LARRY JAFFEE
Contact: lsjaffee@gmail.com
917-291-2488 (NYC mobile)
Appearance on WBGO-FM jazz station the day before RSD 2024 talking about my favorite hoiday of the year.
Video of 2022 book launch events at Recirculation; and Looney Tunes on RSD. Coverage about the book on/in:
Ken Dashow's Beatles Revolution, Portia Sabin's The Future of What podcast, Record Collector News, the Record Store Day Podcast, Goldmine,
Author, Record Store Day: The Most Improbable
Comeback of the 21st Century (Rare Bird Books, LA)
MAKING VINYL 2024: Returning to Nashville, the vinyl manufacturing industry's only dedicated conference to the format's rebirth, Making Vinyl once again provided 300 professionals with the knowledge how to succeed in a resilient market that now shows young people the biggest consumers of records. The European event returns this fall in Haarlem, The Netherlands. Co-founding this conference in 2017 is one of my proudest career achievements.
BOOK TOUR CONTINUES: I was a featured speaker on May 16, 2024 at the Association of Recorded Sound Collections Association (ARSC) annual conference in St. Paul, MN, where I explained why vinyl the most improbable comeback of the 21st century. I also received an ARSC award for my RSD book. I am also scheduled to lecture on August 26 on the same subject at Long Island University, where on July 12 I will lecture on the secret Jewish lives of Joey Ramone and Lou Reed. Rutgers Institute of Jazz Studies promoted the RSD book on Jan. 29, 2024 with a special event about the vinyl revival. Seventy students of New York University's Steinhardt School of Music & Performing Arts heard my talk in Feb. '23. Click here to watch it. My graduate school alma mater Penn State featured me in their alumni magazine and the listen to the Lion Legacy podcast, in which I talk about my journalism career, the media business & RSD.
2023 PODCAST APPEARANCES
• Other Record Labels with Scott Orr
• Musonomics with Larry Miller
• The UYC Experience with Deal Radio's Marc Carey
• 900CHML (Toronto, Canada Radio)
“A complete and colourful book that needed to be written. Hats off to Larry Jaffee who stepped up to give us the definitive history of a phenomenon." —Gareth Murphy, author of Cowboys and Indies - The Epic History of the Record Industry
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Author, Educator, Creator
My book Record Store Day: The Most Improbable Comeback of the 21st Century, was published April 12, 2022 by Rare Bird Books for RSD's 15th anniversary. Order the standard paperback here or a store near you.
Jack White congratulates me on the book after his April 21, 2022 Brooklyn, NY concert
My favorite Record Store Day releases?
Here's a start, featured in The Big Takeover.
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Record Collector magazine (left) March 2022:
"Just before RSD, Larry Jaffee publishes a book on the history of the global event to date, while [Taylor] Swift extols the virtues of physical media...." Billie Eilish's retweet (right) gets 35,000 likes in minutes.
PHOTO: MICHAEL WEINTROB
Career Highlight: Introducing T Bone Burnett, closing Making Vinyl keynoter, June 24, 2022, Nashville, TN. Watch my book talk there. Making Vinyl returned to Music City June 3-5, 2024 for a smashing success. We're onto Holland in the fall.
ACADEMIC UPDATE
I will teach music writing at St. John's University this fall.
I have wanted to teach this class for literally 40 years. For the past 18 months, I lectured on journalism at Rutgers University in Newark, NJ, following a decade on the faculty at the New York Institute of Technology, where I received the 2021 Presidential Award for Excellence in Part-Time Teaching. Fresh off the picket line of Rutgers' historical April 2023 walkout, I published this piece on Medium, "Why the Rutgers Strike Is Different." My fall '23 senior magazine students revived a print magazine. Rutgers is home to the Institute of Jazz Studies, which invited me in late January 2024 to talk about the vinyl comeback.
Promoting the RSD book in Offenbach Germany, September 2022
New portrait (below by U.K. photographer William Ellis, holding a record that has special significance to me: Gil Scott-Heron's The First Minute of A New Day.
