Scott Alarik, the longtime principal folk music writer for the Boston Globe, has been dropped from the daily newspaper’s pages as part of a restructuring of its arts section.

A contributing writer for the Boston Globe since 1986, Alarik has been professionally engaged in the folk music community for nearly 40 years – both as a music journalist and a singer-songwriter. 

Hailed as “one of the best writers in America” by Pete Seeger” and as “the finest folk writer in the country” by Dar Williams, Alarik also writes for Sing Out! magazine.  He founded and served as editor and chief writer for the New England Folk Almanac during much of the 1990s and spent seven years as folk critic for the public radio program “Here and Now.”  His book, Deep Community: Adventures in the Modern Folk Underground (2004) is a compendium of columns that he wrote for the Boston Globe and Sing Out!, which fellow music journalist Earle Hitchner called “an impressive – no, make that essential – collection of writing from one of America’s most astute music critics and chroniclers.”

Ron Olesko, who hosts “Traditions” on WFDU-FM in New Jersey, believes “The Boston Globe is shortchanging [its] readers by eliminating Scott’s insight from [its] pages.”  In a posting to his Folk Music Notebook blog on Oct. 3, Olesko notes that “The Boston area continues to be a hotbed of traditional music exploration and emerging trends in contemporary music.  At a time when a farsighted publication would recognize the potential, the Boston Globe has chosen to operate by an accounting ledger instead of following a journalistic vision.”