music writer first, music journalist second

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to any of you who pursue the music writing thing, professionally or otherwise, do your priorities run like this?

you're not so fond of chasing stories, making connections with PR people, frantically searching for people to speak to, pitching ideas, getting on the phone, getting freelance assignments.

you're more interested in writing pices which focus on your own opinions and conclusions, you prefer to write from your own home, you like the freedom of a large word count and minimal editing, and find smaller word counts constricting?

are there any of you who like the journalism stuff more than the writing?

how has it hindered or helped your career to focus on one category?

― weasel diesel (K1l14n), Friday, 21 October 2005 16:52 (twenty years ago)

When I write about music, I guess I do prefer the "music writer" over "journalist". in fact, the closer I feel to being a "journalist", the less I want to write about music.

― Dominique (dleone), Friday, 21 October 2005 17:05 (twenty years ago)

why so?

― weasel diesel (K1l14n), Friday, 21 October 2005 17:06 (twenty years ago)

because 1) I don't enjoy "covering" things unless I happen to be personally interested in them, and 2) because I don't usually want to remove myself from the situation I am writing about in order to be objective. I want to be fair, inclusive, informed when I write, but I don't feel okay about writing about something, dropping it and moving onto the next thing, which is what the routine of being a journalist feels like to me (at least in the short term).

(and of course, I don't enjoy interview people or going to shows and having to take notes!)

― Dominique (dleone), Friday, 21 October 2005 17:09 (twenty years ago)

In my fairly limited experience, I don't like pitching things, I'd rather be self-directed or assigned projects. The bulk of my experience is based in writing from a critical or personal perspective, though that may change dramatically soon if all goes well. I vastly prefer shorter word counts. I have a hard time going long, and I am naturally wired for brevity as a writer.

― Matthew C Perpetua (inca), Friday, 21 October 2005 17:10 (twenty years ago)

pitching sucks.

― Huk-L (Huk-L), Friday, 21 October 2005 17:10 (twenty years ago)

Actually, I should mention that a lot of my professional experience as a writer is rooted in writing non-critical copy and press release stuff, which is a whole other thing.

― Matthew C Perpetua (inca), Friday, 21 October 2005 17:17 (twenty years ago)

i kind of prefer the journalism angle; my strongest writing tends to be in interview-based features.

― PeopleFunnyBoy (PeopleFunnyBoy), Friday, 21 October 2005 17:22 (twenty years ago)

The long, interview-based features I've written have mostly turned out okay. If I'm writing reviews, though, I prefer to stay short - no more than 500 words, and usually closer to 200-250. I think taking assignments is good for a writer - keeps you from disappearing up your own ass and spending your whole life just writing about stuff that's already in your comfort zone. Every once in awhile, you should write about something you don't have an opinion about before you begin.

― pdf (Phil Freeman), Friday, 21 October 2005 17:31 (twenty years ago)

Eh. I do hate pitching things, and do prefer to write about music the way that you describe, but a majority of my writing is (by now) not about music at all, so I tend to see things from a journalism perspective. And besides, I like a lot of newspaper-style coverage of music (when done well, obviously. Saneh from the NYT is one that's usually pretty good).

― js (honestengine), Friday, 21 October 2005 17:35 (twenty years ago)

I actually don't mind assignments - assuming I still have time to write about things I'm interested in. It's kind of a tough situation, because the only way to be able to write about what I want is to pitch; I don't like pitching, but if I only take assignments, I end up never writing about things I want to. Over all, I'd rather write about things that engage me, as I'm inspired - hence, I wouldn't consider myself a journalist.

― Dominique (dleone), Friday, 21 October 2005 17:36 (twenty years ago)

(and writing about music isn't my primary creative outlet, so I'm okay with a semi-sporadic schedule)

― Dominique (dleone), Friday, 21 October 2005 17:38 (twenty years ago)

I much prefer writing either reviews or opinion pieces to profiles, but I can enjoy writing about records I've been assigned. I wish space always depended on what I had to say. It can be a lot of fun to see what you can squeeze into 100 words; other times 1,000 feels too short.

