Making It Work: Hannah Edgar and Ranya Mathis on Careers, Community, and Criticism in Jazz Journalism

Lawrence Peryer, managing editor of The Buzz, hosts a discussion about what it takes to build a sustainable career covering jazz in 2026.

Chicago Tribune critic Hannah Edgar and Earshot Jazz editor Ranya Mathis discuss the realities of working in this field, from the fellowship programs that make full-time journalism possible to the complicated ethics of critiquing people you see at shows three nights a week. They talk about punching up versus supporting vulnerable venues, whether social media is worth the mental health cost, and why a career that keeps you up until 2 AM can still feel like a blessing. 

This is not a straightforward "how-to" episode. The conversation moves beyond career advice into the actual practice and philosophy of making it work.

Learn more about:

• Hannah Edgar
• Rayna Mathis
• Lawrence Peryer

Don’t miss new episodes of The Buzz. Make sure you follow us wherever you listen to podcasts.

For more from the Jazz Journalists Association, go to JJANews.org.

Transcript

Lawrence Peryer: Thank you both for making time.

Hannah, I'd like to start with you. I'm curious about your path in that you have a musicology degree and library science training, and I'm wondering what, if any, career intention did you start out with and are you doing what you thought you'd be doing?

Hannah Edgar: I am very lucky to say I am doing what I thought I would be doing. When I was fifteen or sixteen, I got super serious about music, mostly classical music at that time. I was kind of a groupie of the high school band. Getting started in jazz is that my friends who were wind players were in our high school jazz band, which was quite good and competed, and it was pretty well known. I kind of got excited about violin, looked at my instrument and my abilities, and was like, I guess sixteen's a little late to start getting serious about this. I mean, of course in the grand scheme of things, not, but not to go to conservatory, at least in that sphere.

I had started music reading, music journalism, and there were a lot of writers that were kind of divining that world for me and making it feel like it was something that I could participate in, possibly because I'd been reading and writing much longer than I had been playing violin at a high level. When I learned that that was a career choice, I thought, well, I guess it's either that or being a school teacher. And I kind of decided that at sixteen, and I didn't look back. So I got to school, realized there was really only one or two extracurriculars I had time for, which was performing music and writing about music. And I kind of limited myself to that pretty obsessively. I even have somewhere, I think in our condo, an essay that I wrote when I was sixteen or seventeen about—it was a career assignment for band—and I wrote at the time that I wanted to be a music journalist.

Lawrence: Oh, that's amazing. That's really amazing.

Ranya, I have a version of that same question for you, but I would like to start by asking you, well, to set it up. You know, when I look at what you do, you seem to be very representative of the type of professional I see a lot of today, which is someone with like a portfolio career. You do multiple things, all in and around the arts. But I'm curious, I guess it's a two-part question. One is, what do you primarily identify with professionally? Or what, you know, if I meet you at a party and I say, oh, Ranya, what do you do? What do you tell me? And what was your path into specifically the journalism part of your career in editing at Earshot?

Ranya Mathis: If you meet me at a party and you ask me what I do, I'm always going to say I have two jobs. I'm always going to say that in the day I work with schools, and at night I work in music, and they're both equally weighted in my life. It's interesting because I'm actually approaching my five years with Earshot this April.

Lawrence: Wow.

Ranya: It's interesting that you use "portfolio career" because I've been really reflecting on how this version of me I never knew could exist. As you see in my LinkedIn or any websites, I feel like the biggest footprint I have online professionally is around arts education.

Hannah: Yeah.

Ranya: And that's where people have seen me, and I love it. That's really where I got started. I started in museums and went into more research and just really dug into the arts there. And I entered journalism through—well, let me tell you how I entered jazz, and then I'll tell you how I got into journalism.

Lawrence: Please.

