Welcome to the Listen Magazine editor’s blog, The Listener. I’m your founding editor in chief, Ben Finane.
Listen: Life with Classical Music is in fourth year of publication. Our print quarterly launched during a time when many online zines and blogs were gleefully predicting the death of ‘old media’ with such tasteful features as ‘Magazine Death Watch’ and ‘Magazine Death Pool.’ And while magazine ranks have certainly thinned over the past decade, it is now clear (and frankly unsurprising) that demand for stylish, relevant, inquisitive, considered print publications will remain. And Listen will continue to be the American voice of classical music.
In the late nineties and through the aughts, tensions arose — with the rise of technology and the (then-with-a-capital-‘I’) internet — between newspapers and blogs, books and Kindles, radio and streaming audio, television and Hulu, CDs and MP3s, et cetera. Different media were pitted against each other and the received wisdom was that ‘new media’ would ultimately engulf ‘old media’ and it was only a matter of time before the total annihilation of television, radio, newspapers, magazines and the compact disc.
Well, that didn’t happen. What has happened, to everyone’s benefit, is that readers, listeners and viewers now have more available destinations where they can read, listen and watch — and that’s fantastic!
And now readers of Listen will have another classical-music destination in the form of my blog, and soon, through free and comprehensive online access to back issues of Listen. Enjoy!
