• Home
  • About
    • CultureCrash: The Blog
    • Culture Crash: The Book
    • Scott Timberg
    • Contact
  • Culture Crash: The Book
    • Culture Crash: The Book
    • Book Events
  • Other AJBlogs
  • ArtsJournal

CultureCrash

Scott Timberg on Creative Destruction

The Winner-Take-All Culture: Beyonce’ Edition

October 9, 2014 by Scott Timberg

[contextly_auto_sidebar id=”s7QjDjoKc7tKlcAxYUDRApP9riUN4cz9″]

NO, you’re not reading an article from the Onion, but rather a news report of an an extreme and literal instance of the winner-take all culture.

This brief story from Poynter, “News station lays off journalists, will play Beyoncé songs instead,” quotes Houston Chronicle 175px-I_Am..._Tour_11_croppedreporter David Barron:

Radio One owns the station, known as News 92 FM. Its employees “were notified shortly after 9 a.m. Wednesday that the news format was being dropped and the station rebranded – for the moment – as B921, playing around-the-clock, commercial-free music by Beyoncé,” Barron reports.

Of course, I’m not worried about a larger wave of radio journalists being executed and replaced by overhyped R&B singers. But as a demonstration of where we are today, this is weirdly apt.

My soon-to-be-released book, Culture Crash, gets into the way the larger winner-take-all-society, which has been best described by Cornell economist Robert H. Frank, works out for the creative class. Until then, this example will have to do.

 

Filed Under: celebrity, creative class, Culture Crash the book, journalism, Winner-take-all

Scott Timberg

I'm a longtime culture writer and editor based in Los Angeles; my book "CULTURE CRASH: The Killing of the Creative Class" came out in 2015. My stories have appeared in The New York Times, Salon and Los Angeles magazine, and I was an LA Times staff writer for six years. I'm also an enthusiastic if middling jazz and indie-rock guitarist. (Photo by Sara Scribner) Read More…

Culture Crash, the Book

My book came out in 2015, and won the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award. The New Yorker called it "a quietly radical rethinking of the very nature of art in modern life"

I urge you to buy it at your favorite independent bookstore or order it from Portland's Powell's.

Culture Crash

Here is some information on my book, which Yale University Press published in 2015. (Buy it from Powell's, here.) Some advance praise: With coolness and equanimity, Scott Timberg tells what in less-skilled hands could have been an overwrought horror story: the end of culture as we have known … [Read More...]

Follow Me

Follow Us on TwitterFollow Us on RSSFollow Us on E-mail

Archives

@TheMisreadCity

Tweets by @TheMisreadCity
October 2014
M T W T F S S
 12345
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
2728293031  
« Sep   Nov »

An ArtsJournal Blog

Recent Posts

  • Scott Timberg Has Passed Away
  • Ojai Music Festival and JACK Quartet
  • What’s in a Name?
  • Time Pauses For Valentin Silvestrov
  • The Perverse Imagination of Edward Carey

Copyright © 2025 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in