Ranya: Jazz. I grew up as a kid. My dad always used to take me to the smooth jazz festivals at Chateau Ste. Michelle back in the day. I have plenty of t-shirts from it, and I loved it. I was like six, seven. I always remember being like a kid dancing in the field alone. In high school I started swing dancing and so fell even more in love with music. But to me, again, these were just things that I did. I just would show up to a show, have a grand time. And then when I moved to Seattle for college, I didn't know anybody in the city. I was lost. And I knew the first thing I needed to do was to find community. And the thing that felt familiar to me was jazz. And so I was like, I've got to find the jazz spots out here. I hooked up with the Ballard Jazz Festival, started volunteering through that. I met other writers, Paul deBarros. You may know him as well. So then I started getting involved in just the jazz scene in general and really floated around with Earshot. I got involved with some production work and then also started working with the magazine, or writing for the magazine as well. And then in the pandemic, everything shut down, and it was really quiet, and I was so bored. The position opened up for editor, and I was really encouraged to apply for it because of just my—this is my understanding of it, but my presence on the scene of just being around and people knowing me and feeling comfortable enough with me to talk and share their stories, and that felt like a natural fit for the editor position.

Lawrence: It's interesting how journalism and music together do become pathways into community and connecting with that community.

Hannah, I want to ask you about some of the fellowship programs that you were involved with, and what those meant in your development and how, if at all, they're relevant to where you're at now?

Hannah: Yeah, I'd say they're very, very relevant. The Rubin Institute for Music Criticism, which unfortunately is no longer conferring grants—it stopped that in October—without that I would say I could not have been a full-time journalist. It essentially funds in its entirety my work for the Tribune. With very few exceptions, if there's a piece I write that's not about jazz or classical music, then the monies don't come from there. They come from the Tribune's general freelance fund. But if it's about one of those two beats, it was fully supported by the Rubin Institute. So that was really huge for me and other young writers. I believe, actually, of the recipients I am—don't quote me on this, but I believe I am the only one who covers jazz regularly. It's mostly a classical music fellowship.

But the Rubin Institute, when you talk about it, we're kind of talking about two things. We're talking about the entity that confers these grants to help support coverage at legacy papers across the United States. But we're also talking about a kind of seminar-style workshop that used to convene every two years at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, in which I also participated in 2018. And the year I participated, I was very lucky. And they, for the first time, brought a jazz journalist, and the person they brought was Gary Giddins. So that was awesome. So we covered, you know, again on their dime, which was just unreal, an intimate, like probably a hundred-seater, if that, performance at SFJAZZ. It's kind of—I always think of it as like kind of Hopper's Nighthawks, you know, that street-level space. It's just glass floor to ceiling. It was Jazzmeia Horn singing with a small combo. And this was kind of—I'm trying to even remember if this was pre her Monk win or not. It might have been. It was '18, so we should check that. Or she had just won it. So she was kind of starting to become known, but we got to see her really early on.

And then that was the first night of the workshop. I remember we had to submit a draft to Gary Giddins, and most of the participants were classical music folks. And I would describe myself as that too. But the first review I ever filed, in my career, was a jazz review of Regina Carter in Chicago. So I was like, okay, well, I have done this before, but it's been a while. And to have him read our work and give us feedback was just phenomenal.

I think everything about the kind of overnight grind can be traced to Rubin. It was five days long. We filed something every night. There was one day where I think we filed two things. So whenever I have kind of a glut of deadlines, I just think, well, it's not as crazy as Rubin was, you know, it's fine.

And yeah, some of the other opportunities were just as essential. There was one that I think might be on my bio, Bang on a Can hosts a summer intensive at MASS MoCA in North Adams, in western Massachusetts. I love experimental music of all stripes, whether that's kind of edging more towards the composed western classical side of things to fully freely improvised music. This was definitely the former, but it really stretched my ears because I think, again, that was something where we had to submit a daily assignment, and we were hearing music that had in many cases never been heard before. And to do that in kind of this high-octane environment with Pulitzer Prize–winning composers running around and also having John Schaefer from New Sounds read your stuff was a little bit like, oh my God. So that was really formative to me as well. So yeah, I mean, I would say I really owe everything to those programs. And Rubin has—they're describing it as a pause in funding right now, which reflects the general shift that nonprofits, especially in the cultural sector, have experienced.

Lawrence: Yeah.

Hannah: The Bang on a Can program is still going strong, the media workshop as I understand it.

Lawrence: When I hear you talk about that practice, that week-long intensive of filing every day, I can't help but wonder, it almost feels like a training for a world that doesn't exist as much anymore of filing for a daily paper. Or how do you contextualize it in that way? I mean, the practice is still good to have developed, but the application seems slightly less relevant in 2026.

