Spencer Dukoff Interview
Spencer Dukoff is the director of audience development at Consequence, where he leads “acquisition and retention efforts across all platforms including social media, SEO, newsletter, video, podcasts, strategic partnerships, and other major content initiatives.” He also writes the music-themed newsletter Late Greats Music Club.
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
I studied journalism in college, but didn’t write for the student newspaper or really have many journalism-focused extracurriculars (I did, however, spend a lot of time performing in an a cappella group). My first job post-grad was doing outreach for a financial literacy non-profit, which allowed me to travel the country and hang out in a bunch of college campuses. It was very easy and very fun as a first job until I got a vibe that maybe the funders of the non-profit were hoping the organization could get college kids to vote for Jeb(!) Bush in the 2016 presidential election? I was not down with that.
So I began writing for a new website called Slant that followed the HuffPost or BuzzFeed contributor model, but gave you a share of the revenue generated from web traffic to your article. That’s the first time I started writing about music, which allowed me to interview artists like Margaret Glaspy and Lucius, and cover events like CMJ. I was pretty eager to leave the non-profit, so when I met with Slant’s founder and she offered me a job as the site’s full-time social editor (and fifth employee), I said yes.