A music journalism report card: how did we get here?
It didn't seem possible, but things have gotten worse – much worse.
Two weeks ago, Coldplay came to town. Even if you’re not a fan, you couldn’t have missed the coverage. With three sold out shows at Eden Park, it was the biggest of big deals, and news outlets treated it as such.
Mass headlines were written about front man Chris Martin kissing the tarmac before his flight, about his arrival in the country, about what he might be doing, where he might be going, and what he thinks of us.
Stuff.co.nz even asked their readers to join in the frenzy…
On the morning after Coldplay’s first show, reviews began landing. RNZ called it “cosmic” and “mawkish” in a mostly glowing review posted on its homepage. That’s where it stayed for most of the morning, an indication it was rating well.
Stuff called the gig “a bit weird” due to a sequence involving puppets, space alien costumes and a joke about a potato (I agreed, and then some), then promoted that review in much the same way, on the homepage for most of the day.
Then there was NZ Herald. It did something different. Its own Coldplay review landed nice and early, just before 7am, but it was granted about two minutes on the homepage before being yanked and replaced by something else.
What took its place? A piece of incisive music journalism? A deep-dive into a local entertainment issue? An insightful interview with a local artist? A review of a different show?
Er, no. None of that happened. Instead, one of the country’s most popular news sites replaced that rare thing, a piece of local music coverage, with this:
This, it seems, is the plight of music journalism in Aotearoa, a time when even that most basic of things – a review of a huge stadium show – is almost impossible to find because it has to fight against an avalanche of clickbait.
To succeed, a story needs to quickly hit an algorithmic sweet spot. If it fails to rate, it’s quickly dumped and replaced by something else. Judging by NZ Herald’s Coldplay review, writers have just a few minutes for their stories to prove themselves before they get pulled and replaced. (NZ Herald has supplied comment on this; see below.)
And that’s when horseshit like Armie Hammer’s mother getting him the snip for his birthday takes over.
The day before it treated a Coldplay review with derision, NZ Herald did something similar, this time with a true exclusive. It had the first interview with Shihad after the band announced their break-up, an emotional and wide-ranging chat about why they’d decided to end things and what that decision meant for them.
That story was the first time the band’s four members had talked this over with a journalist. They were clearly struggling. Getting this interview would have taken considerable effort. Negotiations were done. Promises were made. Four interviews takes time, research and writing takes even longer. It was a great read.
Yet, on the Herald’s homepage, that story barely got a look-in. I checked in throughout the day and it didn’t seem to even get the chance to prove itself. In the site’s entertainment section, the headline remained buried under a deluge of gossipy overseas clickbait, including this …
In 2024, there is so little music journalism being done that’s worth celebrating. But that Shihad story proved that even when we do it, and do it well, it gets displaced by clickbait that isn’t from here, doesn’t involve us, has no input from local writers, and covers topics already being done to death by overseas websites.
But those stories are doing real big numbers, so fuck it, right?
We are exactly one year on from New Mirrors, a Creative New Zealand research paper that examined the impact the lack of cultural reporting was having on our country.
To sum up, things were bleak. The report found a media landscape in which arts writing was so miniscule – just 13 per cent of all media coverage – that it was on the brink of collapse. This has a wide-ranging impact on journalists who aren’t getting opportunities to tell those stories, on artists who lose a valuable outlet for unveiling their work, and on readers who are no longer exposed to that kind of coverage.
Important cultural conversations that used to happen all of the time have just … disappeared.
At the time of its release, I spoke to Rosabel Tan, one of the report’s authors. She found things had changed drastically even in the few months that passed between finishing her interviews and putting New Mirrors together.
More journalists had lost their jobs. Fewer editors were left who cared. “It was just so shocking to me that even within that short amount of time, things had continued to erode so rapidly,” Tan told me.
So, one year on, it’s worth examining where we are. All year I’ve been watching, taking notes, talking to journalists, looking to see how things have changed. Because they’ve definitely changed. Are you ready for this?
Spoiler alert: they’ve gotten much worse.