― Mark (MarkR), Friday, 21 October 2005 17:40 (twenty years ago)

i tend to pretty much agree with dominique. and have always thought of myself as a writer that happens to talk about music.

i half enjoy doing interviews, but dread writing them later.

fact checking, chasing, etc bores me.

at the same time, left on my own to drum up and finish projects, i too easily shelve things for a newer idea.

― bb (bbrz), Friday, 21 October 2005 17:46 (twenty years ago)

I love radio, because it's like, NO PAPER WoRK. Which is the boring part of writing.

― Huk-L (Huk-L), Friday, 21 October 2005 17:49 (twenty years ago)

If you ever wind up working for a standard daily publication, like a newspaper, and if you're serious in your interest in writing about music, you'll be in the features section. And you will be compelled to do real journalism -- interviews out the wazoo, previews of coming shows, reviews of shows filed before deadline, all the nuts and bolts that journalists in all other sections of the newspaper do. You'll have to write long and you'll have to write short. You'll have to arrange on suitable art for the story. You'll have to coordinate and wrestle with editors. And you'll have to write on hundreds of things you have absolutely no or minimal interest in and do it quick with attention to deadlines.

After doing a couple hundred interviews and similar pieces, you'll be a better music journalist and a better music "writer." Usually. First pull up then pull down. Results may vary. If erection lasts longer than four hours, consult a physician. Potrzebie.

― George the Animal Steele, Friday, 21 October 2005 18:02 (twenty years ago)

GtAS OtM

― Huk-L (Huk-L), Friday, 21 October 2005 18:03 (twenty years ago)

aka, "Hey Huk, are you a Joe Cocker fan?"
"No, why?"
"Cuz he's calling you in 15 minutes."

― Huk-L (Huk-L), Friday, 21 October 2005 18:04 (twenty years ago)

I'm wondering why you ask that question, weasel diesel? I've become increasingly tired of words and hunger for other, more creative/more inclusive/more tangential ways to respond to music. I'm not tired of music at all praise the lord. I almost dread getting The Wire nowadays. A new one arrived yesterday and I don't really want to remove the cellophane wrapping. As to writing about music, I've written more than 400 CD reviews, 30+ concert reviews and a number of features for magazines and websites. Less - in the case of wordcount - is more in my book.

― 11V, Friday, 21 October 2005 20:19 (twenty years ago)

"I'm wondering why you ask that question, weasel diesel?"

because, although i don't think i'm a particularly good writer, my own priorities are generally as laid out in the thread title. indeed, my editor referred to me as "writer first, journalist second", and told me that i'd be sensible not to prioritise one over the other. or, indeed, to see them as mutually exclusive - journalistic activity can feed the writing, and vice versa, of course. i asked the question because i wanted to know how people in a similar quandary felt it had impacted their work, or if they felt it was a quandary at all.

― weasel diesel (K1l14n), Monday, 24 October 2005 19:46 (twenty years ago)

my own priorities are generally as laid out

initially I read this as "my own priorities are getting laid..."

― m coleman (lovebug starski), Monday, 24 October 2005 20:37 (twenty years ago)

i hate interviews more than life itself, but they kinda go with the territory

― strongo hulkington's ghost (dubplatestyle), Monday, 24 October 2005 20:55 (twenty years ago)

I'd certainly concur heartily with what Kilian said in his original post. But economically it's suicide to opt for the "writer" rather than the "journalist" path (though really either path is economic suicide) unless you have Independent Means (i.e. The Day Job).

― Marcello Carlin (nostudium), Wednesday, 26 October 2005 07:17 (twenty years ago)

and even if you want to do lengthy thinkpieces you still have to pitch them, with the inevitable boomerang response.

