Matthew Horton reads too much into yesterday’s comment pieces.

Interesting - if slight - editorial schism on the Guardian site this week, where hooded claw Maggoty Lamb (via the late Charlie Gillett) pinpoints the mid-80s demise of the NME to its desertion of black music, while Michael Hann, current editor of the physical Guardian's Friday Film & Music pullout, lets slip the dropping of UK urban albums from his reviews section. In the comments area of a piece about divisive cash-for-reviews company The Men From The Press, Hann admits his roster of writers lacks specialist knowledge of R&B and hip hop, so prefers to avoid rather than cover with half an arse.

The Guardian's shift is governed by market forces, of course - if budgets are slashed, niche freelancers go down the tubes, and their niche concerns with them. Hann is at pains to point out that urban music is given ample space in dedicated features, and fair enough, but these are necessarily occasional. At the same time, last Friday's reviews included albums by bastions of commerce Wooden Shjips, The Ruby Suns and Peggy Sue; hardly sops to the advertisers. Hann steers a strong team of writers, but if he's losing whole genres because he cannot afford to pay specialist freelancers, perhaps the contracted group needs a shake-up instead?

Naturally, the Guardian is not obliged to cover anything it doesn't think its readers want. Still, there's a sense of glee in Maggoty Lamb's reporting of Gillett's told-you-so to the NME (and its immediate rivals). As ML says, Gillett decried the established rock press's blithe avoidance of black music, flinging the accusation that they had "abandoned everything [they] were meant to be doing" and confessing he was "glad" that the more inclusive likes of Smash Hits had triumphed in the landgrab.

Its rivals have gone the way of all inkies, but the NME ploughs on in its pallor, unrecognisable from the weighty wodge of rancorous paper that in 1985 voted Marvin Gaye's What's Going On the greatest album of all time. They know what their readers want. But do their readers know themselves? Opportunistic flirtations with Arctic Monkeys and Calvin Harris, plus a shrewd willingness to play the game, have flipped Dizzee Rascal into the mainstream, onto the NME's cover and over the indie kids' kneejerk defences. He needn't be a one-off. Until there's a sea-change in editorial policy, there can be more happy confluences of events.

Presumably Film & Music's readers are neither buying the Friday paper for its dense coverage of urban music, nor turning away for any lack of it, but it couldn't hurt to have the variety. Even if the newspaper has no moral (or commercial) reason to bear responsibility for black music's national profile, the fact that its contributors can recognise - by mild endorsement of opinion - the potential pitfalls of tacit sacrifice of an entire genre surely calls for some searching of the soul.