How to Write a "Vinyl is Back!" Story

Last Saturday marked Record Store Day, a global celebration that encourages folks to head down to their local record store and buy some vinyl. Pleasantly, the initiative has done wonders for local businesses. Besides boosting sales, Record Store Day also offers an invaluable service to writers: It presents us with a peg to hang our "Vinyl is Back!" stories.

The "Vinyl is Back!" piece has been a news staple for decades. It allows business reporters to let their hair down and jam a little with some funky tunage, just like back in their freewheeling J-School days. It also gives editors an assignment for music writers they don't particularly like.

As with any established genus of story, "Vinyl is Back!" articles follow a strictly enforced series of guidelines.

Headline
If the headline to your "Vinyl is Back!" story lacks a pun, you should hand over your badge and gun and retire. Luckily, headlines are usually in the hands of editors who love nothing more than writing gems like these:

"Grooves," Those Radial Notches on Records, is Also a Colloquial Term That Evokes a Sense of Familiar Yet Cool Comfort, Which is Appropriate Given the Resurgence of Vinyl

Do Kids Even Know What Records Are?
Pressed vinyl as a musical format is old. Children, on the other hand, are not old. What happens when these two things meet? Who cares, but write about it anyway, like this CBS report:

Schoolkids at P.S. 8 may not know exactly what the large round black thing is.

"It's, it's, uh, I don't know," one said.

"A CD?" another asks.

"It's a disk," said another.

Hey, if you were born in the age of digital sound, you might not know exactly how this it works, either. But they threw out guesses:

"It's something really old and it plays music."

"And it's so huge because in those days CDs hadn't been invented and this is kinda what it was."

"When you play it, it sings music out."

"It's a record!"

And ... it's coming back.

It's important to write about kids discovering their parents collections as if they are finding carefully hidden easter eggs or pornography, and -- just like with porno -- making an instant connection. From USA TODAY:

"There are tweens, teens and twentysomethings looking through Mom and Dad's record collection...All of a sudden Mom and Dad are a lot cooler than the kid might have expected."

And from TIME:

Many young listeners discovered LPs after they rifled through their parents' collections looking for oldies and found that they liked the warmer sound quality of records, the more elaborate album covers and liner notes that come with them, and the experience of putting one on and sharing it with friends, as opposed to plugging in some earbuds and listening alone.

On the next page, more tips on how to write your "Vinyl is Back!" story.

I dig vinyl, but anyone who says "it's back" is either purposely misleading you or just kidding themselves. Yes, sales were up 18% in 2012, but the overall #'s (4.6 million) were so small as to barely register. Vinyl will remain where it is (i.e. - a small, exclusive market for the sound aficionados) while cd's will eventually make there way there, trending lower and lower each year.