Has The NME Got Good?

xpost Lex - the difference between the John Lewis ad coverage and the NME advertorial is that the John Lewis ads became news because people liked them, they became incredibly popular, and they started spawning hit singles. Publications - including the Guardian - started covering them because people were talking about them. People didn't start talking about them because publications were covering them. They became legitimate news events. Soft news, sure, but news.

enh, unless the coverage across the board is 'people are worthless cretins and if you perpetuate the idea that these adverts are in any way net good for humanity you literally deserve to be fucking stabbed to death,' then i think there's a failure of journalistic responsibility

Well, if you want to say people are worthless cretins because they are interested in things you're not, that's your lookout. It's not a sustainable way to run a journalism business, though.

no, only Windows 10 has the powerful features that contain sustain high quality journalism today

i don't think "people like advert" is remotely newsworthy - adverts are designed to manipulate people! - and def not in the uncritical way the JL shit is covered - treating it like an important cultural event when it's. a. fucking. advert.

one was clunkily executed and the other was not but the NME advertorial and JL hype are indistinguishable at root

I think it's a sign of how desperate some people in Britain are for any kind of shared national experience. Specifically white people who want an all white shared national experience. Downton Abbey trailer? John Lewis advert? Who cares. Let these racist bigots rot in their isolationist monoculture.

I suppose you could argue that the Age UK angle makes this year's JL *slightly* more newsworthy in its own right, but there's something particularly grim about leveraging people's rational fears about old age and loneliness and using them to sell a load of shit, especially in the current political climate, even if you are giving some of the cash to charity at the end of it. And that's even the case with a cuddly mutual like John Lewis of which I essentially approve. It certainly shouldn't be covered uncritically.

Ultimately the desire to manipulate people into buying shit is what's kept non-BBC journalists in work for generations. The primary function of the NME has always been to make money for IPC by selling access to people who are into music. People don't like this stuff being laid bare (cf that Conde Nast statement the other month), but from the NME's heyday through to the advent of the internet the two sides were able to rub along well enough because there was self-evidently a market for music writing (plus the news and the gig guide and other actually useful things). Now there are apps and services that fulfil the utilitarian aspect better, and there isn't really any reason for good music writing to exist within "the market" any more. The result is you end up with crap like that Windows article propping up a magazine that there would no longer be any reason to invent if it didn't already exist. And all the time the NME were sitting around wondering how to make digital advertising pay and how much advertorial they could sell to Microsoft, someone else went and invented Songkick and completely ate up a space they could have owned.

I think it's a sign of how desperate some people in Britain are for any kind of shared national experience. Specifically white people who want an all white shared national experience. Downton Abbey trailer? John Lewis advert? Who cares. Let these racist bigots rot in their isolationist monoculture.

You know that's just absolute shit, obviously. The notion that people only like those things because they're racist is well beyond rational, and somewhere into tinfoil hat/green biro territory.

No, Lex. They're not indistinguishable, because the public want to know more about one – we know this, because we have the tools to see – which is why we cover it. You may as well say the NME thing is indistinguishable from you writing about Dawn Richard, because at heart all you are doing is taking your place in her campaign.

Everything that is not hard news, something someone doesn't want you to know, is advertising at some level. Everytime you fanboy for an R&B singer in print, you're advertising. My gripe about the NME one was how fucking shit it is.

also windows paid NME for the advertorial and presumably have final say in what it contains, John Lewis don't pay the titles that cover their ad for covering their ad and have no say in how they will cover it. These seem not-inconsequential differences between the two cases.

It's a leap to say that anyone innarested in the John Lewis advert and suchlike is racist, but the first part of snoball's sentence is bang on. Lol @ the dreadful paucity of imagination going into this imagined community these days.

Adverts as a shared national experience have been around a lot longer than the social media shitfest that goes along with them these days. The next big Levis ad and the 60s song it was inevitably going to propel into the top ten was a thing in the 80s. I remember new Coke adverts being a big deal too.

(now pining for those halcyon days when I didn't know or care how many people watched ballroom fucking dancing competitions on a Saturday night)

And around the same time there was Nescafé with the future Giles.

