Music Blogging Haz a Sad: Maura Johnston & Idolator Break Up

IDOLATOR is going to Buzznet, a music-focused web and social network. Buzznet recently acquired Idolator’s chief rival, Stereogum, and received a big investment from Universal Music Group...Music audiences are fragmented across genres; Maura’s Idolator gave Stereogum a good run, but a group with a whole array of music sites will command more attention from record labels than we could.

Idolator’s legacy ranged from pissing off music publicists (as recently as last week), to pissing off Perez Hilton, to pissing off the Village Voice (with their own version of the Voice’s epic Pazz and Jop Critic’s Poll, the Jackin’ Pop critics poll), to pissing off Gene Simmons. And then there was their American Idol coverage, which put everyone else’s to shame. Well, times change. Even the Village Voice buried the hatchet, with onetime Idolator rival, the Voice’s Rob Harvilla, noting:

She saw through hype and Internet-echo sort of bullshit really clearly. Debunking the “Kanye declared himself the King of Pop” myth for example.

New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones chimed in on his Twitter feed twice. The first time was: “If my Google Reader contains less than fifty percent @maura, what’s the point? #rsstragedies” and the second time, on her replacements: “Unfollow of the year: @idolator. I had no idea it could go so badly. So many known killers to pick from and then...this." Ouch. Andy Phillips, formerly of PopMatters and Flavorpill, currently of Mog, noted some of his favorite pieces of Idolator’s Maura-era as the tricker stuff: a 19th-century case on music piracy and their secret freelancer interviews. He notes:

I might not have agreed with everything that Maura said (especially when she was taking pot-shots at things that were near and dear), but there’s no question (that) hey-day Idolotor raised the game for intelligent pop music criticism, on blogs and everywhere else. My writers read it, because i told them to.

Lockhart Steele of Curbed Media, the blog network he founded, was once editorial director of Gawker Media, back when Idolator launched. His remembrance:

Idolator was one of the easiest Gawker Media blog launches ever, basically because Brian and Maura were such professionals about it. And, indeed, credit for hiring Maura really rests with Brian—he thought she was the right person for the blog, balancing his big-magazine experience with serious blog cred. Which she did—everyone in the blog ecosystem back in 2006 knew exactly who she was long before Idolator existed, and her joining the team established Idolator as not-just-another-big-media-music-blog right away.

And now, just a day into Maura’s absence from the site, it appears to have become just the thing Idolator set out not to be. Two new writers, penning two posts about Lady Gaga in one day, one breathlessly asking of the new video: ”Did anyone expect any less?” Notably, Idolator’s commenters are now moving in, along with the critics, who have called the blog’s new staffers “illiterate.” Tough first day. If anything is evident in the wake of what Idolator’s going live with, it’s that Maura and her blog network overlords had some creative differences: they wanted brainless enthusiasm, insight be damned, with lots of fishing for traffic from Google keywords. Ugh. This is the way a good blog ends, not with a bang, but with an SEO-inspired whimper. Straight from Maura:

I’m very proud of the work I did at Idolator over the last three years, which actually amounts to about 28 if you go by the timetable of “professional blogging.” I met a bunch of amazing people and got to inflict my Siobhán Donaghy fandom on the world, or at least on the slice of the world that visited the site regularly.

That’s it, folks. No word on where she’s headed next, but no doubt—even in the shit writing economy we’ve come into—Maura’s ridiculously astute, funny insights into music will come in handy somewhere that’s still paying for the best of that kind of thing. Finally, not that we need to know anymore, but the site, according to Johnston, is pronounced “eye-DOLL-uh-ter” and not “I-DOH-LATE-UR.”

Best of luck to her wherever she lands. The original site launch’s announcement and commenter invite for Idolator, via Lockhart Steele, below. Enjoy in all of its old-school glory:

From: 
Date: Thu, Sep 14, 2006 at 12:13 PM
Subject: Introducing Idolator
To: lock@gawker.com

Greetings,

If you’ve received this email, there’s a good chance that you love music, you love blogs, and that you think music blogs are the best thing to ever happen to rock-and-pop nutcases such as yourselves since, well, ever.

And we at Idolator—Gawker Media’s new music blog, launching today—are here to tell you that you’ve been had. The music-blog netherworld has become as homogenized and indistinguishable as the record labels themselves. What used to be a wildly unpredictable chorus of opinions has been solidified into a cabal, one that consists of a half-dozen or so self-empowered pasty white dudes daisy-chaining each others’ opinions, all using an adjective-addled lexicon that’s one part Lester Bangs, one part street-person crazy talk. Speaking of crazy talk, for an extended version of this rant, check out Idolator’s manifesto:

http://www.idolator.com/tunes/announcements/memo-to-americas-music-nerds-you-blew-it-200481.php

This is where Idolator comes in. We’re as obsessed with the music world as we are with the machinations behind it, and we’ll cover the people who are manufacturing the latest band buzz, whether it’s an old-guard standby like Rolling Stone (whose review system is tweaked in our “Everybody’s A Wenner” column), an absurdly powerful new-media turk (Pitchfork), or an agenda-pimping blogger (take your pick).

Of course, being music lovers ourselves, we also want to steer you in the direction of a good song or artist, which we’ll do every day. We aim to be discerning, but not snobby, and we’ll cover everything from indie-rock to Indie.Arie (actually, we probably won’t be covering Indie.Arie, because she kind of sucks, but you get the point). And every time we introduce you to a new artist, we promise to wait at least three months before starting our own backlash against them.

So take some time today and over the next few days to check out Idolator.com. We’d love to hear your feedback.

Oh, like all Gawker Media blogs, Idolator’s comments are by invitation. There’s an invite at the bottom of this email. If you’re already a Gawker commenter, feel free to pass along to a friend, just by forwarding them this email.

Brian Raftery
Maura Johnston
Editors
http://www.idolator.com