Who Killed the Metal Journalist, and What Should We Do with the Body?
- Aug 15
- 9 min read
By Seth Metoyer, MetalCrawlspace.com -
The Vanishing Role of the Metal Journalist
Metal media is shrinking, writers are disappearing, and audiences increasingly get their news from personalities instead of publications. I’m starting to wonder whether the metal journalist is actually dying, or simply turning into something else.
I watched a recent episode of Jon Barbas’ Heavy Metal Philosophy where he asked a question that has been hanging around the edges of music media for a while now: what happens when the journalists start disappearing?
Shared History in Metal Media
It caught my attention partly because Jon and I have occupied some of the same territory. We both wrote for Metal Digest before the site eventually closed its doors and the people behind it moved on to other things. I don’t know the specifics of Jon’s arrangement there, so I won’t speak for him, but most of the writers I knew were volunteers. We reviewed albums, interviewed bands, covered shows, wrote opinion pieces and did the usual work of a metal publication. There was an editorial structure, there were writers with different tastes and specialties, and bands treated it like a legitimate press outlet because it was one.
Jon continued further into YouTube territory with Heavy Metal Philosophy. I went in a few different directions. I own and edit Metal Crawlspace, and I’m also Assistant Editor at Heaven’s Metal Magazine. Heaven’s Metal has around ten writers covering albums, interviewing artists, attending shows with press credentials and writing longer pieces about the music and culture surrounding faith-based metal. Everyone volunteers.
The Two Deaths of Music Journalism
When we start talking about the death of music journalism, because there are really two things dying at the same time and they aren’t necessarily the same thing. One is the traditional paid job of being a music journalist. The other is the actual practice of journalism.
Jon’s video came after another round of layoffs at rock and metal outlets, and he correctly points out that this problem extends far beyond metal. Music publications have been cutting staff, but so have organizations covering sports, gaming, politics and nearly every other subject that once supported a fairly healthy class of professional writers. The economics underneath all of it have changed, and anybody running a media outlet can see at least part of the reason without needing an MBA to explain it.
Living in the Feed
People live in the feed now. I see this from another angle every day because I also run a horror movie platform, More Horror, which has around 60,000 followers on Instagram and more than 100,000 followers combined across its social media pages. Those pages have generated millions of organic views over the years. I also run the main site hub for it MoreHorrorMovies.com, where I publish movie news, reviews, press coverage and material coming from major studios, independent filmmakers and publicists.
The difference in audience behavior between those two places can be strange to watch. I can post something on Instagram and thousands of people will see it. They’ll argue about the movie, tell me I completely missed the point, tell somebody else they completely missed the point, make jokes, tag friends and generally spend a fair amount of time interacting with the subject. Meanwhile, there can be a full article sitting on the website covering the exact same thing, and only a small percentage of those people will actually leave Instagram to read it.
They’re interested. Clearly. They just don’t want to leave where they already are.
The Shift from Websites to Social Media
That has changed the function of a website. Years ago the website was the destination and social media helped drive people there. Increasingly, social media is the destination. The website becomes the place somebody might visit when they care enough to go deeper.
I don’t say that with any particular nostalgia for the old days. I’ve been working around media long enough to remember when getting people to visit a website felt like the whole point, and I also remember plenty of terrible websites packed with banner ads, autoplay videos and five paragraphs of nothing before you reached the information you actually wanted. There was never some perfect golden age where everybody sat down with a cup of coffee and thoughtfully read every 1,500-word album review.
Still, something has changed.
Influencer vs Journalist
Jon talks in the video about how he now considers himself an influencer rather than a journalist, and I thought that was one of the more interesting parts of the whole discussion. He explains that he provides commentary and some reporting, but he isn’t generally doing investigative journalism, breaking stories, seeking formal responses from multiple parties or working through the kind of editorial process we traditionally associate with professional reporting.
I understand where he lands, although I’m less certain where I would draw the line myself.
What Counts as Journalism?
If receiving a paycheck from a media company determines who gets to call themselves a journalist, then underground metal has apparently had very few journalists for decades. Metal grew up with people making photocopied zines in bedrooms, interviewing bands through the mail and writing about records because they cared enough to spend their own money doing it. A lot of those writers had no institutional backing whatsoever. Some of them ended up documenting scenes and bands that we now consider historically important.
The paycheck determines whether journalism can become somebody’s profession. The actual work involves something else.
When I publish something presented as reporting, I care whether the information is accurate. I want to know where a claim originated. I try to distinguish between something a publicist told me, something a band member said directly and something I’m saying myself. If I make a factual claim, I want to be able to back it up. If I get something wrong, I want to correct it. Those habits matter to me whether twelve people read the article or twelve thousand do.
That sounds like journalism to me.
The Rise of the Metal Influencer
At the same time, I’m also doing things an old-school journalist probably wouldn’t have considered part of the job. I make promotional graphics. I think about social reach. I interact with followers. I occasionally post ridiculous memes because people enjoy them and I enjoy them too. With More Horror, I sometimes put the entire review directly into an Instagram caption because I already know most people won’t click away from the app to read it somewhere else.
