Jonathan Bernstein Interview (Rolling Stone)
I’m Todd L. Burns, and welcome to Music Journalism Insider, a newsletter about music journalism. Click here to subscribe!
Jonathan Bernstein is a research editor at Rolling Stone. On the side, he also writes for the magazine, focusing primarily on Americana and country music. (He was responsible for the heartbreaking story of Justin Townes Earle's final days.)
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
I had a few internships in college, one at Rolling Stone, and one at a failed start-up music magazine that never put out an issue. My first job out of college was at a “digital marketing” company. My job was to run the social media accounts for the Arizona and Colorado locations of the national body-waxing chain European Wax Center. It was a strange job! But it left time to freelance on the side, and I started writing for publications like American Songwriter. I had saved enough money after two years to quit and try freelancing. I could not have done that without some savings from my first job.
Back then, Rolling Stone had a rotating cast of freelance fact-checkers who helped with the magazine closes every other week. In 2013, I found out that RS needed new freelance fact-checkers, and I begged and pleaded to be given a chance. I was told I needed more experience, so I was sent down the hallway to US Weekly (owned by Jann Wenner at the time) to gain more fact-checking experience for a few months. Eventually I started part-time fact-checking at Rolling Stone, which I did while freelancing as a writer for various publications for about five years before getting hired as a full-time fact-checker at Rolling Stone in 2018.
Did you have any mentors along the way? What did they teach you?
In college, I had the immense privilege of getting to take creative writing classes with Marlon James, whose teachings and wisdom I still think about all the time. Marlon treated his students as equals, which meant telling me that a line I had written was absolute cliche garbage if what I had written was absolute cliche garbage, which happened often.
I write for a number of different editors at Rolling Stone, and have truly learned so much from all of them. If there’s one thing my many editors at RS have helped teach me, it’s to be more concise and to-the-point in my writing, and to be less concerned with trying to sound smart with long sentences and convoluted prose. I’m still working on that!
The two people I’ve learned the most from in my career have been my bosses in Rolling Stone’s research/fact-checking department: Coco McPherson, who first hired me, and Hannah Murphy, who currently runs the department. They’ve taught me everything I know about journalism and reporting and I would be a way worse writer and journalist (and a worthless fact-checker) without their guidance and generosity.
Walk me through a typical day-to-day for you right now.
I spend the first hour or two of my day working on my writing for Rolling Stone, which is usually some balance of shorter term, quick pieces (blurbs, news stories) and longer-term profiles, features and reviews. By 10:30 in the morning or so I shift the bulk of my attention to my fact-checking work, which usually occupies the majority of my day, except for some interviews I may do throughout the day.
What does your media diet look like?
I follow tons of writers I admire on Twitter, so I’ll admit a lot of my daily reading happens that way. Lately I’ve really enjoyed and been inspired by some of the newer, more-focused publications sprouting up in the country and roots space, like Country Queer, Black Opry, and the recent Rainbow Rodeo zine. During the pandemic, in particular, I’ve really cherished the various print publications I subscribe to: Oxford American, Texas Monthly, No Depression, and The Virginia Quarterly Review.
What would you like to see more of in music journalism right now?
I think there's more of it now than there used to be, but I would like to continue to see more critical reporting on the business of the music industry, which recorded $21.6 billion in profits in 2020, during a pandemic.
What would you like to see less of in music journalism right now?
The mistreatment and under-payment of freelance writers. We are missing out on hundreds of deep reported stories because they are not financially viable for freelancers to take on.
What's one tip that you'd give a music journalist starting out right now?
This may be cliched advice, but mine would be: Find a topic, whether it’s a genre, a scene, or a specific behind-the-scenes sector of the music industry, that feels under-covered, and then become a deep expert in that topic.
What artist or trend are you most interested in right now?
I’m really excited by the group of artists, including Valerie June and Brittany Howard, that is toying with the sonic conventions of the Americana format. Americana's resistance towards any production that feels even slightly modern can feel stifling, so it's encouraging to see that June’s new album, which has quite a bit of drum programming (and is an incredible record), has been doing really well on the Americana radio charts. I’m not sure if that could have happened even three years ago.
What was the best track / video or film / book you've consumed in the past 12 months?
I’m still so blown away by “Glenfern” by Kathleen Edwards. I’ve never heard a song that expresses such generous, open-hearted gratitude for both the good and bad of someone’s own past, and I just love how she uses the metaphor of a since-updated Google street view image as a way of talking about a former relationship. There’s no song I am more excited to hear performed live once I start seeing live music again.
If you had to point folks to one piece of yours, what would it be and why?
A few years ago I wrote a piece about the legacy of The Soul Clan, a short-lived supergroup of Sixties soul singers like Don Covay, Wilson Pickett, and Solomon Burke. While writing the story, I uncovered a never-before-heard Soul Clan rehearsal tape from the ‘80s, the discovery of which was one of the most exciting moments in my career.
Anything you want to plug?
Everyone should donate to the Rosetta Fund, which gives out grants to BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and disabled journalists working in the country and roots music space. The Rosetta Fund is an outgrowth of the similarly essential Rainey Day Fund, which gives out grants to BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and disabled country and roots artists.
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