• Rest in Peace Kinky Friedman (January 1994 interview, On The Tracks)
• Musings About the 45-rpm, 7-inch Single (Copper)
• Bob Marley Biopic Reminds Me of 1987 Jamaican Vacation (The Riff)
• I Wish B.B. King Would Have Told Eric Clapton to F@#k Off (Bouncin')
• Why Can't the U.S. Sustain A Music Press?" (The Riff)
• "Have You Never Seen A Negro Before?"— a 1966 race lesson (4th Wave)
• The Sex Books My Mom Left Behind (Fourth Wave)
• Vinyl Resurgence Examine in Holland (Attack magazine)
• Ed Asner (1929-2021) was a Badass (Huffington Post & High Times)
• Prince Loved His Music on Physical Media (Making Vinyl)
• David Bowie Didn't Make Me Gay (Prism & Pen)
• The Return of Tower Records: You've Been Missed (Copper Magazine)
• Remembering Phil Ramone,10 Years Later (Copper Magazine)
• The Vinyl Industry's Resiliency & Growth Continues (Copper Magazine)
• Mobile Fidelity Weathers the Storm (Record Collector News)
• From VHS to Streaming: A Half-Century of Home Entertainment (Copper)
• Archival piece: 2007 interview with advertising legend George Lois (RIP)
• A trip to the Philips Museum in Eindhoven: Like A Kid in a Candy Store
• Lou Reed Remembered on the 50th Anniversary of Transformer
• Found in the bins: Review of David Bowie jazz tribute LP for trackingangle.com
• Considering the Compact Disc's 40th Anniversary for Copper magazine
• Analysis of the Mobile Fidelity audiophile scandal for Goldmine
• Liner notes for Skip James: The Complete 1931 Sessions (ORG Music)
• Eighties Music is Unfairly Maligned:100 albums you should know and love
• 2022 update of vinyl pressing situation and lost chapter from RSD book
• How high is up? CDs rebound too (Making Vinyl Europe 2022 program essay)
• Liner notes for Detective (debut album vinyl reissue by ORG Music, RSD 2022)
• Profile of Broadcasting & Cable Hall of Fame honoree Dan Mason,
former president of CBS Radio Network
• The Return of BeatleFest April 1-2, 2022 in New Jersey (my first in 20+ years
• Review of The Beatles: Get Back, much-needed context to a misunderstood period
• Liner notes for vinyl reissue of blues legend Big Bill Broonzy (ORG Music)
• How COVID-19 didn't hamper the vinyl manufacturing industry (BMI)
• My virtual presentation on how the vinyl comeback is the most improbable
development of the 21st century, defying all technological, economic and ecological logic
• Leonard Cohen's complex relationship with women
• The Doors' ascendancy as the most popular American band coincided with its label Elektra Records had been located in the same building where I've taught for the past 8 years
• The night that Jim Morrison was kidnapped by his publicist.
• I argue in the New York State – American Association of University Professors newsletter that higher education should use the pandemic to correct the gross inequalities and exploitation that adjunct professors suffer.
•Here's something from the archives: a 1991 piece in The Humanist titled, What Happened to Sex on Cable TV?
Next to record collecting, baseball is my second favorite pastime. With the 2024 Major League Baseball season in full swing, here's a new article about the trials and tribulations of being a Mets fan. From the vault a 2008 piece saying goodbye to Shea Stadium, and a 2015 World Series poem by a long-suffering Mets fan, written on the 7 train, following the Game 4 WS loss.
My son Jake Jaffee, 29, is an amateur baseball player and co-host of the New York Yankee podcast Pinstripe Pulse.
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About Me
This website is a good representation of the various writing I've done over the past several decades. By no means is it complete, and especially missing are the hundreds of articles I wrote as a staff editor for various now-defunct print and online publications or others that never digitized their pages and/or decommissioned servers.
Trained as a journalist, I use my analytical skills in everything I do by coupling critical thinking with a creative flair. As a wordsmith, I find interesting stories in what others might consider mundane. My B2B journalism background is particularly helpful to companies in need of online content creation, media strategy, public relations or marketing materials. I've worked as a senior copywriter at a digital advertising agency, and marketing consultant for clients in the U.S. and Europe.
My favorite quote is from Albert Einstein: "I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious." The great scientist was obviously being humble, but as a versatile jack of all trades, I can relate to the sentiment. After writing thousands of articles over nearly four decades, being curious about everything serves me well. I have a knack for breaking down jargon for lay audiences. Editors tell me nobody pitch the story ideas that I do. I took Apple Computer's ad campaign to heart: I think differently.
