As The Everett True Show rolls on, ANDREW RAMADGE looks at the state of music journalism in Australia.

Jerry Thackray, the conductor of The Fantastical Everett True Show currently touring the nation, must be quietly giggling to himself. Last year his alter-ego made headlines with a scathing appraisal of the local music press and earned his blog – written for the website of a swanky broadsheet on the other side of the world – more publicity than money can buy. And how did Australia's biggest national music magazine respond to such a slight? It hired him to write the country's right of reply as well.

On the cover of the December issue of Australian Rolling Stone was a teaser for an article titled "Is There Anything Left To Say About Music?", a four-page story filled with a giant caricature of the British journalist, several photos of North American rock stars Kurt Cobain and The Dwarves and anecdotes about Irish musician Bono printed under the inexplicable banner "National Affairs". In it, True talks about being himself and how wonderful his magazines are and being punched by Courtney Love and what else was it again? Oh yeah, Australian music criticism.

The article is a half-arsed rejoinder to True's own comments earlier in the year that Australian music criticism has no balls and, less importantly but far more infamously, that silverchair suck. Instead of elaborating on the topic, True hijacks the pages of Rolling Stone for his own ends. Faithful to his self-promoting persona, he uses the piece to endorse his own foreign publications Careless Talk Costs Lives and Plan B – both of which, along with his blog, are mentioned before any local titles – and to reel off a few old war stories about overseas musicians.

When he does get around to talking about the state of local music criticism, True hands the task over to a cast of old-guard music elites with whom he must have felt it necessary to make amends: Bernard Zuel, the Sydney Morning Herald's music critic, who is mostly quoted talking about True's blog; broadcaster and writer Helen Razer, who talks about writing a "rock and roll restaurant review" for an unnamed paper; and former Rolling Stone editor Jeff Apter, who is accorded just half a paragraph in which to say something relevant.

The piece does touch briefly on some worthy topics: Australia's cultural insecurity as a young colonial nation, or as Zuel puts it, the "dual inferiority complex of thinking that the English know more (yet at the same time saying) 'What do you know, you're not from round here?'", as well as the reliance of street press magazines on advertising – and how these issues can inhibit local critics. But the discussion itself is soaked in exactly the type of insecurity that it describes.

What radiates off those pages even more overwhelmingly than True's braggadocio is the smack of defeatism on the part of the magazine's editors. It's not just the imported rock mythology printed under the guise of "National Affairs", nor the highlighted quote from expatriate Nick Cave that "it's not worth discussing the Australian music press" – lifted not from the article itself, but from the back-pages of one of True's magazines without any explanation. It's that True himself was hired to write it. Are there no Australian critics more qualified to discuss the issue? One can only assume that Clinton Walker was on holidays.

If the local imprint of Rolling Stone, a titled renowned in its homeland for publishing hard-hitting political and cultural commentary, as well as music criticism, wanted to weigh in on the state of the Australian music press, then why not run something more relevant? An article on cultural cringe or an expose of the street press publishing model would have filled the same space with room left over to plug a few of the country's high-quality independent titles – Cyclic Defrost, for example, or Who The Bloody Hell Are They? – that prove True's original argument flawed.

For those who missed that argument the first time around, here is the short version: last August True wrote his first piece for a blog on a British newspaper website after relocating to Brisbane. In it he let loose on the lack of critical skills shown by local street press writers, arguing that the problem reflected a broader aspect of Australian culture. "The idea of anyone actually daring to criticise musicians for the sound they make it almost heresy," he wrote. "It runs counter to their culture." It was because of this, True claimed, that the country was known for "musical abominations" such as silverchair and The Vines.

The comment was picked up by Brisbane newspaper The Courier Mail and then by news.com.au, free commuter newspaper MX, the Sydney Morning Herald and others that spread it across the country in a flurry of outrage and nationalistic pride. Most media outlets led on the hook that True had slighted silverchair, playing up the critic as "legendary" and the band as "our best" to capitalise on their readers' weakness for post-colonial drama. Cue a posse of angry people telling "some whingeing Pom" to "fuck off back home" if he doesn't like it and so on.