― Marcello Carlin (nostudium), Wednesday, 26 October 2005 07:21 (twenty years ago)

I have more experience with writing about my own opinions, but I've been delving more and more into the journalism end and straight interviewing and reporting. I like being able to do a bit of both, but at the moment I think I get more satisfaction out of going into an interview well prepared and then transcribing it and finding a way to fashion it into something readable, or giving an obscure or unknown artist some public exposure without having to put much of my ideas or opinions into the picture. I'm kind of learning the hard way how conflicts between the 2 roles can arise (like this week, a local artist I recently interviewed and wrote a fairly straightforward and unbiased profile of for a paper taking issue with something opinionated that I wrote about them on a blog).

― Al (sitcom), Wednesday, 26 October 2005 08:03 (twenty years ago)

I have nothing but total admiration and a kind of fearful awe for people who actually enjoy doing interviews.

― Tom (Groke), Wednesday, 26 October 2005 08:07 (twenty years ago)

or giving an obscure or unknown artist some public exposure without having to put much of my ideas or opinions into the picture.

completely disagree with this. without your ideas or opinions (a) you're just acting as an unpaid PR agent; (b) anyone could write what you write, no?

― Marcello Carlin (nostudium), Wednesday, 26 October 2005 08:09 (twenty years ago)

As a reader, if I wanted to be persuaded to investigate someone's work I would only be moved to do so by a writer arguing passionately in their favour.

― Marcello Carlin (nostudium), Wednesday, 26 October 2005 08:09 (twenty years ago)

I dunno, maybe I expressed what I meant poorly there, I don't feel like what I described is just straight PR. less opinion, but ideas certainly, I definitely think good and hard about how to represent the artist, and not strictly in terms of how to be flattering or polite about it. also, if I'm writing about music that comes from a very small, insular community that I think I understand more intimately than the reader (or other writers), then no, not anyone could write what I write.

as for enjoying interviews, I still get a sickly nervous feeling in my stomach leading up to them, but most of the time once it gets started I can just enjoy it as a conversation that happens to have an agenda, and if I get too lost or nervous I have notes to refer to.

― Al (sitcom), Wednesday, 26 October 2005 08:20 (twenty years ago)

I couldn't abide interviews. Never really saw why I had to do them either - as an appendage to record reviews which really should stand on their own, it seemed a particularly pointless task. You could generally sense the 96th-time boredom of the interviewees, though there were some honourable exceptions.

― Marcello Carlin (nostudium), Wednesday, 26 October 2005 08:25 (twenty years ago)

yeah, that brings up another contrast of my experience with that of other people here. I don't think I'd enjoy interviewing people who are on long, repetitive promo junkets and have well prepared talking points either. talking to someone who has less experience with being interviewed might be a little harder to draw out of their shell and get usable quote froms, but they're at least a little more excited and unrehearsed.

― Al (sitcom), Wednesday, 26 October 2005 08:30 (twenty years ago)

not positing this as a rule, but I always tried to balance both -- reviewing and interviewing -- 50/50 as a freelancer for commercial and aesthetic reasons. not only does feature writing enhance yr potential income it can inform and deepen yr critical perspective. talking to musicians about the songwriting and record-making process is especially beneficial for non-musician music journalists/critics.

not necessary but helpful, at least in my not so humble experience.

― m coleman (lovebug starski), Wednesday, 26 October 2005 09:14 (twenty years ago)

The trouble with U*c*t was that (a) there wasn't much scope for feature writing 'cos there were only about 2-3 major features per issue and these were routinely assigned to the Big Names; and (b) all interesting information about songwriting, record-making process, etc., which I did manage to extract from interviewees was routinely excised from the final cut, which inevitably contained only the blandest of blandishments.

― Marcello Carlin (nostudium), Wednesday, 26 October 2005 09:17 (twenty years ago)

i did an interview yesterday with Colder and it was really nice and all but in the end i just like to talk about music in general and when a person has my tastes (as Colder does) than i actually dont get any really useful info out of them besides from the usual music chatter. i prefer backgroundstories and features or reviews

― rizzx (Rizz), Wednesday, 26 October 2005 13:16 (twenty years ago)

Doing interviews is the best part of my job...I love it (but i'm not a music writer)...but yeah, I think George the Animal is pretty dead on about the demands of being on staff...it's a grind, but you have to do a shitload of different stuff....I've certainly learned alot.

