1. Start with a lede that could just as easily be repurposed for another regular column in your publication—in this case, the "romance among the whiteys" Styles staple known as the "Modern Love" column.

During his freshman year at Point Park University in Pittsburgh a couple years ago, James Acklin, now 20, felt lost among the social cliques on his new campus until he got to talking with a student who was in some of his classes. She seemed unusual, and it wasn't just her look: thick-framed eyeglasses, bangs and vintage dresses. Then, one rainy day in February, the two skipped class and went to her apartment. As soon as she opened her door his instincts were confirmed: she had a turntable. So did he. They both spoke the language of vinyl.

Their bond was sealed as soon as she placed the stylus on an LP by the band Broken Social Scene, he said in an e-mail message.

2. Tie the "vinyl resurgence" trend to another yuppie hobby that's gone from "retro cuteness" to "current, better-for-you hotness." Like growing your own veggies!

"It's almost a back-to-nature approach," Mr. Gagnon said. "It's the difference between growing your own vegetables and purchasing them frozen in the supermarket."

3. Numbers, numbers, numbers! Especially out-of-context ones that merely gloss over larger issues like dwindling shelf space for albums, the increasing price of producing vinyl, etc.

The industry had shipments of 3.4 million LPs and EPs in 1998 and just over 900,000 in 2006, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.

But shipments jumped about 37 percent in 2007, to nearly 1.3 million records. Three years ago Warner Bros. Records returned to the format when it opened becausesoundmatters.com, an online vinyl store stocked with reissues and new releases. At first, any vinyl release that sold 3,000 copies was considered a success, said Tom Biery, who oversees vinyl sales for the company. By comparison, the 2007 Wilco album, "Sky Blue Sky," surpassed 14,000 copies.

Mass-market retailers like Virgin Megastore and smaller record stores like Mondo Kim's in Manhattan are devoting more floor space to the antiquarian 12-inch disc of late. Newbury Comics, a chain of 29 music and merchandise stores in New England, has sold 400 turntables since it started selling them in June, Duncan Browne, a company executive, said.

4. Make sure to note that the vinyl resurgence has the potential to be something on which one can plunk down an absurd chunk of change.

Deluxe editions are trophies of sorts for passionate fans, Mr. Biery said. In September, for example, Warner Bros. Records will release a new Metallica album, "Death Magnetic," in a five-record box version — each of 10 songs will get its own side — for about $115.

5. And by spending all that money, your reader can stand out in a crowd! If she doesn't mind toting around a DJ bag all the time, that is.

In an era when "everybody's music collection is the same" thanks to file swapping, collecting expensive, unwieldy LPs is a conspicuous way for the superfans to advertise their cognoscenti status, he said.

"It's a customer who wants to have vinyl in their home the same way they want books in their home," Mr. Wishnow said. For such a customer, he added, the message is, " 'When I can have all the music in the world in the palm of my hand, what does it say about me that I spend $15 to $20 for this format that is a pain to store and move and is easily damaged?' "

6. Close out the piece by soothing the reader, telling her that embracing this trend will not only expand her consumeristic horizons, it'll make her smart.

"I have a ton of music on iTunes," Mr. Karoly said, "but with that music I get A.D.D. really quick. With my LPs, it's like reading a book as opposed to clicking through articles on Yahoo."

"When you put on a record," he added, "it's an event."

Another Spin For Vinyl [NYT]

1. Kid Rock - "All Summer Long"
2. Rihanna - "Disturbia"
3. Usher - "Love in This Club"
4. Estelle - "American Boy"
5. T.I. - "No Matter What"
6. Leona Lewis - "Bleeding Love"
7. Lil Wayne - "A Milli"
8. Pussycat Dolls - "When I Grow Up"
9. Coldplay - "Viva La Vida"
10. Katy Perry - "I Kissed a Girl"

"A Milli" and "I Kissed A Girl," sure. But "Love In This Club"—oh, you mean the song that hit No. 1 back in March? "Bleeding Love"—which also peaked in May? "When I Grow Up"—which sucks? I'm not even going to get into the part where the writer claims that "No Matter What" is underperforming because T.I. is still under house arrest and unable to do promo, since he might have been as confused by the midmorning scheduling of TRL—on which the MC appeared earlier this month—as I was at first. (And I don't really expect a Time writer to have 106 & Park on their TiVo season-pass list.)