But of course it's never that simple. For some local writers, long stifled and frustrated by the constraints of the street press model, the only point of contention was that it had taken an overseas critic to voice what they'd been saying for years for it to be noticed – a sharp reminder, no less subtle than a jab in the ribs, of the cultural cringe our nation was supposed to have outgrown. What should have happened next was a spirited debate between our writers and readers, editors and publishers. What we got was the next act of The Show.

And so, instead...

In True's Rolling Stone article, the only interviewee to show a bit of verve is Andrew Mast, managing editor of Street Press Australia, one of the largest two street press publishers in the country with titles including Inpress in Melbourne, Drum Media in Sydney and Brisbane's Time Off. Mast calls True out on whether or not he calculated the controversy. "I find it difficult to believe that you were surprised by the response," Mast tells him. "It was a pretty good way for a journalist to get his name back in the headlines."

“What is needed to supplement street press are magazines and fanzines that can fill in the gaps – that can print stories that don't fit the street press model and cover bands on merit alone.”

Predictably, Mast then goes on to defend the virtues of street press and the critics who write for it. Street press publishing is an institution with 20 years of history, he says, including its fair share of tell-it-like-it-is controversy. "Speaking as an editor ... my writers get anything from death threats to dildos to having beer cans thrown at them from Jet, because we've always spoken the truth," he says. The message is that there is nothing wrong at all with the street press.

To disagree with this overly rosy (or perhaps overly grimy) portrait of street press is not to diminish the role of people like Mast within it. The work of street press editors and writers should be admired for having been produced despite, rather than because, of the model they work within. The facts are street press pays like shit, discourages creativity and walks a fine line between editorial and advertorial. Quality journalism or criticism that appears in its pages owes more to the uphill battle constantly fought by staff than to the model itself.

That model is as follows: because they are free, street press magazines rely solely on advertising for income. How this works in practice is a magazine will only guarantee to run a story on a band or event if they purchase an ad, either in the same issue or one around the same date. Even the cover story is attached to a deal. After a band or their label has booked for an ad, a writer is assigned to come up with the story. The writer is free to say whatever they like, but there is an unspoken expectation that the piece will not be too negative.

There is still room to move in this set-up, most notably in the reviews pages where editors are given more freedom to decide who is covered and in what manner. Even when it comes to stories there are grey areas – for example, a spare page may be used to run a story unconnected to advertising or there may be one or more bidder for the cover to choose from. But as a general rule, editorial content is a secondary concern to the sales sheet and there are few safeguards to keep the two concerns separate.

True touched upon street press' reliance on advertising in his original blog post, but failed to realise how important it was. "These magazines are free: their financial stability and continuing existence have nothing to do with (newsstand) sales figures. Why not feature who the fuck you like?" he asked. But in fact, it goes the other way. If readers aren't paying anything to pick up a magazine, there's no impetus to increase the quality of the content. There is, however, a good reason to please the people who do pay the bills.

The second constraint on street press is the constant effort on the part of publishers to keep production and editorial costs as low as possible. This results in two things. The first is that writers and editors are paid a pittance. In many cases writers are paid as little as five cents per word for a story – less than one-tenth of a professional fee – and nothing for a review, with the CD or concert ticket considered payment in itself. This makes it difficult for magazines to retain talented writers as their career progresses or their costs of living rise.

The other result is a cookie-cutter approach to page design that is employed to reduce layout costs. If all the pages look the same, publishers don't have to pay a designer to spend time creating each one. The hidden cost of this template system is that it stifles creativity by locking staff into a fixed format. There is literally no space in street press for articles that would break the mould – opinion pieces, features (unless they are tied to an advertiser who will foot the bill for extra design costs), photo essays or anything else that would require the layout to fit the content.

These issues help to cement the street press's position largely as a stepping-stone for young writers and editors, rather than a patron of quality journalism – but they have another, wider effect as well. By favouring bands that pay for advertisements, street press necessarily favours established or touring acts that can afford them. There is no way a young band from the suburbs can compete with the promotion budget of some trendy group from North America. The battle for coverage in street press is not a fair fight.