― M@tt He1geson (Matt Helgeson), Wednesday, 26 October 2005 13:19 (twenty years ago)

don't think I'd enjoy interviewing people who are on long, repetitive promo junkets and have well prepared talking points either

No, you don't enjoy it. That's what makes it a challenge as a journalist, not a writer. Interviewing comes in with all the baggage and caveats that artists, even insignificant ones, have been coached to expect from the media. Stenography and sickening fluff. The trick is to not do that, even for short things. A build up in experience makes it come easier. There's no way around it. You have to do it to get good at it.

― George the Animal Steele, Wednesday, 26 October 2005 15:55 (twenty years ago)

My background is totally journalism - Bachelor's of Journalism from University of Missouri; lots of non-music (and music) feature writing there; beat reporting for a couple suburban weeklies in Michigan on school boards, police reports, sewage boards, zoning commissions, two summers worth of doing all the high school sports, etc. I was doing reporting before I ever wrote my first record review. I enjoyed it, at the time (in fact, honestly, I kind of miss covering city council meetings!), but once I started writing record reviews (freelance), interviewing bands was the worst part. It just seemed so formulaic, like the words being written weren't mine. But still, the journalism grounding, as George says, helps you make the best of it, and make sure you're not just helping artists regurgitate their pat answers. (One trick: Don't ask pat questions!) And you have to figure out how to make your features read like writing too -- it's a challenge, just like, say, writing 50 word haiku reviewlets for Entertainment Weekly is its own kind of challenge. So I wound up doing plenty of music features for Rolling Stone, Spin, Creem, the Voice, etc, and *never* liked doing them as much as reviewing records. And now, I enjoy editing the reviews in the music section way more than I enjoy editing features, which is harder work, plus, thing, is, I don't tend to *read* interviews with musicians (when I'm away from work, I mean; I obviously read them at work), because I've never particularly cared that much about what musicians think about themselves. Not much bores me more than hearing about celebrities' lives; the way I figure it, their music will tell me what I want to know about them. (There are a few exceptions, of course.) I never read rock-star biographies; could probably list the ones I *have* read on one hand. So I very much identify with the people here who dread and hate the interview thing, and I think people who say criticism *has* to be journalism are idiots, but I also identify with people that say it's an important skill. Knowing how to do journalism gives you a better idea about how to *shape* criticism you write, for one thing. And maybe it's just me, but I'd rather be grounded there than in academic writing anyday.

― xhuxk, Wednesday, 26 October 2005 16:15 (twenty years ago)

It's often better to not just focus on music journalism and criticism. Entertainment interviewing is just largely exhausted in its potential and what is now allowed. If you read "interviews" and "features" on pop musicians long enough, it will occur to you that the poobahs of the publications don't alloy a standard of adversarial reporting that's present in every other aspect of good journalism. Compare pop music interviews with the sports section of a good daily newspaper. Rock critics are never allowed to get away with that kind of thing, the lampooning of coaches to their faces, the outright castigating of star players. In music journalism, you can get away with in reviews in some venues but you can't get away with it in any glossy magazine in the features, not the ones I've seen over the last fifteen years. Largely, it's why I don't read them.

So your options are to keep up the music writing but also go into other branches of journalism. I've done investigative reporting, columns -- expository and opinion, lots of different things. Been on the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, different newspapers, wrote and write investigative pieces, one on nuclear proliferation (hah -- eyes glaze over), a book on virus writers and the anti-virus industry, getting hired at the CIA, which was a hoot to investigate. It was just a lot better and more exciting to just focus on music journalism where my kind of style/approach isn't much appreciated anyway.

That kind of thing makes you a better writer and it will definitely make you a better critic.

― George the Animal Steele, Wednesday, 26 October 2005 16:53 (twenty years ago)

Oops, meant, "It was just a lot better and more exciting [than] just a focus on music journalism."

― George the Animal Steele, Wednesday, 26 October 2005 16:55 (twenty years ago)

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