Taylor Crumpton Speaks on The Ups and Downs of Being a journalist in 2020

Jul 10

With great power comes great responsibility, and being a journalist in 2020 is all about remembering your duty. Social media has made the job a lot more flexible and even more influential. Though not inherently a bad thing, we have seen people use their platforms irresponsibly. That is why Taylor Crumpton, affectionately known as the Hot Girl Journalist, is so admirable.

At any time you can find the Oakland resident advocating for Black rights, speaking on her experiences in social work, uplifting fellow Black women, and fearlessly standing by her beliefs regardless of who may disagree. She is one of the most authentic people on your timeline. Her overwhelming charm and multiple talents have amassed her a following of over 17.4k people. She admitted to that 10k being a goal for her, as it is for many, but having that many people with eyes on you is not always the best thing.

Your ego and insecurities are in a constant tug of war in this field. That is why it is important to stay grounded and move with intention, according to the 24-year old. Check out our conversation below, covering cancel culture, writing a book versus writing an article, patience, and advice to young writers.

You’re such a beacon of positivity for other people. You love the community and you always show support. How are you doing, though? Especially with everything going on in the world.

Taylor Crumpton is surprisingly good. I think people get to see my community really check in on me on Twitter. If you follow me you see my joke around with friends or play cousin. We’re like two old black Southern where I’ll be on FaceTime with her all day. We’ll write articles together, cook together, so I have a really good community. I’m thankful for them, they’ve been showing out.

We have seen many people being canceled lately and publications getting called out. How do you plan to move forward knowing how people have been treated for so long?

The devil you do know is better than the devil you don’t know. I think my first two years of freelancing, I was like “I will damn near take anything. I’m just trying to get my bylines up.” I respect that hustle and that grind ‘cause when I started it was like you know you’re going to be treated badly by them, but you’re getting this byline with the end goal of it’s gonna lead to more and more success. Right now I really love this reckoning that is happening. I think it’s overdue, and the good thing about it us being stuck in the house, “bored in the house bored,” people have been hit with this moment like “You know, what are you gonna do if I speak up? What do you have over me? I’m already unemployed, I’m at my house, I’m probably furloughed.” The Catch-22 is for the journalists like Ivie Ani who have accumulated such a big following because we loved and respect her work at OkayPlayer, she doesn’t need the support of the publication or its backing. Whenever she makes a statement, people listen. We’ve seen these journalists like Weslie Lowery, Pulitzer prize winner, talk all the time about how the Washington Post went and removed him from that publication for speaking up. In this moment when we’re seeing people we’ve looked up to who made their name in the blog era or Ferguson for him, it’s empowering us to be like “If I have the social media following, then I need to learn how to keep them engaged whether that’s Medium, me doing threads, Periscope, or Instagram Live.” I think there’s this redirection of power dynamics in media right now where like--take yourself, for example, your self-published stuff on Medium has probably given you more attention, eyes, and metrics than you’ve done for a publication. The one thing I love about Medium is it gives you the data the publications won’t give you. Back in the day when I was writing for Teen Vogue heavy, my shit would always trend and it would get retweeted by celebrities. I’d ask for data; “Oh, I can’t give you the data.” Well, I’m the one who wrote the article so what do you mean you can’t give me the data? I see it trending. I’m getting texts from my aunties about how people are sharing this, but I can’t capitalize on what that is? So I think just like encouraging writers right now to make your own lane, make your own platform, make your website, but do so with the same quality and attention as you would a piece because we’re seeing this overload. Everyone has a Patreon, everyone has a newsletter, podcasts are coming out left and right. The ones that are going to survive this influx are the ones who make the mission statement, the objectives, the editorial calendars. Go for the goal homie, but do nothing without intention. Another thing is social media will try to tell you you need to be active all the time, where sometimes you just need to lay low.”

We spoke on the podcast a while back about your book proposal. How’s that been coming along?

*laughs* I have never learned so much patience than in writing a book. Writing a book is so much different than writing an article for a publication because you have to really sit down with whatever your subject matter is. Your book is like your dissertation; I am the expert on this. An article you can get some sources and taste it, but you’re not going as in-depth. Your book proposal? That’s 10000 words. They want a chapter, what other books are similar to it, what makes you unique, I mean everything. I really love it because my topic is Hip-Hop history in Dallas. You get a greater love for yourself and the subject matter. It’s kind of cool because I can listen to Hip-Hop from my city and know “That came from 2003, that came from 1982.’ It makes me feel good to kind of be my city’s Hip-Hop historian, but all these people that got book deals—you think it came overnight? For the white people, it did come overnight but that’s a conversation for a different time--racism in the publishing industry. People have to work months and months to get to these agents. It’s not just, “Oh, we’re gonna give them out to our favorite Twitter writers!’ No, you have to sit down and do the work.

