

When the City Pages was bought by the Village Voice Media, the chain decided to save some money by syndicating its critics throughout the papers. Suddenly Rob Nelson was showing up in newspapers across the country alongside J. Hoberman and a host of other good critics. The downside was that any local flavor was drained out of the film sections of the papers in the chain.

Things didn't change when New Times bought the Village Voice chain. Still, Nelson did his best to focus his paper on local festivals and the local art film screenings that would disappear without his attention.

And then this email went out: "The film editor position has been eliminated, and consequently, Rob Nelson no longer works for us."

They dropped the entire position! Good luck finding news and reviews of indie films in Minneapolis now. What you will get is plenty of reviews of movies getting a national release, exactly the kind of reviews you can find on the web. It's no wonder print papers are dying out. They're all trying to hard to have national relevance, and losing their essence. For shame.

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Andy Spletzer was the film editor for the Seattle alternative weekly paper The Stranger from 1992 to 2000, and always preferred to lead with a movie playing in a local art house over a chain theater blockbuster. Alt weeklies have no influence over the box office take of a Hollywood movie.