Internet killed the video star: a decade in music journalism

It’s 1999. Christina Aguilera’s self-titled debut album is at the top of the charts. Even if you eschew pop music, you might catch yourself humming “Genie in a Bottle” because it’s all over the radio, and it’s so darn catchy.

Meanwhile, ‘70s glam rocker Gary Glitter has just been thrown in jail for downloading kiddie porn. While some people are preparing for a Y2K apocalypse, others are “partying like it’s 1999” to a Prince song penned sixteen years before.

If you were a music journalist in 1999, the means by which you learned about and reported on newsworthy events was significantly different from the way you’d do it now. The speed of music news has accelerated from how quickly a publicist can hold (or lose) your attention on the phone, to how quickly a rock star can type a 140-character tweet. Gone are the days when aspiring music reporters were beholden to editors who could decide whether or not a story ever reached the general public.

Now, in the age of the blog, an editor might actually approach a writer and offer him/her a job that the writer hasn’t even applied for. In short, things have drastically changed.

Three Journalists — One Decade

John Nova Lomax, Ben Westhoff and Jeff Weiss are all music journalists. In terms of age, twelve years separate the oldest of the three writers from the youngest. However, all of their careers in music journalism began within the last ten years. The times at which each of them started in the biz — and the technology available to them — have given each one different experience of their field.

The veteran of the three, Lomax, is 39. In the late ‘90s, he became the sole contributing writer to the Houston Blues Society’s music journal. In 2000 he started freelancing for the “Houston Press,” an alt-weekly owned by Village Voice Media (VVM), and by 2001 he was the music editor there.

“I kind of came in through the back door,” he said. Lomax is now a staff writer at the Press. Over the years, his work has been featured in several VVM publications.

Westhoff is 31. He lives in Hoboken, NJ, and has made a living writing freelance articles, primarily on rap and R&B, for six years. He has written for “Spin” and numerous VVM publications, including “LA Weekly” and the “Village Voice.” Internet pieces for sites like Pitchfork and NPR.org have also become a mainstay for Westhoff.

“Over time, steadily, a bigger and bigger percentage of the money I make for writing has come from online stuff,” he said.

The youngest of the bunch, Weiss, is 27. He lives in Los Angeles. After graduating from college in 2003, Weiss said he wrote “all these really stupid emails to “Rolling Stone” and “Pitchfork,” like ‘Please hire me.’”

He ended up contributing to the “San Fernando Valley Business Journal,” and in 2005, he started his own music and pop culture blog, Passion of the Weiss. The blog took off, eventually landing Weiss writing gigs at the “Los Angeles Times” and “LA Weekly.”

Weiss says an editor at “LA Weekly” approached him about becoming a contributor to the paper. Within just a couple years, Weiss had gone from getting turned down for journalism jobs to being offered them without asking — thanks to the popularity of his blog, now receiving about 2,500 page views per day.

As one might expect, three writers in different stages of their careers have a mixture of similar and diverging opinions on their craft. What’s astonishing, though, is how much their industry has changed within a relatively short period of time.

Publicists R.I.P.

In 1979, The Buggles declared that “Video Killed the Radio Star.” In 2009, the latest music casualties seem to be the publicists, dead at the hands of social networking sites.

“The Internet has sort of killed the publicist off,” Lomax said. “Not completely. But every year I’ve had fewer calls from publicists by a factor of about two or three.”

He paused and then added, “You know, which is great.” Though Weiss has only been covering music for a handful of years, he agrees — hypothetically, anyway.

“Ten years ago, you were relying on the publicists to get that promo, and if you didn’t get that promo, then you were kind of screwed,” he said. “Now with the culture of the leaks and with MySpace, you don’t really need that.”

Lomax couldn’t be more thrilled that music publicists are becoming a thing of the past.

“Publicists have made me break stuff in my office,” he said. “Through no fault of their own. I mean, they’re just doing their job. But you just get the same call, and they all have the same patter, where they’re saying, ‘I just want to reach out to you. This band will be in your area.’ And sometimes they don’t even get the fucking town right. Like, they’ll say they’re playing the American Airlines Arena, and I’ll go, ‘Well, that’s in Dallas.’ And they’ll go, ‘Oh yeah, uh, the Verizon Center.’”

To be fair, not all publicists are inept, and some artists still use them. But, increasingly, bands have learned a cheaper way to promote themselves: the Internet.

The Web site that Rocked the World

In 2003, a few eUniverse employees created “A Place for Friends.” The rest is cyberspace history.

“MySpace kind of changed everything,” Lomax said. “I think one thing that it changed was — in Houston, at any rate — it fucked up the way bands promoted themselves. They felt like all they had to do was keep their MySpace up to date, and they didn’t have to do shit in the real world. You know, like putting posters up or actually calling people and getting them to come to their shows.”

Still, the site has proved infinitely valuable for many young artists’ careers. L.A. electro-rockers Shiny Toy Guns, for example, used MySpace to gain fans exponentially and went from being completely unknown to Grammy-nominated in just over a year. This kind of rapid ascent from obscurity to fame meant that staying abreast of music trends was suddenly something that anyone, not just journalists, could do. Moreover, everything about the music industry — and, consequently, everything about music journalism — started happening faster.

In some cases, MySpace is useful for journalists who want to get in touch with artists.

