Is SPIN really circling the drain?

i think there may have been a couple of ppl that did a few singles columns between leland and aaron but yeah it was basically leland's column (hall of fame pop music writing obv) and then aaron's. at this point i think it's fair to say whatever semblance of spin magazine was left is gone. the outrage and hysteria over jojodancer was something else, a shame ilx wasn't around then. googling for it just now it's crazy just how much mainstream press this thing got - http://joeclark.org/dossiers/rocklist/. i mean the voice had TWO pieces on it one week.

there was a little retrospective article on it recently: http://www.themorningnews.org/article/same-as-it-ever-was

"recently": Oct 20, 2009

sorry sorry sorry

fine, i SAW it recently

haha wow I had no idea about JoJoDancer

“If you don’t get excited by music…it’s kind of your last refuge. Like, what else is going to excite you? I find people who get bored with music, and they’re like, I love 30 Rock! TV is so awesome now!

“And I say, ‘Yeah, I like TV, too. But TV didn’t change my life like music did.’”

charles aaron otm

i mean the voice had TWO pieces on it one week.

the voice is also the place that ran articles on what happened at EMP

god the voice had THREE pieces on it one week rather. wow. kinda funny that xhuxk and kogan have spent their entire careers positioning themselves against some 'rock critic' strawman and never daring to actually name names or even specific ideas they're challoping about and then this thing (which reads way different now than it did in 1999 - thing somehow seems 'an artifact of a bygone age' as klosterman calls it and the ghost of internet future)(i mean if someone did that for 2013 it would just be another yawn on the pile, i'm not sure ppl would even think that an pro like aaron had written it just cuz it would seem so part of that wannabe/neverwas lineage of pitchfork reviews reviews and chris ott) actually bothers to name names and they catch the vapors over it. also don't know what the fuck aaron was thinking, he had to know he'd be outed, the joe klein thing had just happened a couple of years before and i think the primary colors movie was actually in theaters when this went down.

i mean, also, like Gen X critics were so backbitey and snipey — beyond Jojo Dancer there was Chunklet and Gerard Cosloy's zine, etc etc

millenials are so different, because like whenever ott posts a video they form like 285 kent voltron to defend the fort against insults, and everyone does SUCH A GOOD JOB and you HAVE TO READ THIS EXCELLENT THING THAT THEY WROTE &c &c

"I find people who get bored with music, and they’re like, I love 30 Rock! TV is so awesome now!"

new board description

The part in the RCL where, if we assume for now that it's Aaron, that he disses himself for writing about Limp Bizkit sticks out cause it's so transparently lightweight (so you wrote about a shitty band, who hasn't) that it feels like he's just trying to cover his own tracks by putting himself on the list.

omg, ballount post just collapsed and condensed years of reading rockcrit and then ilx into a black hole.

haha. yeah chunklet had the asshole list and stuff, i forgot about that. that reminds of all the 'holy shit omg' responses the kendrick verse got where he basically says 'i respect my peers but i strive to be better than them' and all the children were like 'omg DEVASTATION' and i was like if someone released a 'no vaseline' now would everybody under 25's head literally explode???

millenials are so different, because like whenever ott posts a video they form like 285 kent voltron to defend the fort against insults, and everyone does SUCH A GOOD JOB and you HAVE TO READ THIS EXCELLENT THING THAT THEY WROTE &c &c

professional reputation (in the profession), responses to publication, and publication itself all (potentially) put on the same plane

well, i think pitchfork might have a lot to do with that attitude, since their writers are p anonymous, and present the brand as a whole. Lots of millenials really want to be part of that team because they see it as the best/only game in town. Even outlier cranks like GvsB or Perpetua have played ball with them from time to time

It's a way different era than when DeRo was raging about Rolling Stone and could still land on his feet

Like I'm just spitballin but think the Gen X attitude was "I want to be a critic and let my voice be heard" and the Gen Y attitude is "I want to make bands"

are their writers pretty anonymous or do you just not pay attention to who is who.

also i sorta think nobody is landing on their feet, really.

"I find people who get bored with music, and they’re like, I love 30 Rock! TV is so awesome now!"

LOL and otm.

