P. Claire Dodson Interview
P. Claire Dodson is the senior entertainment editor at Teen Vogue and a freelance journalist who has written for the New York Times, Fast Company, and more.
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
In the early 2000s, my dad took me to a Britney Spears concert that he was reviewing for our small community newspaper in East Tennessee. It was my first concert, and my first time realizing that you could literally get free Britney Spears tickets—all you had to do was write about the show. He was a copy editor for all of my childhood, and I loved hanging out in the newsroom and playing on the computer; I was really lucky to see a model for a journalism career early on. My mom taught elementary school and is a big reader, and so she really instilled in me this love for education and reading and learning about people’s experiences that aren’t your own.
My junior year of high school, I took a journalism class and had a great teacher who assigned us an album review. (Shoutout to Mr. Vacek, whose AP Language class basically taught me how to do what I do now.) I wrote about Relient K’s Forget and Not Slow Down, and something just clicked. It was everything I liked to do, listening to music obsessively and forming opinions about how that music made me think about the world.