RIP: A eulogy for Stuff's seemingly dead Music section.

Everything I wrote between 2004-2011 appears to have disappeared into the digital ether. What happened? (Sniff.)

The building was earthquake-prone, the café sold stale scones, and the elevator was airless.

Several flights up a dimly-lit building on Wellington’s Boulcott Street, I was led past the Dominion Post’s massive sports team where the voice of veteran reporter Jim Kayes boomed louder than all the others.

In a dark corner where just a handful of people quietly worked, I was given a desk and a chair. My training at Stuff.co.nz was about to begin.

“Let’s update the Entertainment section,” said one of the site’s eight staff members as she booted up the content management system. “It hasn’t had a new story for two weeks.”

It was 2004. Newspapers were dominant, smartphones didn’t exist, Peter Jackson had just finished his first Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Lost was about to air its first season. Twitter was years away from sending its first tweet.

The website I worked for was still in its infancy with a logo that looked like a kindergarten kid put it together with crayons.

The site was a half-hearted attempt at this newfangled thing called ‘the internet’. “There was a lot of internal embarrassment about the name ‘Stuff’ – nobody wanted to say they were associated with ‘Stuff,’” owner Sinead Boucher says in this 2020 retrospective.

It’s true. When I joined the site, no one bothered our small team with demands. We’d come up with wild ideas and just go do them. There was no one to stop us. For the site’s very first video, we purchased an expensive camera, filmed a gross Creme Ege-eating challenge, and never used it again.

I roamed the red carpet for King Kong’s Wellington premiere clutching a microphone, pretending I knew what I was doing as I nervously interviewed Andy Serkis and Naomi Watts. I filed live updates from the Big Day Out via text using a Blackberry that were published verbatim, full of terrible typos.

Back then, Stuff had an Entertainment section, but it was unloved, underdone and underused. No one working there wanted to update it. But my eyes lit up when I saw that section. I wanted to run it. I wanted to make that thing hum. It was everything I’d ever dreamed about.

So, I took charge of it. I made it my pet project. Slowly, day by day, week by week, month by month, I grew it, setting up thousands of stories through that sluggish CMS, seeing what worked and what didn’t, tracking trends and numbers, building up an audience that kept coming back for more.

No matter how busy I was on other sections, no matter what breaking news there was, I made sure Stuff’s Entertainment section had new stories to read every day.

My theory was the same as it is now: If I want to read this, surely others will want to read it too?

I wrote reviews, trying and eventually failing to singlehandedly cover every act playing in Auckland’s newest concert venue, Vector (now Spark) Arena. I scored exclusive interviews, getting Courtney Love to teach me how to dock sheep testicles, and asking Will.I.Am to sing unreleased Michael Jackson songs down the phone.

Like a madman, I interviewed every single Survivor contestant for at least five seasons.

It was fun. I was busy. But it worked. Everyone seemed to love Stuff’s Entertainment section. The stories I put out received some of the site’s biggest numbers. Those Big Day Out blogs would be read by more people than actually went to the festival. Those Survivor stories went off.

The numbers just kept going up and up. Then, around 2008, I received a contract that made my dreams really come true. That piece of paper gave me a new title: “Entertainment Editor.” It was official. I’d made it. That section was mine.

Those seven years were formative. Stuff taught me how to create content that clicks, how to read audience numbers, how to serve up stories that could be engaging and informative, and how to write good headlines without turning to clickbait.

In meetings, I came up with a phrase to help express how important that section was to Stuff: “Our audience comes for the news – but they stick around for the entertainment.”

I loved the shit out of that place. It allowed my dreams to come true.

Now, much of what I did there appears to have gone.

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In a site revamp and refresh that took place over the past week, many of Stuff’s Entertainment sub-sections appear to have been quietly killed off, including pages dedicated to Music, TV, Film and Games.

The entire Entertainment section disappeared entirely for at least a few days, rebranded with the catch-all name ‘Culture’’ that lumped lifestyle and entertainment stories together in one strange mix.

Late last night, that decision appeared to have been reversed, and the site’s Entertainment section returned. I really did breathe a sigh of relief.

Finding it, though, isn’t easy. You need to click on the drop-down menu, click on the ‘Living’ section, then scroll past Travel, Homed, Wellbeing, Style, and Food & Drink.

Entertainment is now a sub-section itself, which shows you how much of a priority it is these days, I guess.

At least for now, separate sub-sections for Music, TV, Film, and Games, things that have been there since Stuff’s inception in 2000, appear to be gone.

You know what else is gone? All those stories I wrote over the seven years I was there.

All those Big Day Out blogs are gone.

All those concert reviews have vanished.

When I try and access stories from those sections, I get spinning wheels of death for several minutes before this bleak message pops up.

I wanted to insert links into this piece for some of the interviews and reviews I did over the years.

But they’re just not there.

It appears to have all been wiped.

Sigh.

The thing we all felt in that tiny Stuff newsroom back in 2004 was the promise of infinity. Internet news offered no limits, few boundaries. If you wanted to cover a story 16 different ways, you could. If you wanted to film an interview subject, you could. If you wanted to share audio of your interview, you could do that too.

Anyone with an idea could go make it happen. There was no restriction on space, word count, or format, as there is with a newspaper.

Now, we’re seeing the downsides of that promise. Advertising is flatlining, reporters are being restructured, newsrooms are shrinking, and the number of active journalists in New Zealand is lower than it has ever been.

Meanwhile, gigantic social media platforms run by apocalyptic algorithms spread hate and misinformation like wildfire while raking in advertising dollars that used to power the kind of news sites I worked at for 20 years.

As I was working on this piece, Pitchfork staff were restructured en masse with the site set to move under the GQ brand. Along with last year’s Bandcamp layoffs, things don’t just look bleak for entertainment and music reporting, they feel existential.

Stuff’s revamp appears to have simplified the site to make it easier for editors to manage. Getting rid of your Music section makes total sense considering everything that happened last year. If you don’t have a Music section, no one can complain you’re not covering music properly.

But it does make me sad.

It does feel personal.

All those years.

All that work.

All those stories.

All those interviews.

All those concert reviews, filed after midnight, smashing out copy on my own in a dark office.

I really hope I’m wrong, but they seem to be gone.

I was under the impression that it was time well spent, that it meant something, that I was contributing to something bigger than me.

Kanye’s 2009 on-stage meltdown in Aotearoa? Metallica’s beer-drenched in-the-round show? Coldplay heading down the back of Vector (now Spark) Arena with tiny guitars and a miniature drum kit? Massive Attack addressing their infamous infighting, here, on a stage? Dozens and dozens of interviews with local artists?

That’s a lot of history, our history, right there.

If anyone wants to know what any of these gigs were like, to check in what we were all doing over those years, to find out what we were listening to, good luck to you.

Thanks to one very purple makeover, this is what may greet you when you click on Stuff’s Music section right now.

Like much of online life these days, it seems to have melted into a meaningless void.

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