The Story Behind Zinery

I run a music blog. Nothing unusual about that on its own, there are thousands of us, all covering the shows and scenes we actually care about, mostly for free, mostly because we can't imagine not doing it. What's a little more unusual, maybe, is how much of my week doesn't go toward the writing or the photography at all.

Right now I work with around 15 contributors. Photographers and writers who cover shows I can't be at myself, which is most of them. On paper that's a good problem to have. In practice it means my inbox is where the actual job happens, and the actual job has almost nothing to do with music.

What a normal week looks like

A contributor emails me asking to cover a show. I check whether anyone else has already asked, which usually means scrolling back through my inbox or squinting at a Google Spreadsheet I've been maintaining by hand, hoping I didn't miss the other email that came in an hour earlier from someone else asking for the same night. I add a row. I reply to confirm. I reply to the other person to say it's taken.

After the show, the photos come in by email. Not through some clean upload system, just email. Then it's on me: download everything, resize it, rename it (because "IMG_4821.jpg" is not going anywhere near my site), and upload it into WordPress. That part really sucks. It's not hard, it's just slow, repetitive, and it happens after every single show, every single week.

Then I actually write and publish the post. Then I go back and email the contributor to say it's live, because they deserve to know, and because half the time that's how they find out at all.

None of this is the fun part. None of it is why I started a music blog.

The part that made it personal

I'm a photographer myself, which I think is actually why this bothered me as much as it did. I know what it feels like to be on the other end of that email, to send your photos off after a late show and just wait, not knowing if they've been seen, edited, or forgotten in a folder somewhere. I've been the contributor chasing a status update as much as I've been the editor who forgot to send one. Both sides of that are frustrating, and both sides are completely avoidable. It's not a people problem. It's a process that was never built for how many of us are actually doing this.

The spreadsheet wasn't the issue. Spreadsheets are fine. The issue was that everything lived in a different place, requests in email, status in a spreadsheet, photos in a downloads folder, the actual post in WordPress, and every single handoff between those places needed me, personally, doing something manually, every time. Fifteen contributors times all of that, every week, adds up to a lot of hours that had nothing to do with music at all.

Why I started building something

This September, I finally sat down and admitted that I wasn't going to fix this by getting more organized. I'd tried. A better spreadsheet, a clearer email template, a personal rule to check my inbox at set times instead of constantly. It helped a little. It didn't fix the actual shape of the problem, which is that requests, confirmations, photos, and publishing were never designed to talk to each other.

So I started building the thing I actually needed: one place where a contributor can request a show and immediately see if someone else already has it, where photos land somewhere that isn't email, and where getting from "show happened" to "post is live" doesn't require me manually touching every single file along the way. That's Zinery. It didn't start as a product idea. It started as me trying to get my Tuesday nights back.

Why I'm building it in public, on this blog

If any part of this sounds like your own week, the duplicate requests, the resizing, the email you meant to send but forgot, then you already know why I'm doing this. I'm not writing this blog because I think music blogs need more content about SEO and admin work. I'm writing it because I spent years assuming this was just what running a blog with contributors involved, and I don't think it has to be.

I'll be sharing what I'm building here as it comes together, along with everything else I've learned trying to run this properly: how to manage photo passes without losing your mind, how to actually coordinate a team of contributors, how to get a post out while it still matters. Some of it will be useful whether or not you ever touch Zinery. Some of it is genuinely just me thinking out loud about a problem I've been living with for a long time.

If you want to follow along as it takes shape, or you're curious enough to try it early, that's exactly who this is for.