Hannah: Absolutely. And it was not lost on all of us even at that time. And it was certainly not lost on our panel of critics, which included not only Gary but folks from The New Yorker, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle. So they were pretty brutally honest about that. But I will say it's kind of like training for a marathon. Like you actually want to run longer than you think you're going to run. And also, you know, with all of the ills that come with that too, where you agonize about whether you're saying what you want to say because you had twelve hours to say it, including sleeping and including the performance. So that's intense. But I think that it really prepared me for how hectic my calendar now is. I mean, I'm usually out three to four nights a week and sometimes as much as five, sometimes turning that around in the overnight review genre, but otherwise also like filing it away for longer features. So I still found it very useful.

It actually built, although all of these things actually built confidence—you'd think it would strike down one's confidence. But if anything, it was like, well, you know what? What is journalism if not being highly adaptable to meet a moving target or perhaps even a target that doesn't exist. I found it again just indispensable.

Lawrence: Hannah mentioned something, Ranya, that ties into the next thing I wanted to ask you about, which was the idea of the hectic calendar. And as I look at your work and you mentioned your one thing by day and another thing by night, that implies a pretty long day. How sustainable is that approach for you as a lifestyle, and what's the day-to-day like? Do you feel energized? Do you feel burdened? Is it all of the above?

Ranya: Ah, this is my every day. Did that answer? Am I done?

Lawrence: Yeah. That's right. You may have just answered.

Ranya: It is a lot. It is a typical day. Okay, we're going to be real. Here's the day. So I will probably, I mean, my day job, so that's a nine to five with the schools, you know, so it's very present, and you know, a lot of putting out fires and answering principal calls and all that. And just the daily—I'm so grateful to work in the arts at the school district as well because a lot of that intersects. There's a lot of music teachers I work with who are also the jazz scene, who I see at night too. So there's a lot of overlap.

And then if I have a show or a board meeting or something, that's all in the evening, so that's anywhere from like a six to ten situation. I come home, I take care of my guinea pigs, and then I'm probably maybe doing some editing that night, some emails. And then I'm probably asleep anywhere from two to four on an average day, and then I'm back up at like seven to do it again. So that's me. I've had sleep problems all my life as a kid. So my body is able to handle it.

By balancing between two jobs and particularly between two jobs that are both within the arts and have a lot of overlap, I feel so lucky because I feel like I'm in this cycle that re-energizes me to do the next thing. I'm at the schools, and I'm like, wow, there's so many gaps in our arts systems here. How can the music teachers I know be able to support that and vice versa? There's a lot of opportunities to collaborate there. My education background does come into my editor role a lot where I'm like, how can we make mentorship happen in education spaces and partner community partnerships? Because that is jazz. Jazz is a community effort. So that's how I mix it all together in an average day. But I would say I am probably working seven days a week, and like Hannah, I'm out at a show a few times a week as well, because it's important to be out on the scene. It's important to know the people beyond just grabbing a story. Being part of that community is important. And so I make an effort to do that.

Lawrence: Is it sustainable long term?

Ranya: I guess I don't think about the long term because again, while I say it's a good tired, it's a good tired.

Lawrence: I understand that as well. I've come to have a portfolio approach to my career as well that I never thought I'd have when in younger parts of my career. And what I enjoy about it is that I get to flex so many parts of my mental muscle. And indulge, quite honestly, a lot of pursuits and curiosities. I feel kind of spoiled even when the—I'm so spoiled, even when it is demanding.

Ranya: Yes. I'm blessed. Like I said, I truly am so lucky. I could be doing a bunch of other things right now. And I feel like I am a lot of the times working with my friends because these are such good people too. And yeah, couldn't be more blessed. When I was growing up, you know, I was a kid that volunteered in my library, and I went into—my degree is in history, so I was always buried in books, and that was my thing. And so when I entered arts education, that made sense, and I love it. I do love weird, funky education spaces. But music was always just my passion and for fun. And so I never knew it could be me professionally. And now in a way, I'm also a gigging artist too. This is my gig. I'm gigging all the time.

Lawrence: Yeah. Absolutely. You know, I have a question I would love to get both of your points of view on, and Hannah, I'm going to start with you if I may. As a journalist, how do you deal with issues of being part of the scene and having to write about and comment on the work of people you may run into in a social context?

