A sample from this morning’s Slate article on the death of music magazines (sniff).
The full article is definitely worth a read, but I think the high point was the line “there’s dancing about architecture, you see, and then there’s hyperventilating about crap.” Touché, my friend.
Meanwhile, reason #3 music mags are doomed:
Music magazines were an early version of social networking. But now there’s this thing called “social networking” …
Many readers who are otherwise passionate about culture have little time for music writing, irritated that it speaks in abstract, jargon-stuffed language….This has always been an issue for music magazines, but traditionally they’ve been able to make it an asset, too. One of the most important historical functions of music magazines has been precisely to speak in a semisecret language that separates in-the-know us from square them.
I was going to ask you all: What does Hunt have to say about the traditional press (i.e. culture critics from, say, the New York Times or Rolling Stone) and their relationship to Mr. and Mrs. Whuffie?
Wait a minute, didn’t Sarah Palin name one of her kids “Whuffie?”
Unless I missed it, she didn’t touch that one. I did think about how traditional media are using social networking as I read, though. I often find it’s pretty much on par with other big institutions. Some are doing it well (the Baltimore Sun keeps up an active, fun Twitter feed) though I am less impressed with those not pushing too far outside their corporate comfort zone (i.e. the NYTimes Twitter approach, which runs more like a glorified RSS).
As for the online lives of critics themselves, I think I’m inspired to pay more attention to certain people because of their online persona. I do think it’s a huge step in the right direction that people can get a more nuanced picture of who these people are *as people* and weigh their published opinions alongside that knowledge. In one paper/one critic towns, that seems especially important.