What’s the coolest fact about Dallas Hip-Hop you uncovered?

I didn’t know back in the day that Dallas was a hotspot for B-Boy dancing and graffiti. Our B-Boys competed at a more national or worldwide level than our rappers. They introduced a lot of the moves to the LA pop lockers in the 80s and 90s. We used to send a DJ to the DJ world championships, so I was like “Aye.”

You are unashamed of who you are, unapologetic, and not afraid of being held accountable. It showed in the conversation with Jon Caramanica from The New York Times. You gathered a lot of support, but had to come out and say “I might have been off base.” There’s a lot of people who aren’t good at apologizing, admitting when they’re wrong, and with social media, the trend of “this you?”—people are so quick to try and tear you down. It seems like you came out of that moment even stronger and people are respecting you for that. You detailed the conversation a bit, but looking back - what was that experience like?

Man, that was so funny. I’m glad that I can laugh because in the moment I was like “Oh shit.” Within my first 24 hours of being a freelancer, as I just left my full-time job, I came for one of the kings, one of the OGs in Hip-Hop journalism to this day. That’s real Leo shit. What I really love from my conversation with Jon is that he understood the passion, anger, and love I have for Hip-Hop journalism and that there’s a different generational context for him as a white, cis-gendered male Hip-Hop journalist than the ones we have today. The reason why I did that Twitter thread is because I had countless pitches stolen from me and go to white boys at Hypebeast or Complex or insert any Hip-Hop publication, right? So the only way I felt I could hold him accountable or get justice was by calling him out on Twitter. He had to explain to me “Look, I see that trend” and from his perspective, he’s trying to figure out what to do.

That’s why you see he had Alphonse on a podcast or he published a lot of Yoh’s work. He’s trying to figure out where to put his mentorship into the younger generation and also seeing how we talk about the glory days of the blog era but we don’t talk about what we lost in the blog era. How Complex and Uproxx bought out a lot of these smaller black blogs, incorporated them, and restructured them into a very white-facing thing. So he knew that I had experienced that and he even shared with me that he had pitches stolen from him. He kind of gave me the game on how to hold someone accountable on social media, but also look at the generational gap context because he’s 20 years my senior. So he’s like you probably don’t know what it was like when I had to prove myself to Elliott Wilson and work under Danyel Smith. It was a different time to be a white Hip-Hop journalist in the 90s than it is now where I have so many white male editors in Hip-Hop spaces that truly don’t make sense to me. So I think from Jon it was good to hear some mentorship from him, from someone who’s been a music critic for 20 years. It was really lovely, we ended up joking. I said I’ll come bring him a cobbler and he said he’s ready for me to call him in 20 years when some writer accuses me of stealing their pitch. So, it was really weird for him to say “I see you, you do really good work, you know the culture, but next time if we have x, y, z mutuals in common, go to the mutuals.” I also brought up Solange in the thread because Solange and him have the ongoing beef; he’s the hand that she said to bite. I was taking out my hair too, he called me and I’m like “I’m taking out my locs.”

What were people’s reactions close to you?

I had so many black people in my DMs like “Why are you apologizing to this white man? You don’t have to apologize to this white man!” I told people all the time I never want to have so large of a platform that I can never be held accountable. As writers become celebrities in a sense, something that we can both attest to is that when you are in a music and entertainment beat, parts of that start getting reflected on you. People have their favorite music writers, favorite entertainment writers, and normally they’re all in the same friend groups, all hangout, and date each other. So you become more than a figure for writing but a personality or “celebrity.”

I do a lot of work in Oakland talking to high school and middle school students about Hip-Hop journalism, and they follow me. I already warned them about my Hot Girl Tweets. They didn’t seem too concerned about them. I wanted to model what it looks like in real-time and practice. I think part of cancel culture conflicts with my training as a social worker where I’m like “We’re going to have a restorative process. We’re not going to do this in the court of public opinion on Twitter but it happens a lot.