Hannah: Yeah, it's a really big question, and I don't know if anyone who works in any sort of art or just intimate niche has really cracked this. If they have, I'd love to hear from them. I'm desperate to know because it's tricky. I mean, yeah, I certainly have this kind of blessing, I suppose, that I am an amateur musician, but I have never played at a level where I'm interacting with, frankly, anyone or sharing a band with pretty much almost anyone I cover. You know, like maybe there were pedagogical encounters where they were teaching me in a masterclass, but I love that. I'm still very much a student of my instrument, and I am always enthralled by the musicians that I cover. That's how that relationship lands for me. And it doesn't cause me any anxiety or loss of sleep.

And it's always very, I think, very professionally bounded. I will always be really transparent about expectations. If I am working with someone in a musical capacity, for example, I have a violin teacher. I cannot cover my violin teacher's projects. She knows that. And therefore we entered into a consensual agreement to have a student-teacher relationship. There are a lot of musicians in the city that wouldn't do that. You know, they'd say, I really like—there's so few opportunities for coverage. I can't burn one of those bridges. Or not burn, you know, but just like I can't shut that door. I can't afford it. So, which is also a shout-out to my violin teacher for being so cool about that.

But yeah, but in terms of the social anxieties of, oh, are you going to write something possibly nasty and have someone be miffed at you? It's really interesting. This used to cause me a lot more anxiety until I actually did it, like got started working more. And first of all, any critic that I respect isn't nasty for the sake of being nasty. Like the kind of catty social media Twitter threads–esque brand of criticism—like insofar as it still exists, it's not anything I'm interested in. It's not something I want to platform.

And then, you know, I am very conscious of punching up. I know that's a cliché, but genuinely, I have been to some gigs where it was like, man, if I was honest—like, what are we doing here? Should I really be reviewing this, or could I have previewed it? And that's something I sometimes work out with my editor, and we pull the plug or something like that. I sometimes hear from the musicians who participated in that performance, and they're like, yep, you're spot on. Yep, you heard it. You know, music is a collective effort. I think that there is kind of an understanding too, if you are a musician, that you have good nights and you have bad nights, and there's no shame in that. There's no one who's eradicated bad nights. Again, I would reach out, you know, I want to hear from you. That's awesome. But no one's cracked that nut either.

So I think that there's also, at least the musicians that I hear from, they're wonderfully also honest and vulnerable and being like, yeah, that wasn't it. And the ones who get super miffed about it are the ones I just try to distance myself from because that's where actually our relationship becomes untenable. I have had to ask myself sometimes if I'm nervous about how a person's going to react. Luckily I'm freelance. I might work for these papers, but I'm not a staff critic on assignment. I do have the privilege to say, you know, I don't know if the juice is worth the squeeze. This could go really off the rails or in a bad direction, and I can sometimes redirect just on my own to save myself, save that relationship, whatever it may be.

Lawrence: It's really fascinating because it sounds like there's also, at least in the case of some of the artists that will engage with you on your work or your reaction to their work, there's an understanding that this is an ecosystem and that the critic has a role to play in the ecosystem.

Hannah: Yeah, totally.

Lawrence: I'm curious about this same question for you, because one, it's a little bit of a smaller world here in Seattle than it is in Chicago, and you're involved in so many facets of the community and the scene that I would think, and again, I'm projecting a little bit, that it's a little bit trickier of a line for you to walk. Could you talk about this at all?

Ranya: Yeah, Lawrence, that's spot on. And I've been really lucky in my ten years in Seattle too. I've been involved in other arts organizations like Northwest Folklife and KEXP. So it's really expanded my friendships and my circles. Because our scene is smaller, and I've had this running joke to myself and myself only, that Seattle's art scene is like five people that we all collectively know. We just keep running into them, and we're all just bouncing together.

Lawrence: Sitting on each other's boards.

Ranya: Yeah, we're all just like, hey, buddy. You know, like, whatcha doing? So it's kind of hard. It's a different scene. And because it is different in that way, I try to meet the city where it's at in that space and try to use it as a strength of our scene. My approach is very relational, and it's very, to trust me with your story, I hope you trust me. And that is my basis. That's why, again, I put such an effort to just be out there because I want folks to see me as myself and not someone just trying to take a story or to catch them off guard or anything like that, or to get them on a good or bad night. I don't want them to always feel like I'm watching them, and so that's why I am friends with a lot of folks too.

