The Media Oxpecker: Goodbye, 2012

In the spirit of doing what we do best and linking to the rest, we’re going to leave the prediction game to the experts — specifically, the group assembled by the Nieman Journalism Lab — to forecast what journalism will look like in 2013.

The lineup includes the likes of Ken Doctor, former paidContent editor Staci Kramer, Wall Street Journal digital director Raju Narisetti, Street Fight co-founders David Hirschman and Laura Rich, and so on. It’s worth checking out if you’re into that sort of thing.

If that doesn’t satisfy your media prediction fix, here’s another solid lineup of analysts with some U.K. flavour added in.

And finally, our last link of the year goes to former Village Voice music editor Maura Johnston, who asks, “What happened to music writing this year?”


In the pre-streaming era, music writing had a function for the listener, providing context about a record’s sounds (which Robert Christgau cheekily condensed as “Consumer Guide”) as well as the artistic vision behind it. As we go into 2013, there’s almost too much context — from streaming albums to artist tweets to comments in the iTunes Store and beyond — and music writers become just another voice, shouting above the fray to be heard. Turning that chaos into a conversation that spans fans of all genres and artists, and that connects people in surprising ways, should be a goal among writers and editors in 2013 — even if doing so means to first have a radical rethinking about the ways of building an audience and a media business.

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