I believe if Creative NZ published that report today, that figure of 13 per cent would be much lower, perhaps even halved.
Here are some of the lowlights of 2024:
In January, Stuff deleted its entire music section. Over the year, most of their digital entertainment and lifestyle reporters have resigned or been pulled into news teams, leaving huge gaps in coverage and sections that are rarely updated;
In March, the Phantograph Punch, an independent website that occasionally published really good and effective music journalism, went on hiatus;
In July, Newshub’s website, which was doing a better job than most at covering local entertainment stories, was shuttered when Stuff took over the 6pm bulletin; its final story was a list of everyone film critic Kate Rodger interviewed for the site. (She’s on Substack now);
In October, Ambient Light, a local website dedicated to reviewing and photographing as many live shows as possible, ceased publication; the owner told me it had become “demoralising” trying to get access to cover big shows;
This month, NZME announced plans to close 14 regional newspapers in the North Island, a proposal that will put 30 journalists out of work. Those journalists worked small town beats covering all sorts of news, including local music, artists and events that will now never be written about;
Also this month, The Spinoff, which occasionally publishes great music reviews and has had several great scoops this year, confirmed it would cut three roles and halve a fourth;
Newzician magazine, which I profiled in June, recently appeared to also stop doing its thing. (The editor didn’t reply to a request for comment.)
Grim.
This past weekend, I opened up Canvas, a magazine-style insert included with the Weekend Herald, an award-winning newspaper. I used to work for this publication, back when it had a dedicated editor and a team of writers who cared deeply about crafting well-researched and compelling cultural features.
Canvas is no longer a glossy insert. Its paper stock has been reduced to newsprint and is now just 16 pages long. But there’s still ample space for local entertainment, arts and culture reporting. Yet, in Saturday’s edition, there wasn’t a single feature written by a local writer. Instead, three New York Times stories were republished, alongside a fourth from The Times. None were about local issues. None featured local faces. None had anything to do with this country we live in, Aotearoa.
This made me incredibly sad. I still remember the feeling I had when I wrote my first major feature for Canvas, a deep-dive on the comedian Josh Thomson. It felt like I’d accomplished something, like I’d levelled up. Later, I scored my second cover story when I profiled local musician and radio DJ done good Zane Lowe, a story I’d been chasing for a long time.
Those stories took time and effort. I spent three months following Thomson around film sets and fast food joints, interviewing friends, producers and his wife. I travelled to Australia to meet Lowe, sitting in on his two-hour radio show, navigating Apple’s watchful PR team to score a lengthy interview, then organising an in-person chat with Beck – yes, the Beck – just to ask him what it was like to be interviewed by Lowe.
Those stories aren’t being written anymore. You can see the effects of this decline every time you go looking for music journalism. It’s still there. Occasionally, you can find it. But you have to commit.
Meanwhile, weird shit just keeps happening.
Major stories don’t get told.
Sold out concerts don’t get covered.
Unloved entertainment sections end up looking like this:
Recently, I’ve seen business reporters, hard news journalists, social media editors and sports reporters file reviews for major concerts, like someone in the newsroom yelled out, “Who wants to go?” and it was first-in, first-served.
Imagine the outcry if an entertainment journalist was sent to cover an All Blacks game or chase politicians around parliament. It doesn’t happen – because it never would. Yet the opposite seems perfectly acceptable when it comes to coverage of major cultural events.
If you don’t send an expert, you can count on that coverage being haphazard. And that’s what we get, all the time. Just last week I read a concert review on a mainstream media site in which the third sentence was this:
“I’ve always been a fan of [redacted], however my knowledge of his work has never been great.”
Is this the best we can do?
Really?
A week before those Coldplay shows, Travis Scott came to town. I believe that concert demonstrated the full effects of this steep decline of local music journalism.
Scott courted headlines in the weeks leading up to his Eden Park appearance, angering fans by changing the show’s date with little notice, then marking remaining tickets down to just $30.
