5 - CASE STUDIES

5.1 Popjustice[55]

5.1.1 History
Peter Robinson, editor of Popjustice has been working within the mainstream music press since university, when a fanzine he produced came to the attention of Time Out. On leaving university he went straight onto staff at the now sadly defunct Melody Maker, which he left shortly before it folded in 2000. Robinson started Popjustice the same year, but the Weblog (‘The Daily Pop Briefing’) did not come into existence until 2002. Robinson was publishing a weekly news round-up, and “[he] just needed a really easy way of publishing every week, rather than having to go into the web program – Dreamweaver – and doing the page”[56]Since he was working freelance by this point, he was looking for an interface that would allow him to post from any computer: “I started it just so I could update it every week really easily, but then I realised I could do it every day, and it just snowballed from there…The main part of it now is the daily Weblog.”

Robinson has also produced two paper versions of Popjustice, called Popjustice Not Com: “They’re both fanzine things… Basically trying to do what Smash Hits! were doing, that Smash Hits!aren’t doing any more – trying to be funny and irreverent, still loving pop music.” The first sold 6, 000 copies, the second – a programme for The Popjustice £20 Music Prize, a pop version of the Mercury Music Prize – sold 500: “just because it was quite low-key”.

Although Robinson regularly writes pop features in magazines such as the Observer Music Monthly and the New Musical Express, he has chosen to not publicise his name on the website:

“To start with people didn’t know it was me doing it, it was kind of an open secret, but I didn’t make a big thing about it… But once it got to the stage that everybody did know it was me, it wasn’t compromised, but I was having to be a lot more careful about what I was writing, making sure that it was completely true and that I knew exactly what each story was about”.

His intention, however, in remaining anonymous, is more to avoid what he terms “personality journalism”. He uses the ‘royal’ we to describe himself online “I get the impression that some people think it’s sort of ostentatious, making it seem bigger than it is, but it’s just because I don’t want it to be seen to be about me. That’s why my name’s not on it.”

5.1.2 Role
Popjustice fills a very specific niche, by treating commercial pop artists such as Britney Spears with a respect that is rarely afforded to them in any other medium. Popjustice is particularly interesting because it has such a strong mission statement:

“What if you didn't have to leave pop behind when you hit the age of 15? What if, at that age, you suddenly realised that while the worst pop music was made for children, the best pop music was simply wasted on them? What if, in the absence of any decent pop magazines, someone was to try to establish some sort of line between good pop music and bad pop music, even when some artists insisted on flirting with both?”[57]

“Nobody writes about pop music properly really,” states Robinson, explaining that he believes Popjustice has replaced traditional pop media sources such as Smash Hits!: “Popjustice is the filter for good pop against bad pop. And it’s something that Smash Hits! used to do really well, all the way up into the late Eighties, and then through the Nineties there was no distinction between good pop and bad pop.”

5.1.3 Content
There is, on average, at least one post to the Weblog per day, which is distinct from the feature-style content (columns, interviews etc) elsewhere on the Popjustice.com site. On a Monday, there will be a ‘Singles Sweep’ – brief reviews of that week’s key singles (as Robinson points out “Pop music’s about singles”), other posts will usually deal with pop news, descriptions of new bands and short-form features such as ‘Remembrance Wednesday’, where Robinson discusses great lost
pop singles.

5.1.4 Readership
Popjustice is aimed at an older pop-consuming readership. Robinson, however, does not tailor his writing to any particular reader: “For one reason because there are lots of different people looking at it, and for another reason because I’m never sure who’s looking at it. You can’t tailor it to anyone, and nor should you want to.”

Robinson encourages reader input by providing links to comments and messageboards at the bottom of each post. “I think it’s really important to try and have a community around [Popjustice] as well… That’s one of the things that distinguish it, that there is a community. It’s great because some of the people on the messageboard have set up their own blogs.” In drawing a distinction between Popjustice and other pop themed messageboards, Robinson notes that his reader-contributors have a different take on the music: “It’s really easy to tell the people who’ve seen the main page, and who get what the site’s about, and people who’ve just gone there to say why Sam and Mark are really fit and buff.” The people who “get what the site’s about” tend to take a more irreverent attitude towards the music, whilst still unashamedly enjoying it.

