Doug Nunnally Interview
Doug Nunnally is a journalist based in Richmond, Virginia. He’s the founder of The Auricular, a publication that seeks to cover anything and everything having to do with the city’s music scene. Earlier this year, he also brought local folks together to launch the Newlin Music Prize, an award given to Richmond’s best album of the year.
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
Originally, my life goal was to become a music teacher, hopefully in middle or high school. I did band all through school and tried to do a new instrument or two every semester for the various groups and classes. Band geek was a distinction of honor for me back then. Maybe it still is. I don’t know. I was never particularly talented, but I worked hard at it and felt connected to it. Sometime towards the end of high school though, I began to write some columns and reviews… not about music, but professional wrestling. Completely by happenstance. Just saw a job posting for columnists on a website I frequented and took a chance. It worked somehow. I could post up to 5 or 6 columns a month if I wanted so I got to work. Match ratings, opinions on how the quality of various shows and events were, random musings. It was rough work, very unrefined and aimless, but it hooked me. I was writing as much as I could, even branching out by doing interviews and starting a “podcast” or whatever they were called in 2004.
Pretty soon, writing became a passion of mine and I tried to double major in college in music education and journalism. Neither panned out and music education, in that sense, faded away. But writing stuck around. I started my own site, collaborated with a ton of other writers, got to work on a lot of cool projects, interviewed and made connections with some people who would make a big impact 5, 10, 15 years later, ended up on MSNBC randomly, and just kept looking for more to do. Pay was miniscule, but I was having a blast and felt myself getting better with each article and project. By mid-2007, I began to get burnt out. I had taken on too much, the pay wasn’t improving, and a lot of unfortunate things had occurred in the pro wrestling scene. My interest plummeted and I wrote very sparingly over the next two years without a “scene” to cover. But the itch to write was still there as strong as ever.