I understand the influencer side of this world because I participate in it. There’s nothing particularly sinister about that. People have always connected with writers who had personalities. Lester Bangs certainly had one. Hunter S. Thompson didn’t exactly disappear behind the reporting. Even traditional magazine culture depended heavily on recognizable voices that readers trusted, disliked, argued with or followed from publication to publication.
What feels different now is the amount of immediate feedback telling you exactly which version of yourself performs best.
Post an album review and you can see how many people cared. Post some absurd argument involving Metallica and watch what happens. Make a joke, post a meme, mention something politically combustible or toss a controversial opinion into the room and the analytics start giving you a lesson in human behavior almost immediately.
Clicks, Content, and Consequences
Jon makes a related point when he talks about the old flood of click-driven music stories, including the endless genre of “Corey Taylor thinks this about something.” Publications had writers to pay, hosting costs and overhead, so articles needed traffic. The underground coverage readers constantly demanded often produced fewer clicks than the celebrity material everyone complained about seeing. Then, we clicked it.
The publications saw the numbers and responded accordingly. Social media simply turned that same feedback loop into something much faster and more personal. Every independent writer, YouTuber and Instagram page now has access to information that once belonged to an analytics department. I know which posts worked. I know which ones died immediately. I know whether people watched fifteen seconds of a video or bailed after three.
That information can help us understand your audience, and I use it. I want Metal Crawlspace to grow. When I cover an underground band, I want people to discover them. When somebody hires us for additional promotional visibility, I want that promotion to reach as many relevant people as possible. There’s no virtue in publishing something nobody ever sees.
The problem shows up when performance starts deciding what deserves coverage.
Attention vs Integrity
You can feel the pull after a while. Why spend two hours writing about an unknown death metal band when a quick argument about some famous musician’s political opinion will outperform it before lunch? Why interview somebody with 800 monthly Spotify listeners when another “Is metal dead?” post will bring in ten times the engagement?
That’s where journalism and influencing start rubbing against each other in an uncomfortable way. A journalist sometimes follows the story because the story deserves attention. An influencer naturally learns to follow attention because attention keeps the platform alive. Most of us operating independently now live somewhere between those two instincts.
The Website as Archive
I think that’s also why I’m reluctant to write off websites. The traffic may have changed, but the website still does something social media does poorly: it keeps a record.
Metal history is full of things that survived because somebody bothered to document them when they didn’t seem historically important yet. An interview with an unknown band in 1994 becomes valuable twenty years later when somebody wants to understand what that scene actually looked like. Reviews preserve how people heard an album before nostalgia and hindsight rewrote the story. Show reports preserve venues, lineups and scenes that eventually disappear.
Social media gives us tremendous reach, but it also has a short memory. Something can reach 100,000 people this afternoon and effectively vanish a week later beneath another thousand posts. A website article can still be found years from now by somebody searching for the band, record or subject.
Building for Both Platforms
It also changes how I think about Metal Crawlspace. I absolutely want people scrolling past one of our posts on Facebook or Instagram to stop and pay attention. I want to understand how those platforms work instead of pretending it’s still 2003 and everybody bookmarks their favorite music websites. At the same time, I want the actual articles to exist somewhere that feels a little more permanent than this afternoon’s algorithm.
This is probably where Jon and I are closest philosophically.
The Future of Metal Media
He worries about what replaces traditional journalism as the institutions supporting it shrink. Influencers can do some things extraordinarily well. A knowledgeable YouTube host can introduce thousands of people to an underground record that a traditional publication might never touch.
A podcaster can develop a direct relationship with an audience in ways older publications often struggled to do. Artists can speak directly to listeners without having a journalist interpret everything for them first. There’s value in all of that. There’s also value in having somebody who feels an obligation to check whether a claim is true before repeating it.
Jon eventually gets to something I think captures the point well beyond metal: the more outlets and voices we have, the more opportunities we have for people to challenge each other, provide different perspectives and check each other’s facts. I’d rather have a messy ecosystem of independent publications, magazines, YouTubers, podcasters and weird little metal sites than watch everything consolidate into a handful of personalities competing for the same algorithm.
So Who Killed the Metal Journalist?
There probably isn’t a single murderer standing over the body holding a bloody copy of Revolver. The economics changed. Publications cut staff. Audiences moved toward social platforms. Advertisers followed them. Bands learned they could communicate directly with fans. Writers became personalities because audiences increasingly connected with people rather than mastheads. Publications chased clicks because clicks paid the bills, and readers rewarded the material they later complained about seeing.
I’m part of that system too. Every time I look at Instagram analytics, think about whether a headline will grab somebody or decide to put a review directly into a social post instead of asking readers to visit the website, I’m adjusting to the same reality Jon describes.
What's Still Important?
I still think the journalist has a place in metal, though. Maybe the job looks less recognizable now. The person doing it might also run the Instagram account, design the graphics, edit the website, promote the article, answer comments, shoot video at the show and occasionally post something stupid because it made them laugh.
That’s probably going to be normal.
What I hope survives underneath all of it is the part where somebody still cares enough to ask the questions, listen to the answers, check the facts and write the thing down.
And Jon, since you’ve officially moved yourself into the influencer category, maybe I can convince you to relapse into journalism every once in a while. Your Metal Digest articles were great reads and they’ve been sorely missed.
I happen to know a crawlspace with room for another writer.