We have to show that everyone is allowed to fail, everyone can be human, everybody can be restored. Actually that’s the reason why Kehlani asked me to interview her. She said “I understand you’re a social worker, you’re going to ask me critical questions, but you’re going to be a human about it, so let’s go.” She might drop it like Beyonce. I feel like I might wake up one day and the interview will be live.

How do you navigate wanting your pieces to drop but having to wait on a publication when everything was done on your end?

My God, I had a story that got published in September 2019 and I had written that story when I had just graduated from grad school in July 2018. So, I tell people I’ve sat on stories for 12 months. I’ve joked that there are some stories that got published, I could have had a kid and the kid could have been born and we both look at the link go live. It’s funny, a lot of the pieces that have taken a lot of time to come out, looking back now, it wasn’t the right publication for them number one. Number two, it wasn’t going to be received as well in that time. So I think you have to find the balance between “Okay, why do you want this thing to come out right now?” Very much interrogate that.

There was a long time where I was like “Keh, drop the interview, drop the interview.” At the same time I had a Kehlani interview, I had to finish my first cover story. So I was emailing publications, trying to drop these two, and I was just like “drop it, drop it, drop it.” There’s a way we journalists have to disassociate themselves from the work, because if you put so much of your worth and your value as a journalist in this one thing dropping, that opens up a lot of moral ground. Then you start kind of transforming into an influencer.

We should always be doing the work for the genuineness of the work and the subject matter of the story. When you start going on Twitter—and it’s okay to say “Oh, I’m gonna interview this person!” Show off, but when it seems like you’re making a whole social media campaign and every Tweet is like “Have you read this? Have you read this? Have you read this?” Now I’m starting to question what the root of this is because we’ve all seen people in our industries talk about their friends, who they’ve taken pictures with but we can’t say the lede, what were your questions?

So I think we have to be very careful because those lines are starting to merge between journalists and influencers. It’s really on us to ensure that boundary is pure, and that also means when our work comes out, how we promote it, how we discuss it, and then working with editors and being like ‘Okay, if you’re not going to publish it in this, in Q2, can you start the invoicing process? Whenever it’s supposed to come out, I’ll probably be happy it hit then. Especially not right now with the uprisings and solidarity actions; music and entertainment stories are not tracking as well as they usually would. So I’ve kind of been grateful to be laying low and working on my book proposal because, with all this political stuff, our beat really gets put down.

I feel, unfortunately, it is almost inevitable for us to being influencers but you just have to be responsible. How do you stay humble and dialed back despite having such an active following over 10k?

Honestly, I had a group of friends clock me when I hit 10k. Reaching 10k is this weird goal where everyone wants to hit those double digits. It’s one of those selfish goals; let me just cross the sands. Then you get there and realize holy fuck, now if I’m just having a conversation with my friend people can also see this conversation. It complicates things because you’re in this weird space of visibility.

I’m a 24-year-old girl who will get on there and say “I can’t believe this white man went and took my thread and my pitch and I can’t believe it. I’m going on and on Twitter like “I can’t believe this is happening, why does this always happen?” You don’t realize you have all these people watching you, and for some reason my following—I don’t know whether to give them a name because they do show out and it’s awkward. I woke up the next day and they were *makes gun noises*. “Yo, what’s going on?”

Yoh called me and told me his story of when it happened to him. You cross a certain line where you have to think about Twitter in a different sense where it just isn’t for my friends anymore. This is now my resume, my career. He gave me this thing where he said “If you feel hot-headed, open up a Google Doc, write in the doc, and leave it for two hours. If you come back in two hours and it’s still important, go and do that. If you come back in two hours and it’s not, you realize it was just an emotional response.”

Now when I go on the platform I do allow myself to get some drunk Tweets off because I’m 24 and I’m not about to go police that. But when I feel like a Tweet could be very controversial or I’m accusing someone of something, I really have to step back, check in with folks and ask myself am I willing to make this a fight. My mama always said if you’re gonna swing on someone make sure you can take that swing back. So if we go and Tweet at someone, who do we have? We have editors, publications, we have our peers. If you’re dating, someone who you’re interested in. Everything has to be so intentional so that’s what I’ve been trying to manifest more.

