Lisa Hirsch over at The Iron Tongue Of Midnight posted an intriguing article on 7/4/2008 which examines a curious piece by music critic Martin Bernheimer which appeared in the 7/5/2008 edition of the Financial Times. In his article, Bernheimer blames the decline of regularly employed traditional music critics on the proliferation of bloggers. I call Bernheimer’s article curious because this discussion has been chewed over so many times, there’s simply no more flavor so it is a mystery why he decided to engage these issues, especially after the positive outlook on blogging at several of June’s NPAC sessions. Furthermore, Bernheimer is a well respected and established journalist and to read some of the unsupported accusations against bloggers makes him appear like the stereotypical cranky old man standing on his front lawn yelling at the kids to stay off his lawn. Fortunately, out of the dozens of professional music critics I know and respect, I can count on one hand, including Bernheimer, the numbers who share his views. Folks old and new to the blogosphere have come to realize the common knowledge that culture blogging doesn’t hurt traditional music criticism, it enhances it…
Forget Dress Codes On Stage, What About The Office?
Sometimes your memory plays tricks on you but sometimes it delivers a misplaced treat. I was the fortunate recipient of the latter this week when an article from NewMusicBox.com c. 2004 (which is ancient history in Internet years) popped into my head. Written by Joseph Dalton shortly after NPAC 2004, the author relates his time at the conference and how he could tell which conventioneer belonged to which group by how …