My main gripes with the current state of music journalism is how impersonal most of it is and the lack of preparation or effort put into reviews and interviews. Also it seems that the barrier to entry / the quality of writing for glorified tumblr blogs or online magazines is at rock bottom.
Compare music journalism with game journalism for example. While the two may be dissimilar in the way we interact with them they can effect us in the same way. Every time we listen to music how we feel or what we think is usually very personal to us, it's a unique experience to every person. However looking across at an expanse of music reviews you could replace the author name with any other journalist and you wouldn't even know it. There's no personal hook, nothing "real" to latch onto. Most reviews descend into, "how many references to other / more obscure artists can I fit in to show I know what I'm talking about" Or "Let me show you how good/shit my vocabulary is by describing the track to you" in a post-radiorip-straight-to-youtube world where actually hearing the track would surely serve me better. Obviously I'm not asking for more "I listened to Burial for the first time and it made remember..." sob stories. I'm sure there are enough of those as it is, I'm just saying injecting a bit of personality into writing isn't hard but I guess people just find it exposing. However if you're worried about revealing something about yourself in such a subjective industry then, in my eyes, you're doomed to mediocrity.
Also humour is virtually non-existent, partially due to the impersonal problem. As an abstract example,
here's a review of a niche game about being a lady written by the brilliant John Walker. Stripping away the subject matter, it's the personal point of view and sarcastic humour that make it a funny engaging read about an otherwise dull subject matter. Also to note, the subject matter is clearly nothing headline grabbing, but the article was written anyway.
Covering news or releases by big artists quickly to get hits shouldn't be the priority or the thing that draws your readers to your blog, instead it should be the quality of content.
Journalism should go hand in hand with investigation but, as discussed some time ago whilst I was but a lurker on this forum, due the culture of press-releases and promotion journalists just have to open their email in the morning and transform any number of the press releases into an "article" with very little effort.
One of the simplest form of investigation is the interview yet as we've already seen it can be done so badly that it will deliver bland, uninteresting results that could potential lead to both parties looking like
Elijah in a chair idiots.
Here is, what I believe is, one of the best interviews in recent memory. It starts off with the standard motive of trying to promote an album before release but naturally becomes something more and steers its way around other revealing topics that rightful lead to every other blog linking to it. This didn't even seem that difficult, its not even like the interviewer displayed any sign of in-depth background investigation before the interview, but its done well.
(Obviously the Blackdown interviews go without saying as great bits of reading)
If I can find out the information retrieved from an interview from another done 6 months back what is the point? Original, subject specific questions aren't hard to conjure if the research is done properly. A great example of this within the realm of music journalism is Nardwar.
Very well researched, unique style, gets great answers from everyone he interviews and certainly nothing you'll find anywhere else.