By encouraging this community to form, Popjustice is providing an online haven for grown-up pop music fans, “The
messageboard is somewhere where you’re not going to get laughed at for saying that you miss Steps”. He distinguishes it from not only sites such as Popbitch[58]– “It’s not like Popbitch where it really is just a load of media people who are quite cynical. Most of the people on Popjustice really believe in what they’re doing.”

5.1.4 Editorial Decisions
Peter Robinson takes care to make sure that Popjustice is produced as professionally as possible: “There’s no libel on it… and I don’t put MP3 files up to download, because that’s illegal… and the images I put up aren’t copyrighted images”. He also has to ensure – since his livelihood deals with much the same topic – that there is not too much cross-over between his posts and articles which he has sold, or intends to sell: “People use it for ideas for their own features a lot. I have to be careful about it [in case] it’s something I want to write about in the long run.” The majority of articles are self-generated, rather than being directly based on stories elsewhere, which fits in with Robinson’s statement that “[Popjustice] the only one doing it [reporting on pop in a serious way]You wouldn’t get that news anywhere else.”
[59]

5.2 Everett True at Plan B[60]

5.2.1 History
Plan B, an alternative music magazine, evolved out of another similar magazine called Careless Talk Costs Lives. Both came from the editorship of Everett True, a music journalist so renowned that he is actually known as The Legend! True is probably best known for being the first British journalist to write about Grunge in the early Nineteen-Nineties. He was particularly close to the seminal group Nirvana, about whom he is currently writing a book.

The website [61], which pre-existed the magazine for several months, features Weblogs written by most of the editorial staff, including True. It is on his Weblog that I intend to focus, as well as attempting to explain why Weblogs are so “integral”[62] to the magazine in both its paper and online forms.

True states that there were two main reasons for using Weblogs on the Plan B website. Firstly to engage the readership: “We didn’t have a magazine at the time that we started the website, so it seemed like a good way to involve the readership and get them psyched up for the magazine, via the blogs,” and secondly to bring some transparency to the process of producing the magazine: “What I’ve always attempted to do was simultaneously lay bare the workings of being a music journalist… I guess that is one of the reasons I wanted the blogs: to lay bare the workings.”

True also appreciates the immediacy of blogging, comparing it to performing on stage[63]: “I never liked rehearsing, because I always felt it was fundamentally dishonest to rehearse, because you’d write all these really heartfelt passionate songs and then you’d dilute them by practising them, honing the emotion and that always seemed really weird. And the reason I liked writing for a fanzine was because for the first time I was like ‘oh, I can express myself immediately, I don’t have to dilute it, I could just write it, leave it print it.’ And that for me was the best thing ever, that was a much better way of communicating than pretending to be honest by playing all these songs that I’d practised five or ten times on stage. And so Weblogs to me are very much an extension of that. Except they’re even better, they’re even more instant.”

5.2.2 Role
Both Plan B the magazine/website and its attendant Weblogs are aimed at a niche audience: the alternative music fan who is disillusioned with the mainstream music press.>Careless Talk Costs Lives, Plan B’s precursor, was started “because we [True and photographer Steve Gullick] felt that we didn’t have an outlet to express ourselves in any other way”.

True’s Weblog, however, does not seem have a particularly strong agenda, being predominantly a journal-style Weblog, in which the author writes about his life. According to True, however, this is in fact his agenda: “One of the things I’ve always aimed to do with my writing is make people jealous of me – I freely admit that. So if I don’t feel that I’m doing that within my writing, then I won’t write because I don’t want to disillusion people.”

5.2.3 Content
The frequency of posts varies depending on whether True feels his life is interesting enough to warrant a Weblog post. Each one is a fairly lengthy (around 300 words) description of what he has been doing and what he feels about it. There are rarely links. All posts begin with a “current listening” tag, which is not always music-related, for instance the 20^th of September’s entry reads: “Current listening: the hum of my ancient Apple Mac,”[64]

5.2.4 Readership
All Plan B Weblogs feature a comment link at the end of each post, allowing readers to give the editor feedback. This commenting feature is also present at the end of every review on the website. In fact, although the Weblogs are more accessed by readers more comments are left on the reviews. Interestingly, the forum is the most accessed part of the website.

