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Wonder what the L means, or why bloggers still aren’t journalists
By Brian | February 13, 2010
Lousy? Low-rent (or alternately, low-paid, as I can’t imagine a magazine with an “ABC-audited” circ of 105K pays very much)? The L Magazine, which bills itself as a “city guide for young New Yorkers”, ran a story entitled “eMusic Now Charging $49 for the Right to Be Told Your Band Sucks Ass“, about a new company called eMusicBlast, which will solicit feedback from label A&R reps on a recorded musical demo (for a $49 fee, of course). Their mistake was conflating eMusicBlast with the similarly named eMusic, an online music retailer with a subscription model (Full disclosure, I’ve subscribed to eMusic for a couple of years now).
Now, faithful readers, I linked you to the “About” pages on both eMusic and eMusicBlast, pages which took me, oh, all of about 15 seconds to find. If it took me less than a minute to discover the little men behind the curtains, what’s the excuse of L Magazine Music Editor Mike Conklin? Oh, that’s right, he has none. His half-hearted and half-assed correction employed the use of strikethrough text and the caveat that “I jumped to conclusions before getting my facts straight”. Seriously? I did more thorough fact-checking for high school publications. If I were L Magazine E-I-C Jonny Diamond, that kind of tomfoolery would earn someone an immediate permanent vacation and an admonition to not the let the door hit you where the Good Lord split you on your way out.
Not content to simply email them pointing out the mistake, I fired a shot across the bow on Twitter, receiving a response in line with a level of professionalism I attributed to Mr. Conklin (that is, none at all). Not content to let sleeping dogs lie, I decided it would be fun to use social media to point out exactly how lazy and unprincipled Mr. Conklin is as a journalist. His response precipitated an exchange of jabs and barbs that I used to maximum effect, and that I present to you in all its social media glory.
Topics: Art & Copy, These Go to 11 | No Comments »