With all that controversy, along with violence breaking out at some of his Australian shows, I would have thought a comprehensive review would become a newsroom priority. It seemed it might have. NZ Herald sent an entertainment reporter along. I know this because they quoted them in this story…
A Herald entertainment reporter who joined the crowd said it seemed the groups wanted to “keep themselves entertained” before the show started. “Speaking to some friends after who were in the mosh, they said a lot of people were scrapping for the fun of it.”
Yet that critic never filed a review. Instead, editors simply ripped fight footage from social media, wrote a clickbait headline, and watched the views roll in.
Look, I get it. Times are tough for mainstream media companies. It’s hard to care about whether or not you’re covering music in the right way when you’re busy announcing yet another round of redundancies, hoping to keep the doors open during the advertising apocalypse, then providing coverage of your own demise for your readers...
Entertainment reporting teams have felt the full force of this wrecking ball. They were the first to be culled, a phenomenon I called “the canary in the coal mine” for journalism. There are so few full-time culture reporters left I counted them all on two hands and still have several fingers left. (We will hear from them soon.)
As a journalist, as a music fan who cares, as someone who has spent most of my life obsessing about entertainment coverage and writing for many of the publications I’ve mentioned in this piece, it hurts to see all this play out.
Obliteration may be looming, but I know audiences still want access to this content. They tell me so when they find my newsletter. They say: “I just don’t see this kind of writing anymore.” They say: “Please don’t stop.” And they say: “Thank you.”
That’s because they get fed homepages full of graphic murders, sexual assault trials, viral videos, property porn, celebrity gossip, beat-up traffic and weather reports, and imported clickbait tailored to hit algorithms that may or may not be written by AI.
Without dedicated entertainment reporters to balance that coverage out, homepages end up looking like this:
So, on those rare occasions we do music journalism and it’s quickly dumped and replaced by Armie Hammer’s balls, I feel it deeply. It feels personal. What happens next? Honestly, I’m afraid to find out.
A friend was listening to me lament all of this recently when his eyes lit up.
He said: “You know, The Beths wrote a song about you.”
He meant this one:
I like my friend a lot – but I didn’t find it funny.
UPDATE: NZ Herald says its homepage is “curated partially by AI” to feed readers stories they haven’t yet clicked on; it says their Coldplay review and Shihad story did “incredibly well for us” and were among their top stories on those days. It also says it didn’t have a reviewer at Travis Scott as management declined access; the reporter in the crowd was there to cover breaking news only.
This is the first in a two-part series. Later this week we’ll hear what the few remaining music journalists left in Aotearoa think about this sorry situation. (You can read that piece here.) This might be a bleak topic, but it’s one that’s close to my heart, and it’s important to keep talking about it. If you’d like to support the work I’m doing here, I’m offering discounts until Friday. Use this link to sign up and experience the benefits of a full subscription…
Wow. What a wake up on a wet Tuesday morning in the Manawatu. Thanks for the article. This is indeed dire. And factual. And bloody frightening. I’m not a journalist. Just a little sometimes writer with a social anthropological eye and a music gig lover and this has alarmed me.
Another incredible piece Chris. Clear eyed, salient view of a terrifying issue for NZ art and media.
The Canvas stuff hit me particularly hard. When my friend, and incredible musician Reuben Winter (Totems, Caroles, Milk, Roidz, + 100 other acts) died, Canvas gave me the opportunity to write a feature about him and what he meant to NZ music scene. It was a beautiful opportunity to share the music of my friend which I loved so much to a huge number of mainstream NZ readers who would not have otherwise heard it. It is very sad that those kinds of stories look very unlikely to be published again in Canvas.
But one thing that doesn't get a mention in your article, but I thought might be a small patch of bright light in these times is Radio. We have such an amazing student radio network that do an amazing job of profiling up and coming acts. Especially Bfm is a godsend that provides a platform that would otherwise leave bands playing to themselves in the garage. And Radio New Zealand also do an awesome job of profiling local acts, and doing deep dives into their work and what it means.
Just thought I would point that out! There is still hope out there and we should support it!