This is the most disingenuous pile of horseshit I have ever read in my life. https://brokenbottleboy.substack.com/p/twilight-of-the-gods-former-nme-editor

The music/culture mags I'd grown up on were Smash Hits, The NME, The Face and Mixmag. Smash Hits was gone by the time I started writing professionally in the early 2000s but I was THRILLED to write for The Face, and then Mixmag when it was rebooted in 2005. But The NME?

Completely aside from the quality or otherwise of any of the band, the concept of "The New Rock Revolution" was an unholy hybrid of David Brent and Smashy & Nicey. It was "HEY THE KIDZ!! LET'S ROCK!!!". It DESTROYED the NME brand.

This in the era of Neptunes & Timberlake, Erol at Trash, dubstep and grime being born etc etc, too. But what's the legacy of 2000s NME? A few dozen old cunts in Doherty trilbies grunting Chris Moyles jokes to each other and pissing on their shoes at some "SHEEEYIIIINE" festival.

And the idea that Pitchfork posting gifs was the end of the print press? PLEASE. Pitchfork succeeded because it had a CONSISTENT WRITTEN VOICE. It normalised longfform reviews in an old school print press style - it was The NME that was going tabloidy / memey / dumbed down.

This is no shade at anyone in particular who worked at the NME in this godforsaken period (well, apart from a couple of people) and I know subsequently under Krissi a lot of hard work was done to try and salvage it, but by that point the damage to the brand was terminal.

Obviously it's very likely it would have ended as a paper mag sooner or later, but the genuinely disgusting travesty it became as an online brand was never inevitable. The NME could have become the UK Pitchfork: it could have MATTERED.

(Tangentially it was a tragedy The Face went up in flames, though that was a whole different kettle of fish: that was vicodin, derangement, cult-leaders, last days of rome stuff - tragic because in its last incarnation it DID begin to show how a mag could work in 21st C)

It’s SO important that the story of UK media is not written through this bullshit smeared lens though. There’s already a tendency to think that it was all inevitable, market pressures etc (see also excuses for the awful decline in quality of Q under Paul Rees) but it was not.