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IPC Media, a wholly owned subsidiary of Time, Inc (ergo Time Warner), is a consumer magazine and digital publisher in the United Kingdom, with a large portfolio selling over 350 million copies each year (according to Wikipedia).
This week New Musical Express, owned by IPC Media, put Elliott Smith, the late folkie, on the cover and questioned whether he committed suicide.
rock nyc writer Alyson Camus applauded NME.
We beg to differ.
rock nyc is smaller than small, we are smaller than them all, IPC Media has more resources in their fingertip then we could even imagine in our wildest dreams, and rock nyc reported circles round them.
Imagine if Time Warner had done the bare minimum and have a reporter call the LAPD and ask them what was happening. Do you think the LAPD would ignore Time Warner the way they ignore rock nyc?
Imagine if you will that NME assigned a reporter to the case.
Imagine if they had done ANYTHING AT ALL.
NME did nothing. Shameful, lazy, ignorant. Hell, they could have just stolen our research, everybody else does.
I mean everybody as well. Our Elliott Smith reporting has been accessed thousands upon thousands of times. And how many attributions have we seen? None. When brooklynvegan mention a tour has been cancelled we attribute the story. We never receive such professional courtesy.
rock nyc has the story backwards and forwards. But neither mealy mouth hypocrites like producer Larry Crane (who begged us not to quote him and so we didn’t and is now speaking to Q Manazine) nor cowardly Spin scribe Liam Gowing, will go on the record, indeed,nobody will. Why should they? We can’t help them.
But NME could have nailed it and didn’t.
New Musical Express need to right this wrong. They could blow our reporting out of the water, they could singlehandedly make solving Elliott Smith’s death a priority. If Time Warner put their immense resources at service of this story it would be closed in a month. If TW are willing to make money off Elliott Smith by putting him on the cover of their magazines, why are they not willing to solve his death?
Alyson Camus, as the face, and M. Kriss, behind the scenes, have done a tremendous job reporting this story.
We appreciate and applaud them.
IPC didn’t and they should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.
iman lababedi
helen bach
editors
rock nyc