I have known for several months that the International F. Scott Fitzgerald Society was having its annual conference at Hofstra,” the founder of the Dorothy Parker Society of New York, Kevin Fitzpatrick, said. “So I wrote to them in January to invite them to the Algonquin for a joint cocktail party with the Dorothy Parker Society of New York, to welcome them to Manhattan, just as Mrs. Parker did when Scott came to New York in 1920. I never heard back from them.”

The Fitzgerald conference, which runs through Saturday at the Hofstra University campus in Hempstead, N.Y., examines Fitzgerald’s connections to New York and Long Island and includes tours of sites connected to “The Great Gatsby.”

Mr. Fitzpatrick was undeterred. He had met a member of the Fitzgerald group last year at the annual Parkerfest, who told him that the Fitzgerald Society was comprised largely of academics. ” So they are the exact opposite of what Scott Fitzgerald is about,” Mr. Fitzpatrick told The New York Sun. Taking his cue from Mrs. Parker’s stiletto style, Mr. Fitzpatrick invited the Boston-based Robert Benchley Society to come to town, and the Parker and Benchley fans are holding a joint cocktail party in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel on Saturday evening.

Why then and there? “The Fitzgerald people are going to be there for a dinner. They are invited to our party. If the Fitz Society wants to mix with us, that is what we’ll see about. But they apparently don’t even get along with the Hemingway fans, so how they will react to us, we’ll see. As you know, the Parker group is all about having fun and a good time, like Mrs. Parker. We do not present papers or do academic talks, that’s not our mission.”

At 7 p.m., when the lobby begins to fill for the party – cash bar and open to the public – the Fitzgerald Society will have just concluded its panel and program (now closed for registration) featuring the author E.L. Doctorow (“Ragtime”).

Benchley, Parker, and Fitzgerald were friends when they were alive. Mr. Fitzpatrick said that Parker was the only writer to attend Fitzgerald’s funeral in 1940.

The evening will mark the first time these three literary societies have ever formally intersected.

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JOURNALISTS & JET LAG

“We live in a profound isolation,” said the director of Columbia University’s National Arts Journalism Program, Andras Szanto, introducing a panel on Tuesday titled “The Transatlantic Trap: Arts Journalism in the U.S. and Europe.” American arts journalists rarely leave their own towns, he said, “and when they do, they go as tourists. In the age of global culture, this is very bad news.” He said generally even the best American newspapers have at most one international culture article a day – “but enough of the doom and gloom,” he said, welcoming the panel.

New Yorker writer Jane Kramer moderated the panel consisting of New York-based cultural writer for El Pais (Spain) and Clarin (Argentina), Hector Feliciano; senior editor of the New Republic, James Wood; and the American correspondent of the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Jordan Mejias.

Mr. Wood opened by saying London journalism is in some ways the opposite of its American counterpart. Here there are many good magazines, while Britain has comparatively few; conversely, he said, London has a lively and thriving daily newspaper culture, with five dailies and four papers on Sunday.

Mr. Wood said books generally receive vastly more coverage than dance or music criticism. He said he would be happy to read more fine classical criticism than “endless reviews of people’s first novels.”

Mr. Feliciano said American society has a different relation to the written word. Culture, he said, had a different weight and position in Europe. Bringing up Argentina, he said that, astonishingly, cab drivers in Buenos Aires read the cultural supplement. (Audience member Carlin Romano later replied that this situation may be due more to unemployment than the cultural situation.)

Mr. Jordan said he didn’t want to idealize things and say “every taxi driver runs around with a complete volume of Goethe.” But he said public intellectuals still have a different role in Europe, and the views of public figures such as Jurgen Habermas or Gunther Grass appear not only in cultural pages but in the news and political section as well.

The European panelists all agreed that daily papers can engender debate and get the reader involved, following a discussion that unfolds like a novel in installments across different newspapers and continuing for weeks and sometimes months. Ms. Kramer said one place where that kind of dialogue exists is online, and she mentioned a particularly engaging debate about Chekhov that appeared in Slate magazine.

Speaking of American newspaper coverage, Mr. Jordan said it sometimes resembles “a public relations brochure; the text is not very different.” He said stories such as those focusing on the weight problem of a ballerina prima donna is “a big step in the wrong direction.”

Mr. Feliciano said that, in America, entertainment coverage had been eating up arts pages but somehow European newspapers had largely protected themselves from that tsunami. But Mr. Wood said that coverage in England had gone “downmarket” in the last 15 years, following celebrity culture.

Are there disadvantages to remaining up market?

“The frustration of the longer form is that no one reads you,” Mr. Wood said. He recalled a woman at another recent panel telling him, “You have a huge fan club.” “I very much doubt that” Mr. Wood recalled replying, before she continued “a huge fan club among pseudo-intellectuals.”

Citing the robustness of English journalism, Mr. Wood cited an old word “notice,” which once commonly described short reviews. He said that in the hands of someone like Cyril Connolly or Anthony Burgess, these shorter notices can over time be “cumulatively powerful.” They can add up, and get closer to literature itself, even themselves being collected in a book.

Audience member Todd Gitlin, a Columbia University sociologist and journalism professor, said the panic in America about the erosion of newspaper audiences and the anxious search for younger readers would make it unlikely that American papers would expand serious cultural coverage to look like the Allgemeine Zeitung.

But the evening was not all negative about American arts coverage. European weaknesses came in for scrutiny, too. The general director for cultural affairs of the Consulate General of the Netherlands, Jeanne Wikler, inquired about the evening’s written program description, which described a stereotype of European arts journalism as more “theory laden, over-long, clubby and combative.” Ms. Kramer said it was difficult reading French cultural coverage, since it was “so nationalistic and chauvinistic” and had collapsed into a kind of public relations.