True and his editorial team do not particularly encourage this interaction between reader and writer, however. Talking about Careless Talk Costs Lives, he says, “We certainly didn’t encourage comment about it because it had nothing to do with anybody else.”He concedes, nonetheless, that “Plan B is done on a more democratic basis… inasmuch as we’re inviting comment amongst ourselves, it’s a very natural extension to invite comment from your readers.”

5.2.5 Editorial Decisions
True has difficulties with the self-censorship he feels is required on his Weblog: “I really don’t like the idea of being dishonest in anything I write, if a thought pops up in my head I want to be able to write it down. I’m not able to do that for several reasons nowadays,” one of the reasons being that he is in a position of responsibility, as editor-in-chief of a magazine. In fact, True’s Weblog has been censored in the past by Plan B’s publisher: “Chris [Houghton] who knows a lot more about web stuff than me, has taken off a couple of comments that I’ve made, because he knows how to.” He states.

5.3. No Rock and Roll Fun[65]

5.3.1 History

Simon Hayes Budgen, the only editor of the three to not have a history of working in the mainstream music press prior to blogging, runs No Rock and Roll Fun He began the site in 2001[66], as an evolution of a music site he had been running called Liverpool Hoopla (itself an evolution from another site). Hayes Budgen has journalistic training, and since starting No Rock and Roll Fun, he has written articles for the New Musical Express. He also runs a less regularly updated
politics Weblog: Something of the Night[67]

No Rock and Roll Fun is a music news Weblog, linking to interesting news stories about the music industry. Unlike Plan B or Popjustice, it does not focus its coverage on a particular niche of music,dealing with extremely popular artists such as Madonna in exactly the same way as more obscure groups such as The Lemonheads.

Budgen generally maintains a low profile, utilising the ‘royal’ we in much the same way as Peter Robinson at Popjustice. His name (“simon h b”) appears at the end of every post. No Rock and Roll Fun is hosted on a free Blog*Spot site and is affiliated with Budgen’s website Both Sides Now[68]

5.3.2 Role
No Rock and Roll Fun is a prime example of a filter-style Weblog: offering the most interesting music-related stories with some brief witty commentary. By collating these links, Budgen provides readers with a digested version of music information on the Internet. Unlike the majority of music-based Weblogs, No Rock and Roll Fundoes not feature reviews, focusing solely on news.

5.3.3 Content
No Rock and Roll Fun is essentially a link-based Weblog, with fairly brief editorial comments on each link. There are often as many as fifteen short posts a day. Posts tend to cover the more quirky stories, although it is also strong on stories about music sharing technology and the RIAA.

One of the most interesting features of the site is the weekly review of the music press. This offers readers a digested version of what appears in that week’s NME and any other music-related publications, such asthe Observer Music Monthly. According to Budgen: “I like to think it gives them some sort of feedback on what they're doing so at least it makes them feel loved,”and it has also led to some employment.

5.3.4 Readership
Although Budgen offers a comments link at the bottom of each post, his readership does not seem to comment particularly often. This may, however, be due to the sheer number of posts he makes every day. He also provides the chance for readers to email posts to friends – a Blogger-powered service.

5.3.5 Editorial decisions
Budgen stays on-topic the majority of the time, stating that “I really should try and plead that there’s some sort of editorial process, but to a certain extent, I work through the news sources and Weblog if I think something is either interesting in its own right, or else has an amusing aspect to it… Things that outrage me do tend to get priority.” Having had journalism training, he aims “to approach libel and court reporting and so on in a semi-professional manner.” Sources include news-digest websites such as Ananova as well as more traditional media sources such as the BBC. Budgen calls it “rip and read,” explaining that he does not perceive it as journalism.

---

[55] http:/www.popjustice.com
[56] Peter Robinson, author interview
[57] Robinson 2004 http://www.popjustice.co.uk/2004/09/trying-to-make-this-place-worth-living.htm
[58] The well-known online gossip messageboard, http://www.popbitch.com
[59]Peter Robinson, author interview
[60]http://www.planbmag.com/blogs/everett/index.php
[61] http://www.planbmag.com
[62] Everett True, author interview
[63] He is also a singer/songwriter and performs under the soubriquet The Legend!
[64] http://www.planbmag.com/blogs/everett/archives/00000053.php
[65] http://xrrf.blogspot.com
[66] Simon Hayes Budgen in email correspondence with Tara Spinks
[67] http://ofthenight.blogspot.com
[68]http://www.bothsidesnow.co.uk