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Who Makes the Decisions? Zach Dundas, former music editor for the Willamette Week, reveals the secrets to who gets in the paper and why, and what it’s like to be the most popular, and hated, guy at the paper. by Eric Stern How come my local weekly heaps praises on Lard Punk Picnic or features my little brother's lame band but doesn't say shit about mine? What goes on in these music editor's heads? How the hell do they decide who gets press anyway? Is it all a popularity contest, or is it more like fifth grade where I have to give the teacher my report in a fancy binder to get an 'A'? If you're one of Portland's musicians you've probably wondered what the best approach is to the weeklies. Since I formed my band, I've run the gamut from practically sending flowers for a write-up to adopting an, aah-who-the-hell-needs-'em attitude, and chucking the newspaper in the can. I recently met with Zach Dundas, former music editor for Willamette Week, to get the skinny on how editorial decisions about music are made at a large city weekly and to see what it was like for the guy on the other side of the music desk. ES: I think there are a lot of preconceived notions that musicians have about the weeklies and how they work, and I'd love you to illuminate or dispel some of these myths… ZD Or confirm! Or confirm. So here's a scenario, the deadline's approaching for the music reviews, …in my mind, all you editors get together for breakfast or lunch and you systematically decide who gets in, who doesn't, you base it on things like who's been in a lot lately, that sort of thing. Is that an accurate portrayal so far? I would preface everything I say with the fact that Mark Baumgarten, who's now doing my job, might have a completely different process than the one I had and I'm sure that Julianne at The [Portland] Mercury has her own system, but for me? One thing I was frustrated with was that I didn't really have a staff to pull together and talk things over. I had an assistant editor, and I had a staff of freelance writers so I was left to assign the blurbs myself based on what I thought was interesting, what I thought was important. It was impressed on me early on when I failed to list The Dave Matthews Band the third or fourth week I was there, that we should at least offer some comment, be it positive or negative, on shows like that simply because of the mass interest. I assigned things also on the skills and interests of the people writing the blurb. If there was a band coming that I thought one of my freelance writers would be particularly interested in I'd assign a blurb about that band to that person. That's obviously completely outside the band's control; nothing the band can do can really influence that. It was really less systematic than the scenario you described and more of an ad hoc decision I would make every Wednesday or Thursday. How set is the two week deadline for a band? Should you get your stuff in three weeks in advance, then two weeks, then one week again, or just once, or what? You have to impose some sort of deadline so that it was never a hard and fast thing in my mind if a band got their materials to me a week and five days before their show that they wouldn't be listed. Really that two weeks is dictated by the fact that some decisions, like what bands will receive larger feature coverage, are often made quite a bit in advance, so if you're trying to decide what's going to be in the paper a month from now, you'll be considering what you have on hand and what you know is coming up. In that sense it's in the band's best interest to be early and to provide a complete package. I think bands can help themselves out a lot by simply being on top of their own promotion and making the materials they turn in professional and useful. Making sure that all the information's on there. I can't tell you the number of times that bands would submit press releases without their phone numbers or without the date of the show or the address. But the two week thing… it's not written in stone. I would advise bands to pretend that it's written in stone. A lot of times who gets there first dictates what you're thinking about. What's the worst thing a band could do or some of the worst things you've seen? I'm thinking along the lines of harassment, bugging you… I never minded people contacting me if they took the right approach. The right approach is extremely common sense, low pressure; just try to be informative and helpful. It's okay to promote yourself, that's the name of the game. A hilarious thing bands would do, for some reason a lot of heavy metal bands would do it, they'd call and say that they were the next big band in the Northwest, or they would include that claim on their press release. I don't know how many times I saw bands say, “The hot up-and-coming-band out of the Northwest.” If you make outlandish claims either in person or in your press release, unless you're doing so for calculated humorous effect I would really steer clear of that, even if you've been told that by your mom or girlfriend or whatever. Does it matter how slick a press packet or release is? Not really to me. I think legibility is priority. There are some press releases that people put together that are actually quite cool and beautiful in their own right, crafty cool things. And that always sticks with you a little bit but I never assigned an article on the basis of a cool press release. Do you listen to every CD that comes along? I didn't listen to everything. I think it would be possible if you really didn't do anything else, but the whole time I was at the paper I was also engaged in numerous other projects that had nothing to do with the music section and some things went by the wayside. I think that the way press releases can help is if you're clear and if you can find a way to spark some genuine interest or excitement within your press release, with