What is your current job?
I am a freelancer. I write when I can for who will take a pitch of mine. I’ve had a couple of pieces recently in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Alta Journal and Dame magazine. My first book, a highly acclaimed oral history just came out earlier this year. It’s called “The Freaks Came Out To Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Newspaper That Changed American Culture.”
What was your first byline?
If we are talking professionally, it was for The Stranger for Daniel Housman sometime in 1993 or 1994. I forget what the assignment was. I know it was a music review of some kind.
But I published my first byline in the student paper in junior high for Cannon in Las Vegas. That was a review of a George Michael album, (probably Faith). I went on to edit the high school newspaper and yearbook at Valley High School. And I worked at The Daily, at the University of Washington. I was writing for them when I was writing for The Stranger. Then, a new music editor came in and she didn’t like techno so she stopped using me.
What was your first real job in journalism?
My first real job in journalism was at the Village Voice. I first applied to be an intern in 1997 after a photographer at the Daily, Samantha Appleton (now very famous and with many accolades) had done an internship and loved it. I went with another friend who was on staff at the Daily, Kathryn McGrath, and we both were interns. She worked for Richard Goldstein. My internship was with Brit Frank Owen, who was known for reporting on the scuzzy side of nightlife. (He proved the Michael Alig club kid murder case and did a lot of reporting on Peter Gatien, the Limelight owner and his trials). While I was interning, I fact-checked and wrote short listings and worked on a cover story with Frank about female DJs. My internship ended after three months and I went back to Seattle where I lived and started writing very regularly for the Seattle Weekly, and doing their calendar listings part time.
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How did you get it?
I ended up back at the Voice in a roundabout way. A friend told me that CMJ magazine was hiring an editor, and I took the editing test. I got the job and I moved out for the job. But I was incredibly unhappy within a few weeks of getting it because the location was terrible and hard to reach from where I was living, I was making less than I had in Seattle after those pesky NYC taxes were taken out, it was a small staff of all men that didn’t include me in meetings and I didn’t feel valued, and the copyediting process was so convoluted (I’ve never seen anything like it before or since) that it was just miserable.
My old factchecking chief from the Voice knew I was in town again and she called me up and said, “so I have a full-time job or a part-time job, which one do you want?” So I left and went to the Voice. The first few weeks I was there, the person who had the club listings column left, and I was the only person on staff who “spoke techno” as I liked to say, and so I got this column called Club Crawl, which was small but had a large audience and made it my own.
I was very lucky. I started writing listings, and small features and eventually got a second column called Fly Life that was sort of like a lesser version of Michael Musto (as I liked to refer to it), and that kept me going for a long time. I left when New Times fired me for matters of taste, as they did for everyone at the paper, went to L.A. just in time for the Great Recession and suffered through on unemployment for a few years. Then things started picking up with the Daily Beast, writing weekly for them and the great editor Kate Aurthur. I found L.A. very isolating as a freelancer and I moved back to Seattle, freelanced for a few years and got a job at The Seattle Times as a feature writer; I left to edit the Stranger just in time for Trump’s presidency, which was a terrible and exciting time for journalism. And then I left and worked on the book, “The Freaks Came Out To Write,” an oral history about the Voice, and now seven years later, here we are.
What advice do you have for people looking to break into journalism?
Don’t.
I wish I could be more optimistic but this is a brutal business. Unless this is the only thing you want and know how to do, do not go into journalism. Making a living is brutal and getting harder by the year. I am making less than I was 20 years ago. When I interviewed all the legendary people at the Voice, they mocked the pay rates back in 1960 and they were in disbelief that the pay has dropped back to that or is even less.
But, if you absolutely MUST….
If you want to work in journalism, intern if you can afford it at the place you want to work for. I suppose you could start a newsletter. But this would all mean that you have money to back you while you are getting your sea legs. It’s a problematic situation in journalism that the people who can afford to pursue it are from high income backgrounds or Ivy Leagues. It means that the reporting is often out of touch with reality.
It might be better these days to work at small local papers in towns you wouldn’t think of normally. You won’t make a lot of money, but you will work, and you will learn the bones of the trade. And local news is becoming increasingly more important, because so many small newspapers are being gobbled up by bigger entities or shut down entirely.
I think a successful young journalist will have to be very fluent in multiple formats— video/TikTok, data journalism, shoe leather reporting— and must be nimble and able to meet deadlines. If you don’t meet deadlines, there are a hundred people right behind you who do. They might not be as talented, but if they are easier to work with, they will climb.
Find Tricia on her website, LinkedIn and X or buy her book here.