Featured Career: Magazine Correspondent

FIRST, A FEW HOUSEKEEPING ITEMS:

1.In case you missed it this weekend: Recap of my SECOND week of sprint tri + half-marathon training (including details of my BIKE CRASH last week!)

2. I accidentally hit “publish” on a featured career on Friday. I swear I caught it within 5 seconds but google reader was too fast for me. Anyways, said featured career will officially post on August 8 so check back then if you read it in your google reader and would like to comment

3. THE GREAT FUNDRAISING ACT: Fellow blogger Susan has been diagnosed with Hodgkins Lymphoma. She is 25 years old. Today the blog world is coming together to raise money for her treatment. Though Susan is a fellow Canadian and a lot of her treatment is covered by our public healthcare system, her medications are not and they are going to cost her thousands of dollars each month. Please bid on an item at the bake sale or donate money directly to Susan through PayPal; every little bit helps. NOBODY should have to deal with cancer, especially at Susan’s young age, I hope you can find it in your heart to donate! Also, read more about her journey HERE.

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OK, time for today’s post; another featured career! Here are the five most recent careers I’ve featured. To view ALL the featured careers go HERE.

• Marriage and Family Therapist
• District Secretary
• Assistant Editor at DiabetesMine
• High School English Teacher
• Project Manager and Senior Designer

As always, email me if you’re interested in being featured!

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Today I am featuring Melissa from Press Play! When Melissa emailed me and told me she writes about music for a living I thought that seemed like such a cool career and one my readers would be really interested in! Hope you guys enjoy this interview as much as I did.

1. What is your official job title and what exactly does your job entail?

My official job title is simply ‘Magazine Correspondent’ but more commonly I just call myself an interviewer, because that’s what I do!

I work for an online music magazine called ‘CONFRONT’ (www.confrontmagazine.com). It’s based out of my hometown, Montreal, and its run by two amazing women who started it up from nothing 4 years ago out of their passion for music. We’re about a dozen employees and everyone works for free- this isn’t my one and only job- but it’s fulfilling in its very own way. When musicians/bands/artists come through my city (or any nearby city that I travel to go see a concert), my editor requests an interview with one of the members of the band (or the musician) and I can either ask to do the interview if it’s an artist I absolutely love, or she sends out an e-mail asking all of the correspondents who would like to sit down with that particular artist.

The job isn’t paid but it has its own perks. I love music and love going to concerts, and working for the magazine has opened lots of doors for me in this industry. I’ve met some amazing people because of it and I’ve had the opportunity to go to lots of concerts that I wouldn’t normally go to. I’ve been introduced to so much music that I didn’t listen to before, it’s unbelievable. But in a good way of course!

2. Describe a typical day in your work life?

There is no typical day with this job. It’s really on an irregular basis that I have work to do, but when I do, I’ve got LOTS of it. Instead I can tell you the things that I do for the magazine and the things I’ve learned:

My first and most important job is interviewer. The moment I request to interview someone, I’m bound to that day no matter what, unless a coworker can replace me. Interviews don’t always get accepted, and we only find out a couple days before (I’ve even done interviews and found out the DAY of). It’s important to show the people who work in the industry that our magazine is a reliable place and we love to feature
their artists. Which we obviously do. So the day of an interview, I often make sure that I’m either working my part-time job early in the morning so that I’m free all afternoon, and then I usually spend an hour or two researching the band and making my questions. I make my way downtown to the venue where the artist is playing and sometimes I can watch them do their sound check (which is SO cool. Being one of about ten people in the venue before the doors is a really special feeling!) and then we go into the dressing room, or the tour bus, or we just sit at a nearby table and I interview the artist for about 15 minutes.

Once the interview is done, my editor tells me if it’s going to be a featured article (which is a 2,000 word piece), or simple a weekly interview. For the big musicians we do a big article (which gets published the last Thursday of every month), but for most of my interviews I just have to write up the interview from my recorder and write an introduction and conclusion for the website. Those kinds of interviews get published every week online.