quotes from other critics if you're touring from out of town or write-ups. It's about how you present yourself and it's difficult because you have to seem sincere--what I was talking about earlier, people bragging about how great they were, is the insincerity, the patent ridiculousness of those statements--but it's okay to promote yourself in a really sincere way. If you do it well, a good press release does help you get listed. How about people coming up to you at shows? It's fine. When you take that job you're in for a penny, in for a pound, if you're going to take the job and get the free CD's and you're going to get into the shows for free and have the weekly ego stroke of having your name in the paper then the flip side of that is that you do have an obligation to listen to people. Four times out of five it's great. Again, a common-sense kind of approach is great. Think about what would work for you if you were in the writer's shoes, and what would get you interested. It wouldn't be a high pressure, you-fuckin'-idiot-why-haven't-you-written-about-my-band, approach. I always appreciated musicians just letting me know when they were playing and that they were available to talk or to give me their music. The things that didn't work…I don't think anyone likes to feel that they're being hustled so that approach was not successful. The music that gets showcased seems to be geared towards the twenty-five or under crowd and is also generally rock, alternative. Yes, absolutely. I know that this is frustrating to musicians who don't fall into that category. Was it frustrating to you and what did you do about it, things like cross-over genres, bands like Klezmocracy and others. Some of the [paper’s] decisions are demographically driven. I said earlier that advertising doesn't determine what goes in the editorial content and in way that's true and in another way that's false because your advertisers are trying to reach your reader. So who your readers are and who your advertisers are give you a pretty good clue as to what the interests of the mass audience you're trying to reach is. There's a certain amount of lowest common denominator. This is obviously where a huge number of people are looking to find out where the rock shows are, so that's what we'll write about. But I know that the scene in Portland isn't quite that simple and I know that there are really great vibrant scenes in a lot of different genres, in fact there's many different scenes here that sometimes overlap and sometimes don't. My chief frustration in my years as music editor was failing to reflect the true nature of the Portland music scene in that way, failing to totally reflect the diversity. Are people always calling you on the phone, chewing you out? It's not a good job for being super popular. It's a good job for getting thicker skin. The conclusion I reached is that it doesn't really matter what you write, someone is going to be mad. That's just an assumed risk of the job. How much of a band's work did you listen to when you gave a write-up? People don't realize how little time there is to listen to things. I wrote so many previews based on a song. I'll cop to the fact that on some occasions I did write reviews based solely on information that was in press releases without listening to the bands, especially when all I had was a piece of paper describing the band and who was in it and there was no way for me to listen to them, a CD would either have not been sent, got lost, no mp3's online… And why would you review that in the first place? That's a great question, it probably should never have happened. Sometimes there's a matter of filling space and you get caught up in the need to generate a certain amount of copy and you cease to really examine how you're doing it. There would actually be times when we would have no shows to list on a given day of the week, a night when we had received no press releases, no CD's or anything. Decisions are often made chaotically and not on a very well thought-out basis. If there's an amazing band do you still have to limit how much you write about them? You don't want to be writing about the same band every week. Let's say I'm in a band and I have a medium sized show April 24th, and then a huge one May 7th, what should I do? Most music editors I know would be happy to answer this question. You could call the person doing the job and ask them. This gets back to the common-sense friendly low-pressure approach that I advocate. Establish a relationship with an editor at a paper then call them and ask them. So it's okay to call? Yeah…I think it depends on whether you've had contact with that person before, use your head. Establishing a rapport with the music editor is a pretty useful thing to do, which is probably why you don't want to be a jerk the first time you call. We'd certainly list bands multiple weeks in a row in the listings section, but if you're hoping to get that feature article, save it up, push for the big show. You can say on your press release the size of the venue or that you're opening up for a bigger band A lot of musicians don't realize that they can work together with the weeklies, they have an adversarial viewpoint instead. Part of that is that there's a certain amount of separation dictated by journalistic ethics, if they're being subscribed to properly. In the field of the arts it's less rigid than it would be in politics…the same exact set of rules should not apply. Journalists need to maintain their credibility but they also, if they're doing a critical job in the arts, they need to stick with what they think is high quality and if they have some rapport with the people who are doing good work then I think it helps both sides. If anyone out there wants to be a music journalist, find things you like and champion them but don't champion things you don't like because you know the people involved. Eric Stern can be reached at efperry7@yahoo.com |