High Bias (in sum)

So. What did I learn? Well, I'm not sure I expected to learn anything concrete by quizzing musicians about what they think about their relationships with journalists. I had already learned by having conversations with several that there's no one answer.

Being a survivor of daily paper work, however, I tend to want there to be rules. But I'll also gladly take money from the tourism bureau of some foreign country in order to travel there and cover a festival. Conflict of interest much? Yeah, the worlds of political and arts journalism are not the same.

That said, maybe what was most enlightening to me about this endeavor was what came by way of nonresponse. About 1/6 of the people I asked to do this actually did. Again, I don't know what I expected, but that seems low. And while this is all hardly scientific, it was interesting to note that in general it was younger musicians willing to do it. Maybe they have more time, maybe they are more engaged, I don't know. But one very well established musician over 50 seemed shocked that anyone would participate in such a thing. Jaded much? I don't know.

That does seem sad to me, but what do I know? Most but not all of the musicians and most but not all of the arts journalists I know are nice people. And if I had to draw once conclusion from this experiment, I guess it's that most but not all of us aren't quite sure what our relationship should be.

It's been fun, though. And I'm going to start another template interview in a couple months. In the meantime, I'm going through old notebooks looking for unpublished fragments to type here.