In terms of stories though, I do have to be equitable in the way that we approach our content. And so if there is, let's say a friend of mine has an album, it's coming out, I think about multiple factors around it like who sent it my way, what label it's on and what significance that is, who else is on the album, other things that can tie into our work or our events. So while I do know people on a one-on-one basis, content is never decided based off that one-on-one encounter. There's a lot of other factors that need to go into any content decisions.

Lawrence: Yeah. You know, there's something really interesting about the Seattle area scene that I've observed, and I still kind of wrestle with in my own work, which is it feels very delicate right now, especially in this kind of post-COVID environment with venues closed, and opportunities seem to have shrunk, and it does feel like it's starting to expand again. And you know, whether it's the Jazz Fellowship or other venues in the South End, it feels so precarious in nature. And maybe it's the same way everywhere. I don't know, but I feel it here, and it feels like, to a certain extent, while music criticism is always important, we want to further the work, we want to make sure the work is held to a high standard or at least interpreted and explained to people, the scene needs support and boosterism. And it's a really weird thing as a journalist to want to balance that. I'm curious how the two of you deal with the issue of wanting to be supportive of the community when it's in a vulnerable state versus the role as an objective journalist?

Hannah: This is where also I think it's very important to modulate criticism. Larger presenters can be held to account because they have the kind of resources that small presenters only dream of having. And again, I'm talking about the Chicago sphere. We do kind of have presenters of all sizes, so we're very fortunate in that sense. An arts administrator whom I was interviewing for a story once said something that has definitely stuck in my craw because having worked in arts admin briefly myself, I know it's true, which is that things are scarce everywhere, and the margins are tight everywhere. It's just that the costs and the expenses and the budget changes, but everywhere is lean, which is hard to wrap your head around. And so I think that's also an important thing to do where when you are criticizing an arts organization, it's never with a burn-it-down perspective. It's a, can you redirect, can you reinvest, can you reprioritize? I always tell people I am an institutionalist. I just am. It's just how I think because I think institutions are made up of people, and therefore institutions can change if enough people want them to change. I am not a dismantler personally. I don't find that perspective particularly constructive. I mean, it's literally destructive.

And then as we're talking about independent venues and also organizations that are still smarting from the pandemic and perhaps will never look like they were before the pandemic, or in the very rare case where a new venue opens up, which feels like an impossibility sometimes in 2025, 2026. But when it happens, you know, I would say the tenor of my coverage is always, oh my God, look at what someone's doing here. And it's not with an eye to be like, oh man, and this really stinks or something, you know. And then maybe there are ways that that presenter, that series, that venue can be better, and they can be mentioned in person or in passing. But I am always going to take the booster approach of how audacious, how phenomenal for someone to do something that seems frankly impossible sometimes in live music.

And also my jazz criticism is also a little bit different from my other hat as a classical music journalist, in that we have huge institutions here, with multimillion-dollar endowments, the Chicago Symphony and Lyric Opera, and the way I discuss those will always be different from a contemporary music collective that is doing a DIY-ish show at a small venue or trying to do a performance series. I mean, of course it's always going to be different. So, yeah. But I do find it kind of interesting where, like this, to circle back to what I was saying about how things are lean everywhere and institutions make tough decisions everywhere. I wish I knew, for example, what impact negative criticism had on, say, ticket sales. Again, I don't think it's terribly often that I would write something where someone at the CSO would return a ticket. And also I would personally implore them never to do that because Thursday can be different from Friday, which can be different from Saturday. But if that's how people are thinking, I don't know.

I was talking to someone recently about another critic in the industry, and they're like, well, you know, they were always very tough, and it really hurt the box office at this institution. I'm like, did it? Do we know that? And that's where I kind of confess that I don't even know. I can't predict audience behavior in that way. And I'm never writing with an intent to influence audience behavior.

Lawrence: What are you thinking about?

