The 1970's were iconic for it's journalistic icons. But how much has it really changed since then?...

Tim Lott ... 'To be a music journalist back then was to be important'

Music journalism took a huge turn in the 1980's, there was the rise of the style press. At this particular point in time we saw a boom in post modern pop music and a time where we began to celebrate design and the attributes it could bring to the music press. However, this lead to the accusation that the music press had become more or less style over substance and we began to see the disappearance of the personality writers that had been so abundant in previous years, such as Lester Bangs, Nick Kent and others. It began that the writers became much more self aware.

We then saw various enormous changes in the 1990's beginning with the introduction of the riot grrrl. This feminist empowerment of punk was bought into commercialism by the Spice Girls, thus giving exposure and paved the way for female journalists such as Mary Ann Hobbs and Sara Marcus. The 90's also saw the hip-hop genre steadily making its way into the music scene, with magazines such as The Source and Vibe emerging. This further gave an introduction to journalists that could represent black music in the 90's and 00's. dream hampton is hugely influential and has gone on to make films and write Jay Z's biography, proving that more or less, journalists tend to work in other fields of the media nowadays.


The 'rock journalist' also developed into a tighter sub-genre, we now have the pop/indie writers such as Peter Robinson and Alexis Petridis who writes for The Guardian, and Kitty Empire, for The Observer.


I think that majority of the changes in music journalist is due to the technological shifts and the way in which we now view the internet as our primary source for finding new music. There has also been huge cultural changes such as the emergance of black music into the mainstream that will have affected these changes, as well as many, many more women within music journalism. A pivotal move was in 2009, when Krissi Murison became editor of NME, a position rare for a female to win. Finally, there is now such an abundance of people who call themselves journalists, yet thirty years ago these writers would only be in fanzines, yet instead they're plastered throughout mainstream music press! A change for the worse I'd say...