Writing reviews
We have an excellent and experienced team of reviewers writing for Musicweb. However, we are always seeking to expand the group of people who write for us. In part this is to cover those existing reviewers who for various reasons either retire or are obliged to step back for a while due to other commitments. Even more pressingly, though, the record labels continue to issue an encouragingly large number of new releases – usually at least 200 every month – and we want to be able to cover as many of these as we can. So, the more reviewers we have in our team, the better.
You don’t have to be a professional journalist or musician. The sort of people we’re keen to attract are experienced listeners to recorded music who are keen firstly to share with other people their enthusiasm for the music they hear and secondly to help our readers to decide whether or not to invest in a particular recording.
Musicweb has never operated behind a paywall and we intend to keep it that way. For that reason, I’m afraid we can’t pay our ccontributors but you do get to keep the recordings that you review. Some of our contributors review from discs, others from digital downloads. We welcome new contributors who use either medium. However, because the cost of posting discs overseas has become prohibitive we ask all new reviewers who live outside the UK to review from downloads.
If you would like to know more, please contact me through this address: enquiries@musicwebinternational.com
John Quinn
Editor in Chief, Musicweb International
Preparing reviews
MWI’s new site employs the WordPress publishing system, which is very easy to use in terms of creating content like reviews. It is little different to using a word processing program such as MS Word, and you certainly don’t need to have any expertise in computer programming (or even using WordPress).
The basic process for preparing a review for publishing in WordPress is as follows:
- the review text is put onto a new WordPress page by the webmaster as a draft allocated to a given page preparer and date
- the draft reviews are easily accessed for editing from a list in the website’s administration section (which you would be given a log-in for)
- find the cover image for the recording, resize it, upload it and insert it into two locations on the review page
- find the unique identifying “code” for the Presto/Amazon/Arkiv sales links and paste them into the appropriate location on the page
- add a title and some simple indexing “tags” (e.g. Recommended, composer or reviewer name)
- convert from Draft to Scheduled, which is no more than clicking on the Schedule button
So it is relatively simple, once you get used to it.
You would be responsible for preparing a specific day’s batch each week. A batch comprises 6-8 reviews, and these are made available as Drafts usually a week in advance. It doesn’t matter if you do them all at the same time, or one at a time, as long as they are completed and ready to go before publishing. The estimated time to do the whole batch is 2-3 hours at the start, and that would come down to around 1 hour once you get used to the process.
The most important aspect of any commitment is that you need to be able to do this “every” week for an extended period. Obviously, there is scope for covering you for the occasional absence, but otherwise, it does need to be an ongoing commitment.
If you are interested in helping, please contact John Quinn via our email address: enquiries@musicwebinternational.com
