Negative Nellies At “The New York Times”
Former New York Times journalist John Rockwell writes about being pressured to be positive or, in his case, negative by editors. His Grey Lady editor equated negativity with controversy and more readers, and subsequently pushed him to make a negative Joni Mitchell review even more scathing:
I remember a piece I wrote about Joni Mitchell’s CD of orchestrally accompanied versions of some of her finest songs. I hated it: I thought it was pompous and leaden. But an editor came up to me eagerly after he’d read what I turned in and pushed me to expand it and sharpen it. Being negative, in his eyes, was equivalent to being sharp and controversial; it would boost buzz and readership.
I am embarrassed to admit that I went along with his suggestion, and the piece ran as a wildly over-played full-page blast against an artist whom I had long admired (with the inevitable caveats).
Rockwell later got his comeuppance a few months later, when Mitchell upbraided him by phone.
It’s the reverse of the Jann Wenner Bob Dylan Rule. If you’re gonna trash it, then really trash it. Nobody wants three stars. They want one or five. Bold statements on the extremes make much more of an impact than middle-of-the-road ones. As a publicist, I noticed more action for records that got a 4.4 than albums that got a 6.4. It’s why so much music criticism seems like binary code now. Ones and zeros. It’s good or it sucks.
I wonder how much this goes on. We all know about editors feeding records to the writers who are most likely to write positive reviews. Any writers out there pushed to go negative?
