In most industries in the United States, there is a pool of publications and thought leaders that serve as go-to destinations for industry folk, and organizations try to display their own thought leadership by getting their work seen in these publications. I have noticed that in the world of independent theatre, the dynamic seems to be different and becoming moreso every day.
There is a general cultural drift away from traditional news and publications and towards the more egalitarian, accessible modes of communication of blogs, Twitter, etc. In few places is this demonstrated more clearly than in the theatre industry. While asking a contractor what publications he reads, you’re likely to get something along the lines of "New York Construciton News" and the "Subcontractors Trade Association" quarterly paper, among others. For theatre folk, you are far more likely to get a list of bloggers. Moreover, many of these blogs tend not to display business or artistic advice, but rather raw data of who’s doing what, when, and where, and reviews of that work. Despite there being a ridiculous overload of independent theatre companies in New York, the community itself remains fairly self-contained, collegial, and well-connected. Therefore, the primary information sources in this community are other members of the community.
The old guard of theatrical publications (Playbill, American Theater, etc.) generally have their eyes focussed more on tourist markets and Off-Broadway and Broadway industy types. Moreover, any attempt to run a publication focussed on matters of "how you should run your theatre company" would no doubt find itself getting a lot of pushback from the very people it would be trying to reach. For better or for worse, independent theatre companies are mostly trying to solve the same problem: There is too much bad theatre going on. Their approaches and processes are personal, individual, and generally resistant to the more structured startup methods seen in other industries.
In the theatrical community, thought leadership, in the traditional sense, is not divorcable from the people practicing the art. With the exception of blog-based theatrical critics (and this only applies to those who aren’t also playwrights/actors/directors/producers/etc.), almost everyone demonstrating thought leadership is participating in the industry directly. Their leadership is demonstrated in the art they produce.