“It’s almost impossible to try to track down a rapper’s cell phone number, but if you hit him up on his MySpace page, he’ll hit you back immediately, within minutes,” Westhoff explained.

Lomax and Westhoff agree, though, that other sites have become more useful than MySpace. Both writers refer to Facebook as the new Rolodex.

“MySpace sort of killed itself, in my personal opinion,” Lomax said, “and I’m old and cranky and get off my lawn.”

He credits the Web site’s demise to the number of ads that now plague the site, to its users’ excessive “pimping” of their profiles and to the amount of time it takes for each page to load.

“Its users killed it,” Lomax said. “MySpace’s users destroyed it.”

Even so, such sites remain vital both to musicians and to music critics.

“Social networking sites are a very important tool, and without them my job would be very difficult,” Westhoff said.

On the other hand, Weiss believes that Twitter makes it harder for a music journalist to get an exclusive scoop, as artists can announce news directly to fans.

“It definitely takes some of the power out of being a journalist,” Weiss explained. “Because all they have to do is tweet something, and then it’s out there.”

The Year of the Blog

Weiss refers to 2004 as “the year of the blog.” He’s not alone in thinking that that year brought even more changes to how music journalists gather and publish information.

Westhoff had just started freelancing when the market started to shift.

“First there was what I call a blogging bubble,” he said. “There was tons and tons of money being poured into blogs. I remember I made $200 for one blog post.”

He observed that, at the time, newspapers were making significant efforts to transition to online reporting, but he thinks that these efforts have subsided somewhat due to the recession.

“The pay is definitely better for print, no doubt,” Westhoff said. “But it’s shifting, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the numbers became equal and leveled off in the next years.”

Though some journalists are reluctant to embrace blogging as a valid form of reporting, Westhoff believes that putting more emphasis on blogs is in the best interest of the public in the long run.

“You read all this stuff about how bloggers are destroying journalism,” he said, “and about how the old media did things right, and the new media is irresponsible and doesn’t get to the heart of things. I think it’s all just total bullshit.”

Westhoff believes that blogging encourages more specialized, niche reporting.

“I think all these dinosaurs in the old media are nostalgic for the old days, but I think that when it shakes out in the end, the public will be better served,” he added.

In 2005, Weiss (then in his early twenties) started the blog that ultimately launched his career. Similar scenarios have become more and more common.

“I think it has changed to where you can just write on your own blog now,” Lomax said. “But you’ve got to publicize your blog. You can’t just write on your blog and wait to be found.”

Fans and Haters

With blogs came the ability for readers to leave comments — impassioned comments. Music fans can have very strong feelings about their favorite artists. And the artists, in turn, can have very strong feelings — about journalists.

According to Lomax, online publishing has at least tripled, if not quadrupled, the amount of feedback he gets from readers. Sometimes, he’ll spar with people who comment on the Press blog posts — but it’s not always friendly on the part of the readers.

“I’ve always believed that as a music critic, if people have a problem with your musical taste, there’s just no arguing with them,” Lomax said. “But what would hurt would be if someone would say I was a shitty writer.”

He adds that if he finds something he wrote being panned on a different website, he’ll usually leave it alone. Unlike Lomax, Westhoff doesn’t mind readers with harsh opinions.

“I love nasty comments,” he said. “I just like any comments.

Both Westhoff and Weiss admit that sometimes the readers call them out on inaccuracies.

“God knows I’m very often wrong, and sometimes I’ll make a factual error, and it will be corrected within usually ten minutes because the readers are just really knowledgeable,” Weiss said.

One risk of writing music criticism is the potential to anger the artists you’ve written about. In Houston, some disgruntled local musicians have long-standing grudges against Lomax. In one instance, he said, a feud with a band almost led to a physical fight onstage during the Houston Press Music Awards. Evidently, some forms of reader/journalist interaction are more direct than others.

The Age Factor

Music criticism differs from most other types of journalism in that, to a large extent, the music culture tends to expect from its critics a certain “hipster credibility.” The taste-makers are typically young listeners in their teens, twenties and early thirties. As a result, some music journalists find that their cool-factor is limited by an age-determined shelf life.

Although Lomax is not even middle-aged, and despite having fully adapted to online media, he feels like he outgrew his job as the “Houston Press” music editor.

In addition to feeling burned out, he said, “I was just getting too old. For an alt-weekly music guy, I believe there is sort of a window of both years in the scene and also age. I don’t think people pushing forty should be the music editor in the way that this job specifically would have required me to be. They wanted me to go to shows three times a week and write about bands in their twenties.”

Paradoxically, while fluency in online tools like blogging and social networking is requisite for music journalists and can help jump-start a career, it doesn’t guarantee that a writer will be well-suited for the same job after ten years.

“The kinds of music that I’m into are sort of on the wane,” Lomax said. “I was old-fashioned when I was in high school. Now I’m like prehistoric.”

Consequently, Lomax has changed positions at the Press; as a staff writer, he now covers a broader range of news stories — not just music.

Even Weiss, whose blogger-to-journalist trajectory seems progressive enough to hold him in good stead for a while, has his eye on M.F.A. programs and fiction writing in the future.

Only Westhoff seems content, for now. He maintains an optimistic, if a tad idealistic, outlook.

“I think music journalists have the same responsibility as every other journalist,” he said, “which is getting to the core of things and telling an interesting story — one that applies to a larger trend or speaks to our common humanity.”