The Songs Of Summer 2008 [Time; HT Rap-Up]

While it is fairly common practice for artists to offer promotional pre-release web streaming of new music, it is a unique arrangement to stream an album on newspaper and TV websites. For Gannett, this is an opportunity to deliver new music from a respected artist familiar to its core news audience. Top Gannett markets were chosen for the web streams, some because of the size of the market, others because of a large Brian Wilson fan base.

"Streaming a full album is a first for Gannett, so we are thrilled to be working with Capitol Records and a musician of Brian Wilson's stature to deliver music in a new way to our online audiences. This positions us well to expand our digital platforms while demonstrating the power of Gannett to deliver quality content across a network of websites," said Jim Lenahan, strategic development manager for Gannett's U.S. Community Publishing division.

The words "core news audience" in that quoted bit are of particular interest for reasons beyond icky advertorial ones. See, Gannett's flagship, USA Today, has apparently been working on changing its online music strategy over the past few months. What this has meant up to this point is that Ken Barnes' once-enjoyable Listen Up blog has basically been gutted of all its geekiness and turned into a repository for reviews that run in the paper and roundups of semi-moldy music news by one Korina Lopez, who's taken it upon herself to announce, special correspondent-style, that yes, it's actually her doing the recapping. When you look at these changes in the context of the Wilson deal, one has to wonder if "exclusive" Web content bits like this the future of music coverage for USAT (and whatever Gannett papers still have music content)? And if so, how long before the higher-ups decide that any music-related content should dispense with the pesky words altogether in favor of "quality content" that's acquired through corporate agreements?

Brian Wilson And Capitol/EMI Partner With Gannett For First Of Its Kind Album Premiere [Yahoo! Finance via Digital Music News]

When the borrowings from my Slate essay end, four paragraphs from the bottom of the article, Williams makes a jarring genre shift from think-piece to celebrity profile, complete with boilerplate quotes from the singer himself. Did the Bulletin really interview Jimmy Buffett? I Googled a phrase from Williams' piece— "leaves the Parrotheads with this head scratcher"—and the search returned two results: "Spring Fling" and a USA Today piece from July 8, 2004, "Buffett takes country out for a boat ride," written by Brian Mansfield.



It was then that I realized, with a pang of regret, that Mark Williams is not my biggest fan—a reader so enraptured by Rosen's prose stylings that he was driven to steal them. "Spring Fling" has at least three sources: my Slate essay, Mansfield's USA Today piece, and a Minneapolis Star-Tribune Miranda Lambert profile. And this is just the beginning of Williams' collage-art music journalism.

Further digging found endless examples of the Texas paper's "creative rewriting," particularly on the political end of things. Even in my worst moments of unconsciously pilfering my colleagues' phrases I've never rewritten anything quite so baldly as Williams and his editor, Mike Ladyman, seem to be doing on a regular basis. It's enough to make any writer want to check and see if their own phrases might have made it into the Bulletin under someone else's name.

Dude, you stole my article [Slate]

1. Call Pitchfork a music blog. Never mind that it's been around, as you point out in your article, since 1995—two years before the term "weblog" was invented, and four before Peter Merholz coined the shorter version; never mind that the only aspects of the site that vaguely resembles a music blog are the Forkcast and the News section, neither of which have the coronation power of a "Best New Music" from its reviewers. Who aren't bloggers (well, at least not for Pitchfork, anyway).