Still, I'm wondering if demand for the kind of what-happened-on-the-telly-last-night entertainment news has actually ballooned since the internet, which is weird now you can basically watch it whenever you want.

Has anyone actually got and read one of the new NME's yet? Outside of London like

well, yeah

you're barely outside tbf!

i read one
it had loads of james bond stuff in it
it was awful, but a few bits less awful than I expected

They're around in Glasgow. Fopp and elsewhere. It's just another free thingy isn't it? I don't know if I would connect the NME logo on these things to the paper I read in late 80s/90s any more than I thought that paper was the same as the 50s version.

HMV have copies in Dundee. I think I read the first free issue, maybe two, but haven't bothered since - I'd stopped buying it on any regular basis years ago anyway. Is it terrible thay I can't be bothered carrying a copy around town if I pick one up? At least the Skinny has a little more to read.

Also I find the NME website unreadable on my phone so that's not really a replacement.

They have them in tesco. In my local tesco anyway.

New free NME seems very closely modelled on ShortList in terms of design, content, even the paper used

How is it on the cheeks?

https://pmchollywoodlife.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/justin-bieber-nme-magazine-lead-1.jpg

oi, leave me out of it

can't work out whether piscesx bumped that in a +ve or -ve way. opinions to go with your c/p images please!

Also, the Hollywoodlife.com link, is that on the actual magazine?

opinions to go with your c/p images please

sometimes silence is more dignified

That Bieber cover is New Labour level triangulation. "It's okay older readers, he's got a knife through his head really!"

It's not even their fucking interview.

that Hollywood Life bit isn't on the cover, couldn't fnd a JPG of the regular one.

i think it's pretty good they've got JB on because NME likers on Facebook have been moaning non stop about *every* cover they've had since the relaunch (RiRi, Kill Your Friends etc) so they musta thought F it and just gone the whole hog. i still don't think he's done anything as good as Boyfriend mind.

Nah they'll have had a Bieber cover in mind since the relaunch, especially given we're now well into the worldwide Campaign for Bieber Rehabilitation.

that Hollywood Life bit isn't on the cover

OK, so it's not some sort of weird buy-in interview from said website which requires a citation/publicisation.

That's something, anyway.

https://www.facebook.com/nmemagazine/posts/10154344284529167

RIP NME.

It's a long, painful death until it joins Sounds, Melody Maker and Word in music mag heaven from this point on.

Trying to read the awful 10-best blog posts everyone's complaining about, and they seem to have been taken down. Microsoft didn't get value for $, obviously.

"It's a long, painful death until it joins Sounds, Melody Maker and Word in music mag heaven from this point on".

Don't forget Select!

Select is in music mag hell for creating Britpop

The pre-Oasis polyester version of Britpop though: Suede, Pulp, Auteurs, St Etienne, Denim. Eccentric rather than beery. Stuart Maconie's essay in that issue is worth rereading.

They still covered all things Britpop though. It was *the* britpop bible

I dunno, I quite enjoyed Select magazine at the time - particularly when they would do things like go through a bands discography song-by-song, like they did with Blur and Radiohead.

Uh, well they covered the biggest bands of the time. They also covered lots of dance music and declared (iirc) Orbital the highlight of Glastonbury, not Blur, Oasis or Pulp.

aww RIP Select, thank you for introducing me to such Britpop legends as Vapour Space and the Wipers. Possibly both in the very same Britpop issue.

also Vox, which I concede maybe nobody else remembers fondly, but also turned me on to a bunch of stuff

although, in those days, what mag didn't? the joy of not knowing everything yet (ha)

For all Select's faults, the joy of reading a new issue with an afternoon pint and fag will never in my life be surpassed.

I enjoyed Vox too. If I recall, the first time I ever heard Lamb was on a cover-mounted CD with Vox.

There's a website with scans of old issues of Select, although it's not complete.

Vox where U2 & Inxs covers were their equivalent of Beatles & Stones

I used to enjoy Q, years and years ago, when they'd do things like make a journo sit in a pub for 3 days and record every song played on the jukebox and go slowly mad to endless replays of 'Africa' and 'November Rain'