In restful Chestnut Hill, next to the farmers’ market occupying a humble portion of Boston College’s Lower Campus, I picked the mind of writer and editor Maura Johnston. Fresh from the Big Apple, Johnston recently moved up to the city to teach as the BC Institute of Liberal Arts’ first journalism fellow, and she’s welcomed the experience with open arms.
“I’ve actually been thinking about moving to Boston since last year, and so this was just something that came up when I got that phone call from Carlo Rotella in the American Studies department,” Johnston said. “He was just like, ‘Would you be into this? Teaching and being on campus?’ I was over the moon. It was just such a great opportunity.”
Johnston is a seasoned music and pop culture journalist with bright red hair and enviable spunk. She was a founding editor of Gawker Media’s music news site Idolator, has contributed to Spin, Newsday, Rolling Stone and The Awl, was the music editor for the Village Voice and, prior to her relocation to Boston, she taught a course at New York University entitled, “Writing About Popular Music.” She is also the editor of her self-titled, weekly magazine Maura Magazine.
Sporting a denim jacket garnished with a couple band pins, Johnston talked to me about her first few weeks in Boston.
“Things were sort of really high intensity for the first couple weeks that I was here,” Johnston said.
September’s frenzy has come and gone, however, and the new season has brought about a new serenity. It also seems like Johnston’s writing has benefited from her fresh start in a new place.
“I wrote this one piece that had been percolating in my mind for a really long time on Candy Crush Saga ‘cause I got obsessed with it this summer when I was just waiting to move,” Johnston said, chuckling. “And I wrote it, and my friend Brad, who’s the copy editor for my magazine, was just like, ‘This is one of the best things you’ve written in so long.'”
The music critic has started to dip her foot in Boston’s music scene by attending some local shows, one of which was a Steely Dan concert at the Wang Theatre. She’s even gained some insight into the backstage culture of Boston venues.
“When you go backstage at shows in New York, it’s a crush of people ‘cause it’s where the business is, it’s where so many writers are,” Johnston revealed. “But when bands come to other cities, you can just like hang out, and it’s really great ‘cause they don’t know a lot of people and then they see a familiar face.”
Johnston started writing about music full-time in 2006, when she became a founding editor of Idolator, but she’s always had an interest in music. In ninth grade, Johnston worked at a bakery in Long Island.
“I’d get paid in cash, very above board, obviously, but I’d go next door and just spend all my money on CDs,” said Johnston. She later told me two of the first albums she ever bought were a self-titled album from the band Enuff Z’nuff and Funk-O-Metal Carpet Ride by Electric Boys. She would also ask her father to drive her to the Tower Records in Carle Place where “he would just sit at the Barnes & Noble and drink coffee while [she] just went through the aisles for hours and hours.”
In college, Johnston signed up for a woman-founded dial-up service called Echo to be able to email her friends. She would attend Echo’s monthly get-togethers held at the Art Bar in West Village, NY, where she met people working in both old and new media.
“It was a perfect storm,” Johnston reflected. “I’ve had a lot of really great people in my life at very critical junctures who have been really encouraging.”
Johnston has since been fortunate enough to have had a variety of mentors in her career, the most recent of whom is David Jacobs, one of the founders of 29th Street Publishing. Johnston’s colorful spirit and edgy gumption have helped establish herself as a respected and constant presence in the flux of music and pop culture journalism.
So, what does the practiced journalist think about recent events in the realms of music and pop culture?
The most obvious example that everybody can’t stop talking about is Miley Cyrus. She did a video of herself naked, and that helped her get to number one on the Billboard charts. … A lot of the hits that have been number one since Billboard started this YouTube counting have had some novelty element to them. I mean, I love Robin Thicke, but I would count the controversy over “Blurred Lines“ as that. You have “Gangnam Style,” you have the “Harlem Shake,” what else has been number one this year? I mean, Rihanna.
The surge of what Johnston calls “gimmickry” and “cheap tricks” in music and pop culture stems mostly from the growth of social media in recent years. Social media has become the preferred medium for self-branding and self-promotion for artists for many reasons, one being the ability to reach a vast following in as little time as it takes to press “Tweet.” Social media has helped launch some artists to the top, but it’s tough holding one’s own up there. What Johnston was getting at is this adoption of “gimmickry” by some artists in order to keep their personal brand trending on your news feeds.
Like social media trends, digital media is in flux. When asked about the constantly changing landscape of digital media, Johnston said:
I was reading a piece that was about pay walls, and how pay walls are really just not working out for a lot of news sources. Very small percentages are subscribing and the revenue that they have to make up is just massive because the ads used to be so expensive which was obviously a flaw by design of a lot of these publications. … I think there’s going to be some sort of shake out. I just feel like the disgust that more people are feeling with content that’s designed to be pointed at and made fun of is growing, and so I hope that that sort of tapers off soon.
In a way parallel to artists embracing “novelty elements” to maintain and increase their fandom, online publications have espoused a mentality that values views over content. Sites like Buzzfeed push content that, while highly entertaining, promotes a different standard for digital media content. As Johnston suggested, this trend in digital media is bound to be confronted later down the road as more people feel a growing need for content of a higher quality.
Since her days sifting through CD aisles as a teenager, Johnston has become a frontrunner in the uncharted field of music and pop culture journalism, and she has a sizable amount of insight to show for it. She has already begun integrating herself into the fabric of Boston, and who knows? Maybe you’ll run into the red-haired music reviewer at an upcoming local show. Or better yet, stop by her reading this Thursday at Lorem Ipsum Books in Cambridge.
From working as the music editor for The Village Voice to founding Maura Magazine, Johnston’s journalistic trajectory has been somewhat unusual, yet nonetheless prosperous. And we’re glad it’s led her to our city.
