Boys Against Girls Against the Brisbane Street Press – part 2

The Four Street Press Papers

Rave (Disclaimer: I photograph for Rave)

If you want something reviewed, Rave are your people: 183 reviews put them a country mile ahead of the second placed Time Off, who published a measly 97 reviews over the same five weeks.

In terms of published articles and counting all contributions equally, Rave published the most content from its contributors in those five weeks, 360 named-contributors worth, compared to the 286 from Time Off. Of those 360, 291 were by male contributors, 69 by female contributors, an almost 4/1 split.

Time Off

I think Time Off must have read Part 1 of this feature. Having mentioned that they hadn’t had a single female on the cover in four months and a single solo female artists in eight months, they treated us with three in four weeks; Kate Nash, Joanna Newsom and Adalita. Good work, keep it up.

If Rave do reviews, Time Off do interviews; 120 in the five weeks, compared to 95 in Rave.

In terms of published articles and counting all contributions equally, Time Off published 286 contributions over the five weeks, 249 by male writers, 37 by female writers, a 7/1 male/female split.

Scene

Every week I pick Scene up, quickly flick through it and put it in the pile for recycling. Over the last couple of years it seems to have started to move away from dance music and include a lot more content on rock/indie/alternative music; I’m not sure if this has been a good move for them or not. But actually reading the magazine in more detail for just about the first time, I was surprised at the amount of non-music articles are in there, especially the theatre reviews, which were really noticeable when you started totting up the number of live reviews. Although it probably also helped that it was festival season, it was a surprise that in terms of contributed content, there was an almost identical amount of live performance review contributions in Scene over the five weeks as there were in Rave and Time Off.

In terms of published articles and counting all contributions equally, Scene published 218 contributions over the five weeks, 144 by male writers, 74 by female writers, a 2/1 male/female split.

Out of the four weekly street press publications, Scene was the magazine that had the best balance between male and female contributors and a pleasantly surprising 1/1split for the live reviews. The improved balance between male and female contributors in Scene also helped the bring the overall numbers for the four Brisbane street press publications over the five weeks down from what would have been a even higher imbalance between male and female writers.

3D World

When I lived in Sydney I picked up 3D World for a week or two and then realised that as an exclusively dance and clubbing music publication, it offered me nothing, so stopped picking it up to go with my copies of Drum Media and Brag. The 3D World that gets published now, at least in Brisbane, is a different beast (I’m guessing it’s the same in Sydney too). Although there’s an obvious dance music slant, there’s a lot of bespoke one-off features and articles, and it’s not just music; it’s a refreshing change from the more typical street press cycle of interviews, reviews and live reviews of some form or other.

As pointed out in Part 1, 3D World was the publication where it was hardest to work out the gender of the contributors listed in the masthead, as a result of the extensive use of pseudonyms. However, I think there was less of an issue when it came to tallying up the content in the magazine over the five weeks.

In terms of published articles and counting all contributions equally, 3D World published 170 contributions over the five weeks, 131 by male writers, 39 by female writers, a 3/1 male/female split.

(continued overleaf)

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by ed

Justin Edwards is a regular contributor to Brisbane's weekly street press magazine, Rave and his photographs have also been published in Rolling Stone, Plan B magazine, Mess+Noise, the Herald-Sun and Blunt, as well as on numerous music and band websites.

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