I have a new hero, his name is David Kiefaber, he writes for Ad Week, and his smackdown of Spin will soon be legendary. The story kinda speaks for itself. rock nyc has its own arrogance but we are not a major rock magazine who has just, in effect, given up its job. There are albums I review in just a paragraph or even a sentence, but some albums take a coupla of 100 or even 1000 words. For Spin, the worst rock mag in a world that includes Rolling Stone and Pitchfork, to give up on its duty to review music, that's pretty damn weak.
"Figuring less is more, Spin magazine is moving most of its reviews to Twitter, where each album will be assessed in a single tweet at @SPINreviews. Senior editor Chris Weingarten says the decision is all about quality control and decluttering, adding that "the days of wasting people's time with 1,000 words about a record that we don't even think is good [are] over." Keep in mind that this magazine has been picking at Kurt Cobain's bones with bloated, falsely reverent tribute issues for well over a decade now. They're worse than Courtney Love. Anyway, my gut tells me this Twitter thing is really about generating publicity for their site redesign and saving money by not having to pay their writers for full reviews. Whether that's true or not, it's probably good that they'll be using Twitter for something productive, rather than trying to strong-arm the @Spin account away from the guy who's had it forever.
david Kiefaber"