Editors of the music press/fanzines - what is wrong with them?

Tom is a much more hands off editor - time issues and also because he doesn't own what you write. And the difference has become house style at FT (after all - Giant Spiders don't quite fit into the usual musical bent. As for The Jubilee Stuff...)

Is it their job as editor to reform your basic material into some sort of house style (and house style might include nothing too long).

When the "house style" is that they don't HAVE a house style, and I quote:

2.2'The writing's quite varied/amateurish in places, isn't it?'

Quite possibly. We make no apologies for this. We have a diverse team with a diverse set of writing styles. We'd like to make things as good as we can, but ultimately it's a site by music fans for music fans, and our primary motivation is to put the word out about the music we love, provide a forum for discussion and a useful resource for music fans.

I don't see how that applies.

I think, quite snottily, that in this case, that the site/zine seems to feature a preponderance of hardcore/emo/punk. Not exactly genres known for their attention spans. Considering that the average length of your average dronerock song is about seven minutes or so, perhaps fans of the genre have a slightly higher attention span?

long articles on the interweb SuXoR.

I could not disagree more. I don't care what the length of an article is, I care about the quality of the writing. In fact, if an article is long, I'm more likely to bookmark it and go back and read it several times. And, as Gareth points out, some people like to print out good web articles and read them at leisure.

You people probably read more articles on the web than any other single groups of people gathered in one space.

What ARE your thoughts on the length issue? I'm genuinely interested to know. Don't just fucking ignore this cause it's blah blah, another Kate complaining thread, like always...

Pretty much my thought. I've often found that if I'm given a word limit, oddly enough, I sometimes have to work to reach it, whereas if I'm given no limit I'll just ramble on. I think this might be because the limit forces you to think of the 'important' stuff you're trying to convey whereas without it you can ramble a bit more freely.

*dodges flying cabbages, zucchinis etc*

1) No, no word count was ever indicated prior to article. Which is one of the reasons that I actually like writing for this organ. Knowing a word-count in advance kills my creativity, as Ned noted.

2) No, no money involved. I'm doing it for the LOVE, maaaan. Hence my attachment to my work.

3) Have suggested breaking it up into two reviews, but that would really destroy the thing, for reasons which wouldn't make sense unless you read it.

Of course, this was when I had a full time job, and didn't need the money. Typical ...

I have massive problems with getting in under length limits, as some of you might guess -- the process of chopping pieces down under them hurts me in my heart and I think makes a lot of the stuff I do unentertainingly dense. I completely understand them, though, even online -- especially online -- for two reasons: (a) it's that much harder for an online publication to project the sense of a "house style" that print magazines can, and some vague uniformity of length is a big help with that, and more importantly (b) people have choices online. If I have a print magazine in my hand I will stick with an article -- even if I don't, it's likely that I'll flip through the rest and come straight back to it. There's a limited number of reading options that don't involve my getting up and going somewhere else and finding different reading material. Online, you can jet as soon as your interest wanes: if you're starting to skim and the progress bar is still up in its upper third and you seem to recall seeing "part one of four" up at the top, it's really easy to wonder what's over on X other site and run off. In other words, the fact that the web can affordably accommodate long pieces doesn't necessarily make them any more entertaining to read than they might be in print.

There's a right length for any treatment of a topic. I think the shortening attention span Maura mentions comes from this: it's really better to err on the side of going shorter than that "right length." Because people like to finish the articles they started.

I have to admit that lately I like three-sentence capsule collections -- say, a page full of 75-word blurbs on 20 different singles. The formal restraint does something interesting to the writing -- and it's still 1500 words, only organized such that you can scavenge it more for what you really want. I wouldn't deny that this format just as often leads to a lot of useless one-liners and no actual substance -- but even then, there are the occasional examples where the one-liners really are substantial.

I can't believe I'm sticking up for short here -- this is some sort of residual guilt over having written 4000 words on the Strokes.

Or can, at least, yes. Hell, I'm doing that on a regular basis! ;-)

I never edit for length on FT. I do cut people's articles if I think they're repeating themselves or qualifying themselves too much but thats not the same thing really. When I format a page for FT I try and make sure it doesn't go over 1500 words - I don't break the articles up too much because some people print them out but if a longer article can be broken up without loss of clarity I'll do it (cf Jess' and my latest things and the Jubilee stuff). Some people won't read long articles online - I don't often. My advice is, if you're interested, print it and you'll read it eventually.

I think in this situation "too long" might be a vague get-out for "I don't like it" - have you asked the editor to send you a suggested revision? By all means submit it to FT though Kate! We seem to be getting a lot of articles about rock (indie or drone or alt- or whatever) and I'm trying to balance them with other stuff so it might not be published v.quickly though.

Personally I read it all because I liked the bands it was about; perhaps their logs say different, but I very much suspect none of their visitors reads every single article - I only wander along there once in a while and there are always loads of new articles whenever I do so, so I just read ones about bands I like or bands with stupid names - and so most people reading it will also be interested in the bands in question. If they're that bothered about 2k of extra storage or the distress caused by hitting "back" and then possibly but probably not deciding never to come back, they could hoover some of the more content-free rants [pot, kettle, I know] out of the non-music sections.

(If anyone who works for the site in question comes along here then I do like your site, that's why I read it, and that's why I recognised the quotation above and went to take a look. Oh, and sp: Laetitia - ok, you may hit me now, but there's one for the "great names nobody's called any more" thread. Finally, you may disregard everything I say because I really can't write reviews and whenever I try they end up as about 27 A4 pages of irrelevant tedium. As do my ILX posts, dammit. Sorry.)

No criticism intended towards Kate, but sometimes 'make it shorter' means 'there isn't enough content for the length, and it will be improved by trimming'.

J Edgar Hoover couldn't move her from my heart,

Emma!
Emma!!
Emma Goldman !!!

Oh wait, Im the only Piggy fan on here aint I?

It's an editor's job to edit. (The word's even in his title!) As a writer you're probably not supposed to like it. At the same time, I feel like most music writing on the Web I read would benefit from a little more concision/focus on main points. It's not an attention-span thing so much as quality control.

They really don't like long sentences, some of these people. Good thing Henry James is dead.