Patrick Hosken Interview (MTV News)
Patrick Hosken is Music Editor at MTV News. On the side, he has a newsletter called Medium Rotation that focuses on "the indie music you would’ve heard on college radio stations from roughly 2007 to 2013."
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
I got a journalism degree from St. Bonaventure University and moved to New York in 2012 without much of a plan. At that time, I wrote some unpaid album reviews for very small websites, carrying over what I’d done at our college radio station. But I spent most of school unsure of what kind of writing I wanted to do, so as a recent grad, I felt a little aimless. My friend Pete got me in at Terrorbird for a music PR internship, which was huge because it gave me behind-the-scenes exposure to the industry and how things worked. Putting Tame Impala’s Lonerism in a bubble mailer addressed to Bob Boilen, for example, did a lot for me psychologically.
Eventually I realized if I wanted to get serious about writing about music, grad school might be a good option. I found an amazing master’s program specifically for arts journalism at Syracuse. We went to TIFF, the opera, half a dozen museums, and wrote about it all and workshopped. During that year-long program, I interned at Stereogum for about four months. That, too, was huge; in addition to a lot of transcribing, I wrote about 30 premieres and even an essay I successfully pitched. I maintain good relationships with the folks there and still write occasionally—it helps that it’s largely the same core staff as six years ago, which is very rare in our industry. Once I graduated from Syracuse in 2015, my friend Emilee at MTV News told me they needed a weeked editor and helped me get in for an interview. I owe her so much because she continued to help me adjust when I joined and eventually advanced to a weekday gig. Amid a lot of changes, I moved to news editor in 2016 and have been music editor since 2017.