Hannah: I am thinking about what it means for the performance to be a frozen moment in time, I guess. And I'm not saying that I want to describe it because I don't think description is criticism either. But if you're going to do something like put yourself in front of hundreds and maybe thousands of people at these big venues, you know, and perform a piece of music, and in the case of classical music, it was written hundreds of years ago, what are you trying to say, and what does it reveal about that music's place in society? Not to say that it's always a sociological treatise, but you know, I think it's interesting. I think what we throw our resources behind and decide to put on does kind of speak to the values of our organization. And also I just love, like for me to go back to the social thing that we were talking about earlier, I mean, I just love watching the human interactions on stage and when you could tell if something unexpected happened or if you can see someone laugh on the bandstand because they're so delighted by something that someone else is doing. That to me is what live performance is.

Lawrence: Yeah. That's fascinating.

Ranya: For Earshot, our publication from the jump and from where we're at has always centered on our resident artists. And so we—I mean, outside of the Earshot Festival where we invite folks nationally and internationally to perform on our stages, but really we're a local publication. And so in my mind, like Hannah was saying, most of our stuff is not going to be like what they did bad or anything like that. Really, I think of Earshot as the magazine specifically as the hero's tale, like the good things that are happening in our community that we want to talk about, that we want to uplift. And that's not just the musicians. That's our venue operators, that's our photographers, that's other editors doing cool projects. That's books coming out. I really want to explore that ecosystem of jazz.

And maybe this is also the education in me coming out too, because I think a lot about the Seattle scene, and you know, venues are struggling, artists are looking for opportunities, but our jazz organizations are doing okay. And so I do think there's definitely opportunity for the organizations to come together to create more resources for artists and to build that up. Right now, I think folks operate in silos. And I would love to see more just collective power, again with all of us just pulling those resources because there's no reason to keep it to ourselves. The arts have always been scrappy and have always made it work, but perhaps we don't have to make it work. And what we need is already available if we connect. It's not just organizations pulling together. I mean, we need money, and the government does need to fund this and support it financially. That is always going to be a tough one. But I think collectively as people, we can do change on our scene and make that really impactful. But I think, yeah, we're probably still maybe like Seattle's a little slower shaking out of the pandemic and getting our legs back on. I think that's true, like you were saying. But yeah, I think we're getting there.

Lawrence: I'd like to ask you both about the role of tools and technology. Maybe Hannah, you could go first. What technical abilities, if any, are important or that you see as important, you know, audio editing, the ability to use a CMS platform, you know, I know there's publications including my own, where we might like to have the journalist be able to submit their work through the CMS as opposed to sending a Word doc. So can you talk a little bit about technical tools that you use day to day and what you think are useful versus nice to have versus essential?

Hannah: Yeah, that's a really good question. I mentioned earlier that the Rubin Institute was really essential for me being able to have a career. Similarly, audio editing has enabled me to be able to sustain a career because now I do quite a lot of radio journalism. It's easily probably about a third of what I do, if not more. I just feel like I got really lucky. The first internships I had, despite being sort of a print journalist, were always in radio. And then when I was a kid, this is kind of—it was kind of the Flip camera era, like where you had a proliferation of these cheap, comparatively speaking, portable cameras. And I'd film my friends and I doing music videos and then edit it together later on iMovie or whatever. And all of those skills are directly transferable to any digital audio workstation. So when I got to my first internship, they're like, do you know how to do this? And I was like, wait, do you just cut and do this? And they're like, yeah, pretty much. And I was like, oh yeah. Oh, I know my way around a crossfade. Oh, yeah. You know, so that kind of stuff was kind of second nature.

But I'm also, I just turned thirty, so this is sort of—that was kind of, you know, the late millennial, early Gen Z, sort of like you grew up so internet literate. You know, I spent at seven watching, you know, the whatever proto-YouTube stuff was out there, playing video games online. If we're talking about young people who are entering a career like that, digital literacy is kind of—it's going to be there at a baseline. I definitely suggest knowing your way around various types of CMSs. That was mostly accrued through other professional experience for me personally, but I also think that any person who's kind of digitally native can figure that out pretty quickly. I myself don't have any hard coding skills besides maybe being able to tinker with things in HTML a little bit. So I always thought that would be lovely to really have enough coding expertise to do something more bespoke. You know, I feel like this is also very ten-years-ago advice, like, yeah, learn to code or something. But, you know, it can't hurt. I wouldn't say that people should funnel resources into it.

