Andrew Unterberger Interview
Andrew Unterberger is a deputy editor at Billboard. He got his music writing start at Stylus, an online magazine I co-founded in 2002. Since then, he's worked at SPIN and done a good deal of writing about the Philadephia 76ers. (Anyone that follows him on Twitter will know his abiding fandom.)
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
Well of course it starts with you and Stylus Magazine! My friend Kareem Estefan and I applied to write for Stylus at the same time in 2003 I think, when we were in high school—he got in and I didn't, but after a little while, he recommended me and you gave me a shot. I ended up writing for Stylus until college, developing a voice of some sort, and discovering I was a little more interested in writing about pop music and pop culture than I was writing indie/underground record reviews. I started my first blog (Intensities in Ten Suburbs) as an offshoot off my Stylus writing, and also organized (along with you) my first staff-wide projects—staff lists of things like the best music videos of all-time, and also a web-only version of VH1's I Love the [Decade] series for the '90s (before VH1 started their own version—halfway through ours, annoyingly), which actually doubled as my high school senior project.
During my junior year of college, I also was part of the winning team on VH1's pop culture trivia show The World Series of Pop Culture, the money from which helped me considerably in taking the time to figure out what I was going to do after school—Stylus and all my other writing gigs had been for free, and I wasn't terribly optimistic about actually ever being paid to write. My first job out of college was a truly surreal part-time position writing trivia questions about TV shows for a market research company that was designed to test viewers' awareness of product placement within those shows. In the meantime, I also started blogging about Philadelphia sports for a blog I read regularly called The 700 Level—I noticed they were sorta lacking in Sixers coverage at the time, and I had just gotten heavily back into that team and Philly sports in general, so I wrote the founder and asked if he'd let me write for them. He did, and I got lucky when that blog was bought by Comcast, leading to my first regular paycheck as a monthly freelancer for them.