Spencer Kornhaber Interview
Spencer Kornhaber is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he’s been working since 2011. His new book is On Divas: Persona, Pleasure, Power.
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
Deep down I think I’m slightly more of a journalism person than a music person—or at least that’s just what I told myself when I was covering school-board meetings in Orange County, California in 2010 while pining to be profiling Grizzly Bear or whatever. But I’m grateful that my first job out of college was at OC Weekly, an alternative newsweekly where I could write about local news and culture with a magazine-y flair. The freedom to write with voice and take on big themes gave me a lot of the experience and confidence to do what I now do at The Atlantic. I am sure I'm not the first person in this newsletter to mourn the general decline of alt-weeklies, but truly, we need them...
I then spent a couple months at Patch.com, the hyperlocal news network. That gig—launching and running a breaking-news site basically all by oneself—was rather grueling and very far from the work I wanted to be doing. But in 2011 I applied to The Atlantic to be an associate editor for its online culture vertical, and the hiring boss later told me he was more impressed by my Patch experience than by the freelance record reviewing I’d been doing on the side. He wanted someone who could perform normie tasks like manage freelancers and handle a budget. I mention this by way of saying, to young critics, don’t quit your non-dream job!