2. Use as your new media "expert" a futurist whose recent forays into the digital-music world ended in failure. Remember the guy who coined the term BlogJ? Yeah, his "blogs will be the next record labels" spiel is quoted here, although left out of the piece is the fact that his recent experiment in Web 2.0 widgetry went tits-up last week.

3. Fill your story with data-free anecdotes, because they make lovely window dressing. Music blogs apparently have "young readers." How is Sandoval aware of this? We don't know, because there aren't any actual numbers in the story at all aside from the number of unique readers Pitchfork gets a month (1.5 million) and the number of words Rolling Stone's Nathan Brackett thinks that the average Man Man blurb has (50).

4. On that note, never, ever press for details. Would you be interested to know that eMusic's Yancey Strickler (who, it should be known, is a friend), who's given space to pontificate on music blogging, writes a music blog for his employer, which could make for some interesting discussion of blogging-for-dollars in a story that mentions corporate influence? Want to know how BrooklynVegan "developed a reputation for being the must-read blog for concert information"? Like to know what, exactly, was inaccurate in the reporting about Stereogum's sale, as Scott Lapatine claims? Too bad, because Sandoval isn't interested in making those details known. (At least not yet! Maybe there's a sequel to this piece coming—Music Blogs II: Return To WordPress!)

5. Get an old-media type to comment on how the blog kids should get off his fact-checked lawn—and then fail to fact-check his comments. "The blogs do the really quick 50-word update on what a band's doing," Brackett tells Sandoval. "They'll write about (singer) Lilly [sic!!!] Allen releasing a new EP or (the band) Man Man is preparing an album. The way Rolling Stone competes is we pick up the phone and bring original reporting. We take advantage of our access. Most blogs don't have the staffs to pick up the phone." Well, most blogs also aren't subsidiaries of huge magazines that can be sources for repurposed content. And really, does recapping a reality TV show count as "original reporting" these days? I guess it's a good thing that I got cable in my office after all.

Music blogs: The new wall of sound [CNet]

Maxim has since apologized for the premature review, but Nas doesn't care. "I'd prefer [a review from] Playboy," the rapper said. "That kind of stuff doesn't reach my radar or effect anybody around me. I don't know what a music rating from Maxim is . . . I don't know what it even means really."

So wait, he's not worried about a 75-ish word blurb-icle in a glossy spank rag deterring its flighty readership from picking up an album from an artist with a compact but committed fanbase, an album that will likely be reviewed in somewhat greater depth closer to its actual release date by publications with an actual connection to that artist's culture and at least the appearance of an interest in music that goes beyond back-of-book space-filler? But if that half-filled circle had been fully filled it might have easily sent two or three more people to iTunes to buy an unfinished album!

JumpingThe Gun [NY Post]

Of course, we always prefer to hearing music, but sometimes there are big albums that we don't want to ignore that aren't available to hear, which is what happened with the Crowes. It's either an educated guess preview or no coverage at all, so in this case we chose the former.

Sigh. Of course, the Crowes are not happy about this little breach of record-reviewing ethics, and it's probably my cynicism about music, writing, and music writing—stripped-down wordcounts, the increasingly pain-in-the-assish process of procuring promos, and the ever-looming question "do these reviews even matter?"—that made me wonder if the only reason Maxim got caught in this case is that other general-interest publications' "not necessarily reviews of music" are generally chirpy in tone, and therefore not subject to irritated bands' and labels' press-release-writing wrath. If the review had been four or five filled-in circles, would the objections be so loud? I'm going to guess that they wouldn't.

Honestly, what troubles me more than anything is that the e-mail reprinted above is from someone who has the word "editor" in his/her job title. Think about that.

MAXIM MAGAZINE REVIEWS ALBUM WITHOUT HEARING IT [blackcrowes.com]
[Photo: AP]

^* How did we have two posts about Maxim in a day? Jeez.

When it comes to this year's crop of Grammy Awards newbies, it looks like there may just be some truth to the playground taunt "Girls Rule, Boys Drool."