Going online

What is needed to supplement street press are magazines and fanzines that can fill in the gaps – that can print stories that don't fit the street press model and cover bands on merit alone. In short, publications that can put a band on the cover simply because they like them. Australia has a long history of independent magazines that fulfil this need – from Fast Forward to B-Side, Lemon and countless others. This tradition is the heart of Australian music journalism, and it is this history that True chooses to ignore – even while boasting about his own independent titles.

In the last decade, most of these kinds of publications have moved online. So we now have websites like Who The Bloody Hell Are They?, a blog run by half a dozen or so writers who exhaustively catalogue young local bands from around the country, and Polaroids Of Androids, a sort of variation on the Pitchfork Media model with an Australian bent and an acerbic sense of humour, as well as more established titles like Mess+Noise and Cyclic Defrost that have moved, in varying degrees, from print onto the web.

Because it is much cheaper for a few budding critics to start a website than to print and distribute a magazine – even a small-run one – it is now easier than ever to write about music that is shunned by the street press and mainstream media. And it is these online writers who are at the forefront of Australian music journalism. In Sydney it has been Polaroids of Androids and blogs like Cardboard Placard who have covered the emerging warehouse scene in the inner-western suburbs that is more exciting than anything going on in licensed venues.

Writers raised on a diet of print still hold a fierce contempt for online journalists. A recent discussion on Melbourne music journalism TV show Dancing About Architecture began with print critic Mia Timpano describing the web as "the toilet bowl of human thought" and arguing that the word "print" was synonymous with "serious" when it came to journalism. In the debate that followed with co-hosts Clem Bastow and Tim Finney, the only advantage of online publishing that they could see was the ability to extend their word count.

Not only is this thinking old-fashioned, it also misses the point. The real advantage of writing for online is being able to escape from the constraints of the traditional media cycle. You want to write about a group not because they're going on a tour but just because it would be a great story? Go ahead. Instead of a review, you want to write an essay about three new records that share a similar theme? Fine. A polemic like this? Cool. A photo essay? No problem. Blogs and websites blow apart the tired "300-word review and 800-word story" format that street press critics are locked into.

Of course, it's not all blue skies. As a whole, content on the web is heavily American-centric. On Wikipedia, which is more popular in Australia than the Sydney Morning Herald website, there is a dearth of information about our cultural history – compare the three paragraphs written on Sydney band X with the several pages on the LA band of the same name. The artists recommended by the iTunes store are skewed towards North American acts. On the Blip.fm music streaming site, they've seemingly never heard of groups like The Saints or Scientists.

This is important because the web has, or will very soon, become the major source of news for Australians. This month the Communications and Media Authority reported that the internet had surpassed newspapers, TV and radio as the nation's most trusted source of information. One of the biggest challenges that Australian music journalists face is ensuring that local music history doesn't get lost online – but it isn't the street press, or Rolling Stone, who are going to tackle it.

Street press publishers have so far largely ignored the internet, possibly out of a fear that they will face the same difficulty in maintaining ad revenue as newspapers have. Brisbane's Time Off is one exception, while Melbourne's Beat has a perfunctory online presence. It's only fair to point out that their fears may be valid. For writers at least, there is no more money – in fact, usually less – in writing for the web than writing for street press, but thankfully that is beginning to change.

If, as True says, we should have a "national dialogue" about issues of cultural cringe and music criticism, these are the topics we should be talking about. The web will be the battleground for Australia's national identity in the future – not the pages of street press or Rolling Stone. And the battle won't just be about having our opinions heard, but also about making sure that our history is recorded alongside the countless pages already written and published online by overseas critics.

One of the most important roles of music journalists is to record the history, or create the folklore, of a particular time – to give music a context and a narrative. It's this role that Australian writers need to fill at the moment, not indulge in the rock mythology of North America and Britain that Rolling Stone continues to worship, or the debates about Fall Out Boy that Dancing About Architecture concerns itself with. In the 21st century, everyone can read Pitchfork Media and NME for themselves.

Write your own bloody story. There is no one else more qualified in the world.

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