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* Does anyone remember Music JOURNALISM?

You might think this post would be another installment about our announcement of last week. But it's not.

In-print music magazines are dying, sure. We've become yet another example of that. Today, however, I'm writing about the practice of journalism in music coverage -- or, more specifically, the utter lack of it.

Two primary examples to which I can point. One was in the print medium, the other online.

You may have read something within the past couple of days about a "review" of the Black Crowes' new record which appeared in Maxim magazine. The writer had a largely negative opinion of it, which is fine, of course. Except that the band's record label had not yet sent out advance discs, nor had it been provided in any other form to anyone in the press yet. Oooops.

Maxim at first tried to explain the review as an "educated guess" but eventually issued a full apology. None of which excuses such a thing from ever being allowed to happen in the first place.

It is theoretically possible that this is primarily on the writer, David Peisner (thanks for the name, Maura) who obviously knew what he (or she? The name of the writer oddly appears to have been shielded from the news reports about the incident, and I've not actually seen a print copy of the magazine yet) was doing. Publications generally trust freelance writers to procure advance music from publicists on their own, rather than trying to babysit or mediate that process.

It's worth noting that a few weeks ago I tentatively assigned a review of the Black Crowes album to one of our freelancers, Bob Townsend, for our March-April issue of ND. Bob wrote back a couple weeks later to say he still hadn't gotten an advance. No problem, I said; if they're not going to send an advance out, we'll just hold off till the following issue.

It's certainly possible, though, that a writer could lie -- "Yeah, I got the advance today, will have the review for you by the end of the week" -- and as such, I can foresee a scenario in which Maxim was not in fact aware of the writer's fabrication. Not that it would let them off the hook -- and it's also possible the editors could have been complicit in the duplicity, of course -- but first and foremost, it's the writer who's at fault here.

It's most certainly the editors who are at fault in my second example, though, and this one at least tangentially affected No Depression. Sometime in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, an anonymous poster circulated a phony "press release" on a couple of message-boards suggesting that the Austin nightclub Pangaea planned to circumvent South By Southwest policy by enforcing a strict dress-code and giving priority admission to those who ordered "bottle service". As it happens, No Depression's showcase is Wednesday (March 12) at Pangaea; the phony missive also listed our lineup, as if to associate us with the false claims.

This smelled like a rat from the git-go, in large part because SXSW controls the door at its venues; it's part of the conditions of their agreements with the establishments who host the conference's showcases.

Yet by late Tuesday morning or early Tuesday afternoon, several music-news websites -- including The Daily Swarm, Idolator, and Stereogum, many of them highly-trafficked and supposedly respectable -- had cut-and-pasted the post's contents onto their site and fashioned news reports out of it.

None of them so much as bothered to question the veracity of the information, or to call Pangaea to see if they would confirm having sent this "press release" out, or to call SXSW to see whether they would allow this at one of their venues, or to call No Depression to see if they would present a showcase at a venue under such conditions.

In fairness, some of the sites subsequently either removed or revised their news items after it became clear -- only through SXSW contacting the venue and passing word along to me, which I then posted as comments below the sites' news items -- that they'd been had.

The point, however, is that they never should have been had in the first place. There are major -- MAJOR -- steps missing in the fundamental news-gathering processes of a great many music-related websites. Basic editing principles and common-sense fact-checking are becoming a lost art.

We all know that there are hundreds of sites out there who are ultimately doing little more than cut-and-paste recycling of stuff they've found elsewhere around the web. But can't anyone bring anything REAL to the table? Real content? Real research? Real writing? Real JOURNALISM?

I'll tell you one thing. If nobody else can do it, we sure as hell can.

adios,
peter

Posted by peter on February 26, 2008 1:48 PM | Permalink