221
absolute bottom of the totem pole.
It's
something you do because you're
driven
to do it."
JOHN SWENSON, WRITER,
SENIOR EDITOR, JAZZ.COM
"I wanted to be a writer first,"
says
music journalist John Swenson,
whose
first byline appeared in his high
school
newspaper. "Growing up during the
1960s in New York, I was drawn to
the
coffeehouse scene in Greenwich
Village--the beatniks, folk music,
and
blues." He entered Manhattan College
in
1968 to study physics ("I was on a
full
scholarship. If you're smart,
you're
suppose to study sciences."), but
switched to English after his first year.
He
worked on the college newspaper
staff,
first writing film reviews, then a
record
review column, progressing to
feature
editor and editor-in-chief. "I really learned
what it is to be a journalist and I learned a
lot about your responsibility to your
audience," says Swenson. "It was the best train-
ing to learn to be a journalist." After
contributing to numerous underground newspa-
pers for two years, he was hired
by
Crawdaddy magazine in 1974 as a feature
editor.
CASE STUDY:
"It is really interesting to see
the
next wave of people coming into
Rolling Stone who are Ivy
League graduates, who expected
journalism to be a fast track to
glib success. Virtually none of
those people have stayed jour-
nalists. They became publicists
or talking heads or advertising
people."
Write, write, write--for your
school newspaper or a local
music magazine; write articles
to pitch to publications; be
working on something all the
time.
CAREER
TIPS
THE LEAST FAVORITE THING ABOUT THIS
JOB:
"Not being able to hire people when my budget
freezes."
THE BEST THING ABOUT THIS JOB:
"Working with young writers. First of all, when
you edit people, you have
an exchange of ideas. More interesting things
always happen when people
exchange ideas; the faster the exchange, the
better. It's like watching a
tennis match; you sharpen your skills. I don't
know what I'm going to say
before I say a sentence and you don't know what
I'm going to say. You may
have some stock questions you're going to ask
me, but the nature of the
conversation is a mystery. As it unfolds, we
both learn things. That's what
happens when you work with people as an
editor."
VOICES
OF
EXPERIENCE
User Comments Add a comment…