When you come on here, what are you trying to contribute? What are you trying to bring? That’s the thing they don’t tell you when you reach this following. I’ve seen my friends get verified and they hate being verified because they don’t tell you all of the bad things that happen. You may get the partnership deal but you can’t just be off White Claws because someone is gonna be like ‘what are you doing?’. Then, my friends who are staff writers, they have HR looking at their Twitter. A lot of my friends from publications are like ‘we admire you because we can tell you stay true and the only person you answer to is yourself. For us, HR can tell us to take something down. You can’t cuss on the internet or you can’t do this.

We are humans who have human moments. Everyone is on edge lately and pivots to negativity. We saw it in the J. Cole and Noname situation. I think the timing was awful, but it was an important conversation to have. The problem is people support people over ideas. I feel it is important to hear from Black women about this because we often speak for them. So, what were your thoughts?

What a wild day. I was teaching some students how to be critical Hip-Hop journalists, then I get off the phone and J. Cole dropped a song. Then I had to go on a live thing and I’m like “Nigga, just read a book.” Hot Girl Tay encourages all of y’all to read a book, do a report this summer, and I’ll review it. I think Cole displayed this longing for a political education but he doesn’t know where to start. There’s also some projection. “She came from a good home, had two parents, everything.” Like Noname didn’t lose friends growing up on the Southside of Chicago.

There’s also this projection of what it means to be an academic black woman—you come from a really good home, you had parents, support, access to all these texts so you’re coming at me like a professor versus an undergraduate student. I think Cole’s song spoke to a power imbalance because you have all this education and all this knowledge and I don’t. We have to look at Cole like okay but you did go to a four-year institution and you are older than Noname.

There are opportunities for you throughout your career and schooling where even if you didn’t know where to begin, there are entry points and opportunities, right? So we have a gender dynamic, a generational dynamic, and then for Noname who grew up listening to Cole, how does that feel when someone you may or may not love or inspired your rapping style come at you? Because when Noname got called out for black capitalism very visibly on Twitter, she was like ‘Okay, I’m gonna step back, read these books, learn from organizers.’ Then she came back and brought us Noname Book Club.

The thing about Noname is we’re seeing how cancel culture kind of gave her this entry point into radicalization and social and political things. The same thing can be said to Cole. People were like “Bruh, I’ve tried reaching out to you before other people.” So that Noname-Cole situation, I feel like that could have been another conversation that didn’t have to make it to the court of public opinion.

Anytime a dispute makes it to the court of public opinion on Twitter—that platform wasn’t made for us to have in-depth conversations. It was never made to go back and forth. It’s just for saying things to your friends. It’s the place to get fits off and dip. It’s not the place to go down here because as much as we try to advocate through engagement, there’s a reason there are only 280 characters. So I enjoyed it because of the beef, I love a back and forth. That Madlib, 70-seconds *chef’s kiss* Someone needs to put them on a best-of list.

I think it also brought up a lot of things where J. Cole fans traditionally favor him and he envisions a lot of what the patriarchal assumptions of Hip-Hop are. This educated man who raps about racial inequality and racial justice, but that is still through a very cis-gendered male lens. While Noname is really representing this generational shift where I can rap “My pussy wrote a thesis on colonialism” and as well as make sure incarcerated folks have access to radical texts.

It highlights the gender and also highlights this generational change in what Hip-Hop is going to look like. I think a lot of people projected themselves and their perceptions and fears of a genre that is going to turn 50 pretty soon and also feel like we’re losing control over it. So there’s a lot of factors that got brought up and it was like a sore wound. We haven’t yet had that conversation as artists, as fans, as journalists about these ongoing gaps. If we never have that conversation it’s just going to get exaggerated, and now white people have entered the building so we’re having conversations in mixed company.

Condescending woke people definitely do exist. Often, unfortunately, black men and black women’s relationship can be adversarial. Sometimes parental. Women taken on a big burden and nurture us. Many of us don’t like feeling punished, but the reality is a lot of black men haven’t been listening. How would you handle someone attacking your tone?

Remember the Dreamville sessions when Ivie Ani asked if any women got invited to the sessions? Which also brought up the conversation that in 2019, some of the best rappers are women, how are they not included in the Dreamville album? Who is in charge of voting and placement? We all know as journalists, the making of an album and a playlist is so political. Who makes the final cut? Who doesn’t? It is all an agenda. People think they just went to the studio. No, baby, A&R, publicists; that was a well-documented machine they produced at Dreamville. Her comments were valid because sometimes we get into these Hip-Hop collectives and I think about how we don’t talk about Mia X who was the first lady of No Limit records. All of the women who get erased in Hip-Hop.