But for me, particularly the audio editing opened up a whole new income stream, essentially. Not only do I produce stories for radio out here at our NPR station, but I also will assist more print-first journalists when they are doing a project for a podcast. So I've assisted people with The Guardian and then in the public media sphere in Germany. I've also done some remote work for them just to have someone who knows, okay, you have to get ambient sound, for example. Well, what's ambient sound? Okay, so I learned this. It was a happy accident, but now I really owe a lot of my income to it, and much like Rubin, without it, I could not do this full time. That is sort of the skill that comes to mind.

I'm also thinking about the sort of infamous pivot to video 2.0 with The New York Times having that as a stated aim, but specifically now we're looking at short-form video, not the kind of Vice-like twenty-minute documentary where you buckle in and sit through it. Again, I kind of wonder if the target audience that we're hypothetically speaking to now, that's just second nature to them anyhow. Perhaps so. I don't know.

Lawrence: Yeah. How about you, Ranya?

Ranya: Yeah, I think the biggest tool, have yourself a good organization tool, like something to keep everything in track. I personally use Trello, something that you can really play with and that's dynamic. I use Trello, and again, if you're also juggling other jobs or gigs or whatever projects, freelance projects, just something to keep all of that in order and to be a solid project manager on top of all the things you got going on, that's really going to help you succeed in this.

Lawrence: We haven't said the words AI, and we haven't talked about the role of platforms. And I really want to get some perspective from both of you about this because, again, it's another area I think I and other journalists wrestle with. And my question is, Hannah, I know specifically for you, you've deactivated your social media platforms. And it's something actually I found attractive going into my conversation with you. The 2016 election really drove me off Facebook, and it took about a year to fully disengage. I've since gotten off of X and Instagram, not only for myself, but also for my publication. I knew it was going to change how we grew, but for me personally, I couldn't be there anymore. And I didn't professionally want to tie my horse to that. I talked to a lot of people who are trying to start a thing, a publication, an outlet, a career. They feel like they have to be there. I also want to broaden that question to include not only social media platform but some of the publishing platforms like Substack or Medium, some of the ones that are getting to be increasingly like social media platforms, and they're platforming some stuff that I personally am not comfortable with. How do you think about platforms broadly and your personal choices and experiences with them?

Hannah: Yeah, absolutely. I first, I will say I definitely stayed on social media longer than I had kind of intended to as well. I also shared your misgivings after the 2016 election, and I think I just told myself, I was in college at the time, and I just told myself, well, you can't jump now. First of all, even just day-to-day communications were so tied up. I remember my college girlfriend and I didn't text. We sent stuff over Facebook Messenger, which now seems absurd. I'm like, I do need your number. Like, what's going on here? So just, I don't know, it's just so interesting looking back on it because now that seems incredibly outré. Like now people of, I would assume, Ranya and my generation—I mean, I don't know, Ranya, if this is the same in your social circle, I assume so. Facebook is so desperately uncool, and I was already—people were really ragging on me because it was kind of the only place I would post up until I deactivated because I felt like, well, at least these are people I know.

And Twitter lost its luster pretty much right around the time it became X. And I would also say I think my excuse of I need these for work, or I need these personally and professionally, started to ring hollow, and I had to really confront what I meant by that when they all started becoming unusable. It got to a point where it was like, I am not learning about any events over Facebook. I am just blasting off my articles. It was kind of what I was getting. It was personally what I was getting back from it. And then I also sort of had to trust that maybe culture would swing in a direction—because I think AI, to take a super broad view here, I think AI is absolutely a symptom of the social media age, where it's like low effort, low engagement, but hypothetically it just kind of amplifies it into some imagined dividend, or maybe a real dividend. AI can cut however many hours of you writing and drafting something, which also, disclosure, I do not use any generative AI willingly. Now Gmail will show me a generated response. But I'd say that's the only generative AI that I feel is forced down my throat. I don't use anything. I've never used it professionally. Certainly I don't even use Gemini when it suggests something to me. I keep scrolling because I know it's probably wrong anyway.