I’ve also, in the past, done a lot of the posting for the magazine (all the stuff that goes online) and I’m one of two people in charge of the street team. These days I haven’t done much of either of those because the website just went through a huge re-design, so things are just picking back up as we all get settled back into a kind of routine.

3. What’s your favourite thing about your career? Least favourite?

My favourite thing is definitely the interviews themselves! I love the feeling just before sitting down with a musician- I always have little butterflies and my nerves are always going haywire. I love what I do and every interview is different so that feeling never goes away.

My least favourite is definitely transcribing the interview from my recorder to my computer. It’s really tedious to sit and have to pause the recording every 10 seconds to copy down what everyone is saying, and I often have to rewind and re-listen to the same thing many times before I get the words just right. That job gets about ten times harder if I’ve interviewed 2, 3 or 4 members of the band. I have to remember which voice belongs to which person, and that can be easy to forget if I’m not super familiar with them.

But I love when I’m done writing it up and my work goes online. It might be tedious to write up, but part of me still loves doing it, even if it takes 2-3 hours for a 15 minute interview!

4. Going to concerts and writing about music sounds really cool and exciting. Does it still feel like “work”?

Actually doing the interviews feels like the complete opposite of work. If I could make a real career out of this kind of job and one day get paid for it, I would consider myself incredibly lucky. It’s such a fun feeling to sit down with an artist as an equal, and get to ask them questions without feeling completely ridiculous. As a music lover myself, it’s something I had only dreamed of 2 and a half years ago, before working for
CONFRONT. The actual writing part can sometimes feel more like work, but I love writing & I love music, so it’s not a bad work feeling at all.

5. How did you end up on this career path?

When I was 17-18 years old, I started going to more and more concerts, and I fell in love with that whole world. There is no feeling like the one I get at shows with best friends, listening to music that I love and seeing artists that I adore in real life. After a year or two of going to 20-40 shows nonstop, the job kind of fell in my lap while I was taking time off school. The editors were friends of friends, so it worked out really well at the time. I leapt at the opportunity because I knew that the experience would be worth a lot to me in the future. Since starting to work for CONFRONT, I just know that I want to continue writing and working in the music business. It’s an amazing place to be.

6. Who is the most famous band/artist that you’ve interviewed?

Since I started working for the magazine in April 2009, I’ve interviewed about 30 or so various artists and bands. The most famous ones that I’ve interviewed would be KORN, Karl Wolfe, Our Lady Peace, Ok Go (pictured with Melissa above), The All American Rejects, Classified and most recently Owl City. Definitely the absolute biggest though would be Barenaked Ladies. That one was only a phone interview (which almost never happens) but it was a really amazing experience and conversation nonetheless. I’ve also had the chance to interview The Decemberists, The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, Dandy Warhols, Circa Survive and The Used. They’re all quite big in their own music genre and also some of my personal favourites to talk to. I’ve been incredibly lucky to meet them, I know that much. Sometimes when I’m getting ready to talk to someone who’s more
well known (or that I’m actually a bit fan of), I forget that they’re just regular people like you and I. Sitting with these particular bands was special because they were all incredibly grounded individuals just living their dream.

7. If you could describe your career in one word, what would that word be and why?

My immediate (more boring) answer was ‘amazing’ but when I think about it more, I would definitely say ‘humbling’. It’s easy to let the image of an artist through the media make them into someone that they might not necessarily be in your mind. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve met someone who has answered my questions in SUCH a humbling manner, that I couldn’t help but respect them more than ever before.

8. Anything else you’d like to add?

Support your favourite bands and buy their music! Even if you aren’t the biggest fan, do what you can to help them out. Music piracy sucks, and it affects them in ways we’ll never be able to understand.

Thanks for having me on your blog Amber!

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How cool is it that Melissa LOVES what she does so much she does it for free? That’s passion and commitment if you ask me. Check out these two posts from Melissa’s blog about how music changed her life and the happiness it gives her.

Question of the day: Is there anything you love enough and feel passionate about enough that you would do for free? I think I would write for Canadian Running or Runners World for free. Maybe