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.
Wired.com harnesses readers to produce better content
Wired.com has some of the most techno-savvy readers of any publication, and editor in chief Evan Hansen is not afraid to use them.
As it turns out, the online publication has fostered symbiotic relationships with its blog readers in a variety of different ways, all of which have been beneficial both to Wired.com and to its sharp-minded readers.
“You have the ability to reveal the story in progress, this sort of ‘process-is-content’ notion,” Hansen explained about blogging. “You reveal what you have, as it comes in, and then you invite the readers and the public to help you finish the story.”
This method of reporting has improved blogging at Wired.com, particularly when Hansen and his colleagues have taken experimental risks that have become incredibly successful. Most prominent among these experiments is the Geekdad blog, which features posts from self-proclaimed “geek” dads and moms. The contributors submit one or two posts a week, typically about science or technology topics that appeal to parents and kids alike.
Nintendo, NASA, and Legos are all fair game. Originally, the blog was run solely by Chris Anderson, but it became too much for one person to handle, so Anderson reached out to readers and asked whether any of them wanted to contribute.
“He found some people who were very qualified to do it, and he took that chance,” Hansen said, “and it worked out.”
“Worked out” is putting it mildly. Geekdad is now one of the most popular blogs on the site, and its contributors write posts for free — yes, free! — from all over the country. The blog’s unpaid editor, Ken Denmead, now has a book deal in the works as a direct result of the blog.
As of April 15, 2009, Denmead has sent out a call for more contributors. If the past is any indication, he’s going to get responses from plenty of enthusiastic, knowledgeable participants — just the sort of people who fuel the content of Geekdad.
As an editor who entrusts readers with blog content, Hansen laughed and said, “You’ve got to close your eyes a little bit and kind of just have faith that stuff that comes out is going to be in line with your brand and your sense of quality. It was a leap of faith, but it really turned out well. It’s an interesting and eclectic and, I think, very high quality publication now.”
Hansen estimates that 20-25 percent of what gets blogged about at Wired.com either starts with or includes tips from readers. The site uses a feedback tool developed by Reddit specifically for Wired.com blogs that allows users to upload text and pictures and also assists with sorting the content offered by readers. When Cal Tech grad student Virgil Griffith introduced the Wikiscanner in 2007, the Threat Level blog at Wired.com asked readers to submit IP addresses of Wikipedia users who were editing the online encyclopedia to suit their own agenda.
Using the Reddit tool to upload their findings to Threat Level, readers exposed hundreds of instances of corporate whitewashing on Wikipedia and then voted to determine the most appalling ones. In 2008, the project earned Wired.com a Knight-Batten award for innovation in journalism; Wired.com gave the $10,000 award to Wikiscanner creator Virgil Griffith.
The kind of reader/blog interaction that changes journalism is, of course, only available on the Internet. Hansen emphasized that Wired.com has the advantage of being a stand-alone Web site with original content, as opposed to being an offshoot of a print publication. Although Conde Nast now owns both Wired magazine and Wired.com, the two publications remain separate in terms of staff and news stories.
“The marriage back with the magazine has been very beneficial financially and otherwise,” Hansen said. “But, again, the structure here is that the Web site is considered to be its own business. We are very collaborative, and we share a brand, and we’re very respectful of the magazine…but we’re not the red-headed stepchild of a print publication.”
While the magazine and the Web site have different modes of operation, Hansen observed that the fundamentals of journalism apply to both.
“The most surprising thing is that the more we got into blogging, the more we realized it’s not all that different from ordinary news gathering,” he said. “The same rules apply in terms of accuracy, confirming information.”
For the blogs, Hansen said the goal is not to be an aggregation site but rather to do original reporting.
“Which means that you’ve got to pick up the phone,” he said. “You’ve got to talk to people. You’ve got to chase down facts and not just link to other people.”
And, it seems, it also helps if you’re something of a risk-taker — with very smart readers.
