Josh Terry Interview

Josh Terry is a freelance writer. He’s worked for RedEye Chicago, VICE, and Netflix over the years, and freelanced for countless publications. Currently, he runs the excellent newsletter No Expectations.

How did you get to where you are today, professionally?

I got into music journalism sorta by accident. I read The A.V. Club, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, Paste, the New Yorker, and Spin religiously growing up but I never really considered writing about music beyond starting an mp3 blog for my friends to read. I definitely never considered it as a career. At Loyola University Chicago, I studied psychology and was set on going to grad school to become a therapist. I had been working since sophomore year at a research lab run by a psychologist who was studying exposure to violence and PTSD in Chicago’s youth. So two or three days a week I was going to the south and west sides to work alongside researchers, grad students, and outreach groups to conduct research with kids at participating schools. While I loved the work and the people I met doing that, I had second thoughts about going to grad school and getting a Ph.D.

In the summer of 2012 right before my senior year, my friend Alyssa Vitale suggested I apply for an internship at The A.V. Club. She had previously worked as an intern at A.V. Club Chicago under Marah Eakin, who was at the time The A.V. Club’s new music editor. Because I was always recommending and talking about bands I liked at parties, Alyssa thought I’d be a good fit. I didn’t have clips beyond research papers so I sent Marah a few sample news blogs I’d drafted that day that I thought matched The A.V. Club “Newswire” style. That got me an interview and I hit it off with the people who hired me: after all, it was my favorite website. Still, I was really lucky and by far the least qualified person there even among the interns. The fact that a dear friend putting in a good word for me is responsible for the trajectory of the past 10+ years of my life is not lost on me. I thought the internship would be more busy work but on my first day, they had me writing blogs. It was a trial by fire and I was really green, but I realized I loved it. I was unquestionably out of my element but the pressure to turn in clean copy on tight deadlines made me want to get better.