Mark Guarino Interview
Mark Guarino is a journalist and playwright. He started as the pop music critic for the Daily Herald outside Chicago, a position he held for 11 years before serving as Midwest Bureau Chief for the Christian Science Monitor for seven years. He is currently a producer with ABC News. In 2023, the University of Chicago Press published his first book, Country and Midwestern: Chicago in the History of Country Music and the Folk Revival.
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
I started as a local news reporter for a Chicago newspaper called the Daily Herald. Before then I was the editor-in-chief of my college paper; the experiences set the groundwork for giving me the fundamentals in reporting. I firmly believe even music critics need to be reporters first, which means understanding the basics of how to report out a story. It’s not all reviewing concerts. The music business is a serious industry just like any other and to cover it correctly requires reporting skills. From there, I switched to national news, a lane I’ve been in ever since.
Even though I am based in Chicago I tend to write about culture and news events from the middle part of the country, connecting trends here to ones happening nationally. I’ve been lucky in this sense because my travels have essentially followed the path of the Mississippi River as I’ve covered everything from Chicago politics to the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and Katrina; personally, my main interest is music from this slice of America as well because I believe it’s the richest. Staying put in Chicago and not running away was the smartest move I made because all the national media outlets on both coasts need good people here.