I can't even get through the rest of the piece because I'm terrified that Sclafani will whip out a "milk milk lemonade" joke. Anyone want to let me know if it's safe for reading?

Invasion of the Grammy girls [MSNBC]

4. Describing its sound as "Upper West Side Soweto"... OK, OK, I know that this is old. But any readers out there who thought that the above construction was courtesy of some hacky rock critic on a Robitussin bender, take note: They describe themselves this way. At least let Robert Christgau do the christening for you, dudes!

3. Mr. Koenig, who recently quit his day job as an English teacher, went on to explain that the place was formerly known as the Mill Luncheonette. "That's why they call it the Mill Korean," Mr. Batmanglij said. Such intellectual showmanship shouldn't be surprising to anyone familiar with Vampire Weekend — and is anyone not these days? Sigh. Sigh. But wait, there's more:

2. Mr. Koenig: "Did you know that New Jersey is the capital of the flavor industry?" Translation: Did you know that I finally finished Fast Food Nation this week?

1. Hardly keeping vampire hours, Mr. Koenig, the only member who still lives uptown, bade farewell to his Brooklyn-bound mates around 10 p.m. But not before reminding them of their plans for the following day: a field trip to Lacoste. But don't get too used to seeing them in your store, Lacosties—once those Best New Music bucks start rolling in, they're going to be all-Polo, all the time!

Know-It-Alls on a Riff [NYT]
Vampire Weekend - A-Punk [YouTube]

The report includes: a goofy, vaguely sarcastic delivery of the word emotional ("emotional"); a helpful definition of the emo genre from some pasty suburban milquetoasts; some home video of a schoolyard emo beatdown (a result of "the emo backlash"); a not-so-veiled assertion by the reporter that emo is "just too wimpy"; an acoustic jam session in a tastefully decorated recreation nook; and, of course, emo-kid YouTube videos. The producers also tragically lump Blink 182 and Green Day in with the genre, apparently oblivious to the hardly subtle difference between scatologically inclined pop punk bands and the quavering outburst that is Dashboard Confessional. But then, local news has never been famous for nuance.

Featured local band Addison Park has a lineup of stereotypes: there's the guy with a beanie cap, the dude in a plaid shirt, the hoodie-wearing keyboardist, and the sensitive lead singer in tight sweater. And their music is a few clicks south of mediocre to boot. If anything, the report is a terrifying warning against the dangers of the Chicago suburbs, a place where "emo music thrives."

Emo Music Thrives In Chicago [myfoxchicago.com, via AbsolutePunk.net]

In some cases the crowds and revenues have rivaled those of the 1980s. Ratt and Poison just wrapped up a long, large-venue summer tour where they played regularly before 8,000 to10,000 fans. Ratt lead singer Pearcy says he noticed an emerging younger fan base of teenagers and twenty-somethings who were born years after Ratt multi-platinum "Out of the Cellar" album released in 1984. "It has been a gradual build up again. It's rock and roll — colorful, dangerous, exciting," Pearcy said.

Hey, thousands of fans, that's good, right? But those numbers often resulted in half-empty venues, even for tours that had the fortune to be big-upped endlessly on VH1. That's not to say that there isn't a story about the number of hard-rock bands who hit the road this summer—look, it's Exhibit A!—but this one seems like it was tailor-made for one purpose: Getting Osborn some face time with his favorite bands. Even if he can't spell their lead singers' first names.

They Came from the Eighties [Time]
[Photo: AP]

Newspapers, as you may have heard, are in deep doo-doo. While the Times still is a profitable business, our revenue was down 10% in the second quarter while our cash flow was down, as our publisher put it the other day, a "whopping 27%, making it one of the worst quarters ever experienced." Times are so hard at the Times that the publisher has proposed putting ads on the front page to generate new revenue.

