Tirhakah Love Interview (The Daily Beast)
Tirhakah Love is an entertainment reporter at The Daily Beast. He’s previously been published in outlets like the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and the Los Angeles Times. He properly began his career, though, at MTV News, at a moment when it was focused more on longform writing.
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
I didn’t know I wanted to be a journalist until senior year of university. I attended WIlliams College, initially, thinking I would be some sort of lawyer. But I took a couple political science classes and realized no one actually gives a shit about the law or justice. I floated around for a little while, latching on to the profession that was most accessible to me: academia. It felt like I would do well in that space because I loved to write, think critically, and make cross-cultural connections.
What I learned, over a number of years going to conferences and writing to and for academics, was that I really hated the style and the holier than thou types. I wanted to write to the kinds of people I grew up with: smart and kind people who had to face the urgency of the everyday. I’d had very little experience writing on a blog though. I started my own sophomore year and hit up like ten of my friends to write on it with me. That shit didn’t last long because we were all in school and I didn’t know what the hell I was doin tryna helm something like that but it was like the first online space I’d ever had just to write, to fuck up, and edit myself and others. On that blog, The Pop Jones, I wrote mostly about music and culture while I ceded the politics, sports, and tv/film topics to my homies. It lasted maybe a couple of months but it scratched an inch that I couldn’t reach again until about I was a senior.