Lost in the Internet

In other news, the Journal of Music (formerly The Journal of Music in Ireland) has discontinued print publication and is moving completely to the Internet. I am a bit of a print fetishist, so I will probably read little or nothing of it again*. I am guessing that the move was driven by commercial factors (i.e. poor sales and the costs of bringing out physical issues) rather than the bold opportunities of the internet trumpeted in the mail-out announcing the change. For all that the journal managed to hang in there for a long time (I only really started reading it in its later days), there probably is only so big a market in Ireland for a public dealing with the crazy world of brainy music. Still, I wonder if maybe they made some editorial decisions that, in retrospect, were not the wisest. It did seem like the later issues featured a lot of articles about music criticism or navel gazing about what music is all about, combined with surprisingly little about actual musicians and the work they produce. Still, it is easy for me to say what went wrong in retrospect, it's not like I have ever tried to edit a magazine.

An inuit panda production


*and yes, I am aware of the irony of someone writing a blog post saying that they do not really like reading things online; readers should understand that this material did originally appear in print.