But I'm actually starting to join the chorus of people who trust that as AI proliferates and becomes so ubiquitous that there will be some sort of cultural backswing towards a neo-Luddite kind of stream. I believe that people are going to feel so condescending to seeing all sorts of insane computer-generated Pixar-but-not imagery and experiences that there's going to be a reaction because, you know, as Newton said, every action has a reaction. And I kind of wanted to get ahead of that, and I also had to do it for my mental health, to be honest. I started a schedule for deactivation as soon as Elon Musk popped his sig heil. That wasn't—you know, I'm Jewish. That's important to me. I just couldn't do it, and I also was unhappy. I'm a happier person off social media. I spent a lot of time there. I found that if I posted something, I wanted to see who had seen it and who had the reactions. And now it's kind of this quiet peace of maybe I'll spend a lot of time writing something, but I don't know who reads it. I spent months on it. I didn't know because I wasn't on social media. I didn't see who was sharing it. I'm also at peace with that. It just really brought me a more Zen outlook.

I do, to return to talking about Substack, now I do have a Substack, and I do not charge people for it. I am not considering it a publication I run. It is not part of my work. It is, until one of my major sources of income drops, I'm not going to charge people for it. It is just meant to plug the hole that social media, leaving social media, left for me. And I should also say I've got burner accounts because you can't even open, for work, you can't even open Instagram posts or something. So I will not be dropping my ats, to say I'm off is like, I'm still using it, but I now, for example, have a burner that only follows other publications and artists, you know, to try to get a sense of what gigs might be coming up or discourses in the beat site cover generally.

But yeah, Substack for me is just to plug that hole and be like, here's what I wrote in the last month. You know, and I really am at most writing something monthly. I just can't, if I'm not on assignment, I do not want to be behind my laptop is kind of my attitude.

Lawrence: Yeah.

Ranya: Yeah, I mean, like Hannah, I also don't use any AI tools. It's not something I gravitate towards. I like the grind. I like the process of thinking with myself. I'm like, is this where I want to go? Is this how I want to say it? Like, you know, and then rewriting and all that. I think it could be good in some spaces, but art, I just am really sensitive around. I could maybe change my mind, like Hannah, in due time. But I'm maybe not there just yet.

Platforms, I mean, Seattle though is a very tech city. With that being said, I do find that, and not just myself, but I would say the majority of musicians do use social media to just get their stuff out or to share or to just be in community with. It really is also a personal thing as well that I've noticed. Whether that's Facebook or Instagram, I'm not on Twitter. I don't see much on LinkedIn or other things like that, so I do maintain profiles on there to just get a sense of what's happening. And I have found that helpful. I would say though, my personal social medias are my personal social medias, and they are not work social medias at all. So I really do, that's my boundary where I make it a separation. I will definitely—because these are all the same things I still am interested in. Yeah, I want to see what your music's doing. Might I use that for an idea later? Perhaps, but that's not the goal. That's sort of how I exist on social media without it feeling like work.

Lawrence: It is such a personal choice, and I don't, you know, I try not to condemn or judge anybody for the choices they make, but it was driving me insane. It was driving me literally insane. And I'm insane enough.

Hannah: Yeah. I totally echo that. I think when I left I had some friends who I could sense a sort of defensiveness from them about staying, and I was like, no. In a lot of cases these people were twice my age or more. And it was like, if you don't have Facebook, you have twice as many friends and twice as many people who have been meaningful to you throughout your life. I'm very lucky that I grew up doing chain emails with my friends or something. And so we each have seven flavors of ways to stay in contact, you know. But anyone for whom their personal life is tied up in social media, and I've also, I find the argument compelling too, that when the world just looks really bad and is really hard and it's hard to get out of bed, the last thing you want to do is socially isolate yourself. And I think I'm just lucky. Chicago's huge. But for example, I happen to live in the same neighborhood as some of my closest friends. You know, I don't feel socially isolated, so mental health–wise, I could also make that choice. And I had the privilege to make that choice.

Lawrence: Yeah. Listen, thank you both for making time. I hope to be able to speak with you both in the future in a variety of contexts. Thank you so much for your time.

Hannah: Yeah. Thank you.

Ranya: Yeah, this was great.

Lawrence: Awesome.

Hannah: Well, thanks, Lawrence.

Lawrence: Appreciate it.

Hannah: Yeah.

Lawrence: Bye-bye.

Hannah: Bye, everyone.