Speaking from a position of complete ignorance of how journalism works here but anyway.

So The Guardian is clearly cutting costs across the paper and on the culture side film and music seems to havw got to a point where they are concentrating on the big industry releases where much of the content can come straight from press releases or put together pretty swiftly. I get this - they are catering to a broad audience and that audience will be most interested in big releases, perhaps especially when catering to a global audience and the advertising requirement to drive traffic and all that stuff. And personally I don't have an issue with having loads of stuff on Kanye or Adele etc just that they seem to be hitting a point where there is virtually nothing else and in the long term this is surely the road to oblivion.

I'm not saying they don't have some good original content e.g. there is a good piece on use of modern classical techniques in Burn the Witch today, but this stuff seems increasingly rare.

In one of the comments on a Beyonce article one of the music staff (can't remember which one but wasn't Petridis or Hamm) said something along the lines of 'go read Pitchfork' if you don't like what we are doing. Fair enough as most of the commentators are insufferable but isn't there some room for collaboration here? I mean I'm not a fan of Paul Simon at all but the interview on here is a great read and surely the sort of content The Guardian readership would love. Wouldn't it be beneficial to all if a small fee could be paid to writers and sites for reproducing articles like this? Or are we actually at a point where budgets are literally zero?

Wouldn't it better use of staff time to be reading specialist original content and establishing a relationship with those websites rather than rewriting press releases or buzzfeed articles. Maybe even ditch writing any reviews or original stuff in house and effectively outsourcing this stuff?

Thoughts? I know nothing of this stuff and I know a fair few of you will so excuse the ignorance.

Tldr - the death of music journalism etc.