Street press/fashion publisher Oyster mag and 3D World was sold to Destra for $1.75m and $0.5m equity - Destra also owns Central Station Records, Fashion TV and thescene.com.au, and is likely to push these mainly print titles further down the digital/broadcast path they’ve tentatively explored.

The founders, editorial staff and management team of these market-leading youth media mastheads will continue in their current roles.

destra will expand the distribution of 3D World, on a phased basis, as Australia’s national youth street press. We will also continue the expansion of international distribution for Oyster.

It’s another example of the broad consolidation in Australia’s street press scene - Street Press Australia (Drum Media/Inpress), Furst Media (Brag, Beat, Fashion Journal, Stu), Fairfax (XPress Perth) - responding to shifting record company promotional budgets and online incursions into the street press space.

I’ve written for 3D and Oyster, and it’ll be interesting to see where this takes them - especially as far as the writers go (once upon a time poorly paid freelancers could at least sell articles interstate). Equally interesting is the pressure this must place on other independents (Mess + Noise, inthemix.com.au, etc).

New issue of Oyster’s out.

‘Dark Meets Light’ issue. Not sure what that’s got to do with our mate Moxey who features in the above four-page spread.

But among the pretty girls, Ksubi and Modular features, and a piece on British hardcore, there’s also my interview with NY music writer Simon Reynolds. Sticking with the issue theme, it picks up on the black/white cross-pollination/miscegenation theme that strings its way through his latest book, Bring the Noise.

Should be online before long, but it’s in newsagents now.

Sydney disco kid and occasional journalist/PhD candidate Margie Borschke is speaking on MP3 blogging (and participatory music cultures) at Sydney Uni this Friday, October 5, at 3pm. It’s free. Go here for more details.

Just got a new zine.

Put together by a handful of bloggers (they say that Blackdown describes it as “a total joy”), the first issue of Woofah features interviews with Pinch, Skepta and Iration Steppas, among many others. The style’s mostly Q&A, basic prose, or old school genre review pages style. Musically it’s “dancehall, grime, dubstep, dub, bashment, roots and all points in between.”

There’s even a cartoon called ‘The Adventures of Lee Perry’. It’s worth the four pounds thirty-five it takes to get it sent air from the UK.

MUSIC MAGAZINING in Australia’s pretty tough, if the recent toll is anything to go by Hot Press - another heavily syndicated mag, this time sourcing its material from Irish mag of the same name - may have just outlasted Nylon, folding after about a year, according to The Brag. Or have they just moved?

IT’S general knowledge now that Nylon (website mia) has folded. Apparently, Nylon US put all their content online and on their myspace page, which meant the Aust version (containing some very large amount of syndicate material) was outdated before the Australian publishers even got the CD of content, let alone a month later when it got published. It was covering some great stuff, but despite the fact that Ishil and the others wanted to cover more local fashion/music, the deal they’d negotiated with Nylon in the states meant they had to pull in the US content. So, who wants to give me a job writing for another cool magazine?

The Australian on freelancing in Australia… As the story says, the Canberra Times pays not much more than 10 cents a word - that’s for in-depth science reportage and light-hearted music/arts stories. In music writing it’s even worse, most of the good magazines are entirely voluntary, which is understandable, but even the commercially successful mags stop returning your emails when you ask about payment, while music websites pay their sales staff corporate wages while keeping their editorial staff on incomes that’d make your local check-out staff blush.

The only way is to get a proper job and do the other stuff as a sideline, or even better, start your own zine/ezine/blog/whatever.

I’ve read plenty of Australian music journo Divola’s pieces over the years in places like Drum Media, the SMH and Rolling Stone Aust, he makes a few interesting points in this interview on AMO.

Fascinating investigative journalism, light-hearted short pieces and music features made Spinach 7 a real page turner of a magazine, and a breath of fresh air on Australian newsagent shelves. Needless to say it was hugely disappointing when the magazine went belly up late last year. The Australian magazine industry is serious business, huge amounts of money are invested by the big houses in getting their magazines into prime newsagent real estate and the content is the least important factor. Editor Eve Vincent explained the problems at Online Opinion.
Still, it’s been great to see the team band together to set up an online hub. They’ve split off into three cohesive units. Signature, which takes on the investigative mantle, reporting topical issues without jumping into the press scrum. This month they compare the experience of SBS journo John Martinkus, who was kidnapped in Iraq, with Douglas Wood. Soundplay, which as it says looks at music and arts. This time Dan Rule looks at lo-fi country kid and Melbourne expat Toby Burke. Mo:life, the last piece of the puzzle is an email list that looks at the impact of mobile media on media, technology and business.
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