The Culture Journalist

This week’s missive, our ninth, is the last you’ll be hearing from us before Election Day 2020. And because it’s pretty hard to think about anything other than the brain-melting insanity of American political discourse right now, we thought we’d bring on one of our favorite culture writers—someone who also happens to be an intrepid labor reporter and newsroom union organizer—to discuss just that....

Earlier this season, we examined the live music industry’s fight for survival in a pandemic that has put concerts indefinitely on hold. This week, we’re taking a look at what this year has been like for musicians — especially when it comes to navigating an industry that has moved almost entirely online. Faced with a sudden loss of touring income, far and away the biggest revenue source for most mu...

Confused about what’s going on with TikTok? So are we. But it’s probably the most “2020” story of 2020 — a perfect storm of geopolitics, national security, social media, pop music, and of course, Donald Trump. In August, Trump issued an executive order promising to ban the platform from operating in the U.S. if its Chinese parent company ByteDance doesn’t sell the platform to an American bidder by...

This week on The Culture Journalist, we’re taking a break from 2020—who doesn’t need one?—and traveling back to a time in music and culture that we’ve been feeling a bit nostalgic for. We’re talking about the halcyon days of 2013, a year that was full-to-bursting with exciting sounds from the underground , including DJ Rashad's Double Cup , Arca's mixtape &&&&& , and Deafheaven's Sunbather . It al...

For independent artists who rely on touring as their primary source of income, the pandemic has been financially devastating . For independent venues who host them when they come to town, it’s an extinction-level threat. Part of the problem is that nobody knows when it’ll be safe to open for business again, mostly because nobody knows when we’ll finally have access to a vaccine. But the live music...

Los Angeles native Jeff Weiss is no stranger to the heartbreak of watching the newspaper the shaped your understanding of the city where you grew up, and the people and institutions within it that are worth fighting for, become a shell of its former self. Three years ago, when a group of Republican-donor investors purchased the LA Weekly and laid off almost the entirety of its editorial staff , th...

Back in April, The New York Times reported that an estimated 36,000 U.S. media workers had been laid off or furloughed—or taken pay cuts—in the first month of the pandemic alone. One of them was this week’s guest and friend-of-the-pod Drew Millard, a North Carolina-born journalist who got his start writing about hip-hop at VICE’s Noisey and has spent the past few years writing about things like go...

Earlier this Summer, The Culture Journalist’s Emilie Friedlander and independent journalist Joy Crane published a 10,000-word investigation about a self-proclaimed “cult” that emerged out of the irony-obsessed Weird Facebook scene of the mid-00s. The piece, titled “ Inside the Social Media Cult that Convinces Young People to Give Up Everything ,” follows the story of a musician named Matthew who m...

We’re kicking off the pod this week with VICE senior writer Kristin Corry , a New York-based culture journalist whose work focuses on the intersection of music and race. When protests against police violence and institutional racism erupted across the country earlier this Spring, Kristin wrote a powerful essay called “The Music Industry Fails Black People Every Day,” dissecting the ways in which m...

Welcome to The Culture Journalist , a podcast about the wild west of culture, counterculture, and the media in the year 2020. Think of it as your guide to understanding the arts, politics, and the anxieties of everyday life through the lens of culture reporting—hosted by Emilie Friedlander and Andrea Domanick, two freelance journalists from opposite sides of the country. Culture doesn't exist in a...