I saw a rerun of 30 Rock, early episode, and man alive it's so heavy on deep pop culture/current events references it's already starting to get borderline incomprehensible, in 20 it be like it was written in Latin

One of those Voice pieces convincingly compares Aaron and Dancer texts, same way the Anonymous/Klein case got cracked. Previously lyin' liar Klein then confessed; Aaron didn't quite, but something to the effect that prying eyes were killing the dream (though the original piece always seemed a little green around the gills to me, intermittently sick with envy and other frustration re the whole mugs' game of rock journo).
Balls is otm about the Dancer piece being as much of a jolt then as it would be a yawn now. But the GOOD JOB and its opp plausibly incl. a signif % of paid.
Some Pitchfork writers are very un-anonymous: yay Tim Finney for inst.
Golden Age of TV usually comes down to the same 10-12 shows.

Oh, and after Aaron didn't quite confess/not confess, the Dancer piece did show up in the SPIN archive.

I saw a rerun of 30 Rock, early episode, and man alive it's so heavy on deep pop culture/current events references it's already starting to get borderline incomprehensible, in 20 it be like it was written in Latin

the last season was full of jokes that weren't funny if you weren't american and didn't have access to a lot of shitty american tv.

Yeah I'd imagine

a SNL-style world

then again absolutely no one will be watching that in 20 years, possibly bcz we will be in Thunderdome or Waterworld

I know Whiney's just trolling here, but the idea that Buzzfeed's music section is being run by an "outlier crank" is pretty amusing. Katy Perry listicles really need that outlier touch to gain any kind of traction.

He's p cranky on twitter and on his blog

Not trying to be mean or snarky, but what is (was?) Videogum? Was it just a site that aggregated funny videos? Was it an official offshoot of Stereogum?

Pretty much.

Was it sort of the red-headed stepchild of SPIN media? I read Spin and Stereogum regularly, and honestly don't recall having heard of it until the announcement today

Videogum was the best site on the web and then Gabe quit and it was over

yeah videogum was gabe and then he left (well became disinvested first) and it kinda withered and died

videogum with gabe at its peak was the funniest web site on the internet and i think he (and silvestri etc) have had a big influence on the sense of humor and style of blogging

ok this demands further explanation. but hey, spin says it wants to put further resources into idolator! so, uh...

ahhhh, gotcha. I couldn't figure out why people were eulogizing what seemed like the millionth site to piggyback on already-viral content

ok this demands further explanation. but hey, spin says it wants to put further resources into idolator! so, uh...

― eric banana (s.clover), Monday, February 3, 2014 7:18 PM (57 minutes ago) Bookmark

the company is bleeding money (if it even has any left) and i'm sure videogum post-gabe wasn't returning anywhere near the money buzzmedia was putting into it.

had no idea videogum was good

no j0rdan s. hyperbole thread gabe's "worst movie of all time" posts is some of the best/funniest writing in the history of blogging

http://www.videogum.com/category/the-hunt-for-the-worst-movie-of-all-time

omg, ballount post just collapsed and condensed years of reading rockcrit and then ilx into a black hole.

epic on many levels.

People aged 30+ (or older?, wtf) can't help but to view SPIN through a nostalgia lens.

videogum was funny the few times i looked at it but it was definitely like "this ain't bad, shame it's called 'videogum'"

http://nypost.com/2014/02/03/spin-media-being-spun-out-to-creditors/

I remember seeing videogum every so often in my rss feeds and being very impressed how it never watered down its voice. (its voice being a slightly more high-key version of the standard blog voice, but even that is harder than one might think to pull off on a consistent basis.)

I noticed I still haven't gotten my Daily SPIN email today....

Are Whiney and Harvilla still there?
from that Post link:
Short consumer-engagement time on many of the 40 sites in the Spin network was always a problem, suggesting viewers were popping into many of the sites briefly, spending less than 90 seconds before exiting.

The network includes sites such as Celebuzz, The Superficial, Buzznet and Go Fug Yourself. The company had two major downsizings of staff in 2013, and as the editorial staffs were slashed, traffic began to erode as well. By November, it had fallen to around 26 million unique visitors on all platforms, down from 34 million in March.

Strang said the company currently has about 165 employees. He said the sale of the assets to the new firm did not involve any new layoffs, but added, “We’re constantly trying to be at the right size.”

Wow there are (were?) some dreadful websites operating under that umbrella

Go Fug Yourself?

Just visited that. Credit them for committing themselves to their atrocious branding: They work some variation of "fug" into nearly every headline

Obv. fans of The Naked and The Dead and The Fugs; yay.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjT_sYUlt70

and grant morrison's seaguy!

http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/01/chubby1.JPG

Are Whiney and Harvilla still there?

whiney is not still there

Sorry, unless you prefer it that way now.