You can’t start “Journalism” without a j-o
Last month, a blogger named DJ Xplosive put up a controversial post on the Boosie verse-selling side hustle of Julia Beverly, the founder and editor in chief of Ozone magazine. The story spawned a lot of debate about whether the email exchange with Beverly brokering a deal on behalf of Boosie’s management actually constituted “scamming rappers” as alleged in the post’s headline.
With all the attention paid to debating label clearances and the highly quotable “What’s the most you’re willing to pay” question, the situation’s true ickiness was hiding in plain sight.
There’s no real case to be made that Beverly was dealing fraudulently with the informant George. She was up-front about the verses being uncleared and about the fact that for enough money the label would likely clear them.
DJ Xplosive was working the wrong angle entirely. There’s no evidence that Beverly was scamming rappers, but she’s clearly scamming readers. Some of you may not remember this, but before the internet we had this thing called journalism. And one of the norms and standards of journalism was a separation of church and state between advertising and editorial, and at least the illusion of striving for objectivity.
In those days, when rapper Benzino muscled his way into co-ownership of The Source and people saw the impact it had on album reviews, ad selection and features, it killed the magazine’s credibility in a hurry.
The impropriety in Beverly’s case isn’t about lying to a potential Boosie verse buyer. It’s the bigger picture question: Why is the publisher of a national music magazine using Twitter to hawk verses by one of her magazine’s subjects in the first place?
Beverly hints at her ability to multi-task these ethical quandaries right out of her hair:
“This is going through my booking agency, Agency Twelve, so technically it doesn’t have anything to do with Ozone, but we could probably at least post the record on the Ozonemag.com site when it’s done.”
Afta the scam it’s the afta-party
Quick aside: My wife was pregnant with our first kid and she was complaining about morning sickness to her Sicilian grandmother until her nonna coldly replied “What do you think? You get to be a mother for nothing?”
Well, Julia Beverly is a bad mother and you don’t get to be her for nothing either.
So, after the cease-and-desist note to DJ Xplosive didn’t get his post off the web, Beverly put out an expose of her own. Her offensive (diversion?) was “Scam Afta [sic] Scam”, a 12,000 word Ozone feature which was giddily posted and email blasted around the web right after Thanksgiving weekend, available for download in pdf or wtf rtf format.
Again Beverly showed off her disregard for archaic journalistic ideas about conflict of interest when in the epic’s conclusion she reveals “I too have been bitten by the vampires to the tune of $5,000″, in spite of which she has “made every attempt to be reasonable and objective”. Some might argue that “every attempt” would include assigning an uninvolved reporter to write this story and reaching out to the accused parties for their comments. But that’s not how Julia Beverly rolls.
Some might even point out that if a music magazine publisher wasn’t running a booking agency in the first place they could have avoided being part of their own news stories.
And if Woody had gone right to the police, none of this would have ever happened.
But on the day the article hit the web, Beverly and Ozone were paid handsomely in props and backlinks for the rambling expose.
Eventually the Beverly haters spoke up, like Sandra Rose who vouched for Gucci’s management and took issue with Beverly “casting dispersions [sic]” despite her own long history of alleged shady business.
I don’t know who’s lying in the case of Beverly vs Gucci’s management and I don’t particularly care. What I have learned is that people down south need to learn how to get to the fucking point. 12,000 words? Too bad she doesn’t have an editor. Oh, wait…. And then the reply from Gucci camp came in the form of an hour long podcast. Sorry, we’re just not that into you.
This is all a mess to follow because there’s no clear horse to root for. Sandra Rose. Julia Beverly. Bloggers you never heard of with an axe to grind. Managers and promoters doing shady stuff, really? Is there a trustworthy voice in the bunch or is it just a lot of vendettas and agendas possibly on all sides?
All I know is Beverly gets the crown for the most absurd internet villain for the stunt she pulled while promoting her article.
SEOMG!
The same day Ozone blasted our inboxes with “Scam Afta Scam”, DJ Xplosive was on Twitter pointing out an illegitimate Ning site that had been created using the name and logo of his company Element 9 Muzik for the sole purpose of promoting the Beverly story.
There were only two members on the phony site: DJ Xplosive and Isis Wisdom, a writer who has been highly critical of Beverly for a long time. The one post on the site came from this Isis Wisdom impersonating avatar hyping up Beverly’s new article.
So it seems that Julia Beverly – in a fit of diabolical genius or junior high school foolishness – created a fake site looking like the business site of one of her enemies, then had the fake account of another enemy sing her praises. Again, not exactly the kind of behavior we’re used to seeing from a magazine publisher.
Think about the level of deceitfulness and pettiness involved in creating that Ning site, the big campaign push for getting people to link to the Ozone article and the oddness of writing an article accusing people of fraud without so much as mentioning that a few weeks earlier you had been publicly accused of fraud.
Beverly was flexing her true e-gangsta with this coordinated attack. Since Xplosive hadn’t taken his post down as her lawyers had requested, maybe Beverly was just doing her best to bury his story. Was the whole Ozone article nothing but an attempt to compete on the “Julia Beverly scam” search phrase? Was this all done as part of some brilliant SEO scheme? My world started spinning as I began to consider the likelihood that a questionable journalist was some kind of evil mastermind. Was this Verbal Klimt revealed as Keyser Söze?
Then I saw the fake Julia Beverly account that someone created in retaliation on that Ning site where registration had been left open. “I have a penis” she said. And I realized I might have been giving everybody way too much credit.
