Ian Anderson used to post to uk.music.folk, and ticked quite a few people off when explaining (or not) why fRoots didn't cover the UK folk club and session scene. I wasn't particularly bothered about that, since there are always other ways to find out about what's going on here and I agreed with Ian that detailed coverage would be a waste of trees.

I was more bothered about the magazine not covering similar scenes elsewhere. I've travelled a lot round Europe over the last 25 years, and my knowledge of the languages and musical cultures of the places I've been to has been quite variable. I can read French quite well but don't have any idea how to locate something like a traditional music session in France. I hardly know any Hungarian but can do much better there. I know even less Croatian or Slovak but got lucky a few times in Croatia, Bosnia and Slovakia; I'll be in Montenegro this autumn but have no reason to suppose I'll get lucky again.

So the main thing I want in a magazine that purports to cover the traditional music of the world is where to find the stuff in the wild. fRoots doesn't attempt to provide that information, or didn't last time I looked at it. I once asked Ian if he'd like an article about the music in a place I was thinking of going to that isn't much written about; he replied that I'd have to suggest recordings to go along with it. Since the locals have been more preoccupied in the last few years with getting their electricity working again, fixing broken windows and covering shellholes with tarpaulin than with running recording studios, that wasn't an option. It seemed that fRoots's policy was that genres that weren't represented on CD would never be covered.

I wasn't expecting a detailed guide to the best bars for singalongs in Reunion or a directory of fluteplaying shepherds in Kurdistan, but there are ways to present that sort of information without coming across as a complete anorak.