At several publishing companies, I managed editorial and production staffs and budgets, meeting deadlines for large Fortune 500 enterprises to entrepreneurial startups. I jumped on the Internet in the early 1990s and have since worked in new media, but remain fond of print media and analog technology, despite my iPhone and iPad never being far away.
As an entrepreneur, I published and edited for 25 years and 100 issues a quarterly newspaper about the popular British television series EastEnders. I turned over the reins of the Walford Gazette to a contributor in the spring of 2018. The publication resulted in two successful self-published books, Albert Square & Me and Walford State of Mind, and a prototype magazine called UK:Cue, celebrating the cultural exchange between Britain and America in film, theatre & television that was backed by a successful Kickstarter campaign.
As a college professor specializing in communication arts, my goal is to get my students – St. John's University in Queens, NY– to think like journalists, much in the way Professor Kingsfield’s objective in the 1970s law school drama The Paper Chase was to get them “think like lawyers.” I first taught on the college level in the mid-1980s, after which I concentrated on my magazine publishing career. I returned to the classroom in 2013 with the goal of improving my students' media literacy.
Obviously, the technology available in the digital age is far greater than it was in 1986. We now explore how photographs, text, graphics, and audio, as well as data visualization tools, bring to life compelling stories on computer screens and mobile devices. But the key – no matter what medium – remains vivid writing and coming up with a compelling story.
Current / Recent Academic Activities
• Adjunct Assistant Professor, St. John's University (Queens, NY)
teaching Music Writing (starting September 2024)
• Lecturer, Rutgers University (Newark, NJ). (current)
teaching Basic Newsreporting & Newswriting, and Global Journalism
• Adjunct Assistant Professor, New York Institute of Technology
2013-2022 Recipient of 2021 NYIT Presidential Award for Excellence in Part-Time Teaching. Faculty Scholar 2015-2020
• Adjunct instructor, Marywood University (Scranton, PA). Jan.-May '22
• Adjunct Instructor, Mercy College (NY) Sept. '21-Feb. '22.
•.Courses developed and taught include: English composition; JOUR 101; Narrative Storytelling; Digital Storytelling; Crisis Communications (graduate course); Advisor to award-winning student newspaper Manhattan Globe (https://manhattanglobe.net); Advertising Copywriting; Advanced Public Relations; Sports Writing & Reporting; Global Reporting; Social Media in Theory & Practice; Broadcast Reporting; and The Business of New Media
• Adjunct Instructor, Borough of Manhattan Community College (CUNY),
Sept.-Dec. 2019
• Adjunct Instructor, St. Joseph's College, Jan. 2016-Dec. 2018
Extra-Curricular Activities
Co-Founder & Conference Chairman, Making Vinyl (https://makingvinyl.com) 2017-current
• Co-Founded in 2017 B2B conference that celebrates the global rebirth of the record manufacturing industry.
•Conceive program theme, invite keynoters and other speakers, edit program guide, write marketing and website copy
• Ran four successful in-person events, two in Detroit, Los Angeles, Berlin (Germany), Nashville, and Frankfurt (Germany).
Contributor, Copper magazine; Goldmine magazine; Record Collector News; trackingangle.com; ORG Music
2010 - 2020
Contributor, SC Magazine
• Write feature and news articles about the constantly evolving field of cybersecurity and secure computing, including ebooks, special reports, and scripts about milestones in the field.
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Editorial meeting of the award-winning student newspaper the Manhattan Globe, which I launched for NYIT in 2016.
Education
Pennsylvania State University
Graduated June 1986 with M.A. in Journalism
Awarded Graduate Assistantship for my year
Taught JOUR 101 and popular culture courses
Master's project on how MTV changed the record industry
Studied empirical research methodology
Hofstra University
Graduated with B.A. in Communication Arts, Journalism
Minored in Sociology
Editor-in-chief, Hofstra Chronicle: awarded by Society of Collegiate Journalists the Best Weekly Newspaper in '79-'80 during my tenure
Who's Who Among American College & University Students, 1980
In 1983, completed continuing-education paralegal course in legal research at Hofstra School of Law
© 2023 by Larry Jaffee