So far we've made little headway developing imaginative strategies to bring back lost readers — or compete for younger readers who get their information from the Internet. The record business has been just as slow to provide fans online with new, convenient ways to hear music — the only visionary idea, Steve Jobs' iTunes store, came from outside the business. Unless you are a mainstream pop artist, it's hard to see how the old-fashioned record company model benefits your career anymore. If you're a respected older performer — known in industry parlance as a heritage artist — your biggest challenge is finding a way to get your music heard.

Hmm, sounds promising so far! And the stats cited contain nothing we haven't heard before.

Here's how it might work. The Times would start a free-music series, offering music (either on a CD or via downloads) from respected artists willing to think outside the box — meaning anyone from Elvis Costello, Beck and Ryan Addams to Ry Cooder, Steve Earle and Lucinda Williams. Instead of paying the artist a fat fee, we'd recruit advertising sponsors who'd be delighted to be associated with classy artists and the imprint of the Times.

If you haven't noticed, music has a powerful mojo for advertisers. TV commercials have used pop songs to sell product for years. Lexus currently has a series of TV ads featuring Costello and John Legend seated in a Lexus, simply talking about their favorite music (Elvis sings the praises of Beethoven). But what they're really selling is coolness by association. The same association could apply to us via a giveaway series. It would encourage readers to see the paper in a new light, as not just a news-gathering organization but a cultural engine. If we surrounded the music with news, reviews and features from our staff, it could also expose new visitors to our formidable music critics and reporters.

Could this really work? For a reality check, I called Jim Guerinot, an industry free-thinker who manages Nine Inch Nails, Gwen Stefani and Social Distortion. "Are you kidding — that's a great idea," he says. "There are tons of these Hall-of-Fame quality heritage artists who don't sell records anymore. It would be a real coup for them to reach their target demo through the newspaper and have the cachet of being an artist of the week or month."

Having the Times showcase new music would do more than attract advertising — it would help transform the image of the paper. "It could redefine the paper by making it a destination site for music fans," says Guerinot. "On the net, the big challenge is always about providing a filter for people. It would make the Times, with its critical voice, into a gatekeeper. People are looking for someone to show them the way — why shouldn't it be the L.A. Times?"

Okay, more good points! Nice to see, also, that Nine Inch Nails' manager would be on board—after all, his client isn't too big of a fan of the current system. (And he actually embraces the idea of a "critical voice"! Be still my heart.)

There's more outlining of the plan—why it might attract advertising, or new readers—in the rest of the column, as well as some of the possible drawbacks: Retail balking, etc. Here's the column's closing paragraph:

Giving music away doesn't mean it has lost its value, just that its value is no longer moored to the price of a CD. Like it or not, the CD is dying, as is the culture of newsprint. People want their music — and their news — in new ways. It's time we embraced change instead of always worrying if some brash new idea — like giving away music — would tarnish our sober minded image. When businesses are faced with radical change, they are usually forced to ask — is it a threat or an opportunity? Guess which choice is the right annswer.

But for Tribune, the Times' parent company, the "right answer" may not be so obvious—after all, the editorial higher-ups are the same folks who unleashed the lobotomized Red Eye, a delightful paper in Chicago that brings together the archaicness of newsprint with the brain-deadedness of omg.yahoo.com. Why entice your readers in a new way when you can condescend to them with whittled-to-the-bone wire copy?

Goldstein's killed column [LA Observed]
Patrick Goldstein: The Big Picture [LA Times]

"OK! Magazine spent a heartbreaking day with Britney Spears and witnessed first-hand an emotional cry for help that will leave you shocked and sad. This week, on newsstands Friday, the truth will be told."

You'd think if the truth needed to be told, OK! would have spoken up sooner, but we guess there are still a couple of advertiser commitments that need to be hammered out. Or maybe they're timing the release of the issue to coincide with Britney's latest video, which should be ready sometime soon ... right?

OK! Goes for It!! [TMZ]

50 Cent Learns Value Of A Dollar [NY Daily News]