Earlier this year, I completed a MA in Journalism and, to my surprise and delight, I finished with a First. A massive part of my Masters was a thesis I worked on entitled "Is there a future in dancing about architecture? An examination of the role of the professional music journalist in Ireland in an era of citizen journalism."
While not the catchiest title in the world, my thesis asked a very simple question; is there a future for professional music journalists when faced with competition from bloggers who provide their services for free?
Up until now only those interviewed for the thesis and my lecturers have seen the results of my thesis but I have been asked by a number of people to put a summary and, indeed, the thesis up online in order to provoke further debate. I've been slightly reluctant to do this because it's very difficult to summarise 20,000 words in 6-700 without losing some context. However, I've decided to forgoe those concerns and so here is my summary, as well as a link to the full thesis:
The first step of my thesis was to investigate why so little research had been conducted into popular (and that includes indie) music journalism and I found that the problem seems to be that music isn’t considered as worthy for study/inclusion as literature or theatre, either by academics or newspaper editors. It would seem that they see music as a frivolous pursuit, relegated to the margins, and not a life affirming passion which is obviously ridiculous to those of us who care about music.
I then set about interviewing some of the most influential (based on a number of criteria that can be found in the thesis) bloggers and professional music journalists in Ireland.
2UIBestow – Peter Nagle
Asleep on the Compost Heap – Darragh McCausland
Harmless Noise – Naomi McArdle
Swear I’m Not Paul – Ronan Hunt-Murphy
Those Geese Were Stupefied – Karl McDonald
The Irish Times – Jim Carroll
Irish Independent – John Meagher
Hot Press – Stuart Clark
Nialler9 – Niall Byrne
My thesis focused on their motivations for engaging in music journalism and found three main roles for the music writer; The Critic, The Cheerleader and The Archivist. These roles can be defined as follows:
The Critic combines objective critical analysis with subjectivity.
The Cheerleader promotes only music they likes with no objectivity.
The Archivist decides what is/isn’t important enough to write about.
Anyway, I found that, while the professional music journalists generally gave equal importance to all three roles, almost all of the bloggers felt that that cheerleading was the most important role, believing that they had an obligation to promote new music, often at the expense of objective critical analysis. The reason for this, I believe, is the interactive nature of blogging, the fact that a blogger can talk about a band/album and then immediately let their audience experience it.
That’s not to say that bloggers don’t play the role of The Critic at times, it’s just that, given the opportunity, they almost all failed to mention it as being important.
I also found was that most bloggers don’t actually want to write about music professionally, especially if it means giving up their blog. It was for this reason, amongst others, that I concluded that the challenges faced by professional music journalists do not come from bloggers but rather they are the same challenges faced by other professional journalists (falling sales, etc), which is, for the time being at least, out of their control.
My final conclusion, and something that journalists can control, was that it is much more likely that newspapers/magazines will hire traditional print journalists who are willing to engage with blogging than they are a blogger crossing over to print media, meaning that there remains a future in dancing about architecture for professional music journalists.
So now I’m throwing this open to you, as I know my findings have sparked some debate amongst the journalists/bloggers who took part and I’d like to see if it will provoke further debate. I would, however, recommend that you do read the whole thesis at some stage but I'm willing to justify any and all of my findings. You can find the full thesis here.
Right then, over to you…