On the record, there's a really good example of women who were striving to push the culture forward and got pushed out because of gendered violence in the form of sexual assault and sexual harassment. These women who bring up these comments, who contribute to the culture, their tone is always policed. ‘I need you to make this more favorable and tailored to me because right now I’m getting offended.’ It’s kind of like that sign that says I don’t know how to read so this sign doesn’t apply to me. I don’t understand these words and I need you to break it down.’

We do that so often as women because we’re socialized to nurture and really guide you. That should not have to be the responsibility for a little girl educating her big brother about why what he is saying to women is wrong when he is married and has a child. Something for me, especially in Hip-Hop, it is on you to know every single aspect. You’ve got to know the producer, the A&R, the publicist, you’re always being checked in the space. You’re never fully welcomed in the space.

I’ve been in interviews with rappers who are like “I don’t really think you know what you’re talking about.” And I’m like, especially me not being born and raised in the Bay, I have to be able to recite not just Mac Dre, not hyphy, but the era and record labels that preceded that just for you to sit down at the table with people who sometimes don’t always know what they’re talking about. I was talking to Regina about how we both get called “female Narduwar” because we have to sit here for hours and do so much in-depth research. A white Hip-Hop journalist doesn’t have to do that and a male Hip-Hop journalist doesn’t have to do that.

So I think until we get rid of these very much gendered societal notions, we’re always gonna have this burden where it’s like alright explain to me everything. Danyel Smith is an icon in the journalism industry, the matriarch, and even at her peak people still went behind her back. The editor in Chief at VIBE Magazine. Even if you have achieved that level, because of sexism, people will go around you. You know she’s from Oakland so you know she don’t play that shit.

I’m seeing this is a dirty game. You play because you love it but you know some people get screwed over. It’s just--

It’s part of the industry, I think. I try to tell that to a lot of people. When you undo the myth that America is based on merit, you can undo that every industry is based on merit. I’m not saying don’t be a good journalist b3cause we value the opinions of those who are genuinely dedicated to the craft. We can tell that and we can see that. We also know there are people in the space of have ascended and have their position because of connections and them playing the game. You really have to sit down at one point in your journalism career and think about what your exit plan is going to be when you leave this field. It’s very hard to keep longevity like Danyel has. When you’re making that exit plan, have a brand Bible.

What are your morals? What are your ethics? What are your values? If a publication has wronged your friend and they come to you with a big commission, are you going to accept that commission?

What is your advice to writers on getting better?

When we saw sites like Jezebel rise to notoriety due to the op-ed complex where a lot of writers of color or people who didn’t go to the j school, the only way you could get a byline is doing an op-ed on trauma porn. You’ve seen so many articles about ‘I took a strip pole class and this is how it affected me.’ Or ‘I did so and so for five days and these are the results.’ Often times those things would trend and bring traffic to the site. The model for us growing up was, ‘Okay, I just need to take this traumatic experience and write about it for publications so people will read my shit.’

You have to take time to disassociate that, because that’s how sometimes you can put the ‘I’ and center yourself in the work. If your first entry was op-ed and you never had the opportunity to do a reported, review, or feature then your mindset is really op-ed focused. You’re going to put ‘I’ in everything. When you have to do writing outside of that, you have to interview someone and determine what is a credible source. So I tell people find your favorite journalist and study them. Look at their work, how they do structure and flow.

I think a good person who inserts themself in the work is Alphonse. You can tell his voice, whether it’s a review or another piece. There’s a way in which he’s blended his voice while also providing critical commentary so you can hear both of him. You can tell that in his piece, and I think that’s a really good example of how you can still be a journalist and insert yourself while also not making this all about “me.” You also have an editor or been with editors who will check you. They see something in you, so they stop you, give you feedback because they know you’re going to come back ten times stronger.

That was Ella for me at Teen Vogue. When I saw her enter the Google Doc, it’s just like “red, red, red, red.” I was in grad school, they said she was the editor of my piece, and I was just terrified. That ended up being one of the best essays on the site. Last month she sent me this brilliant essay about how she’s proud of me and my work over the years. Looking back, you really cared about me. You didn’t beat my ass. I had one editor who just hated me and she would tell me my shit was trash, garbage, she even subtweeted me once because I couldn’t submit an article after finding out my friend had died on Twitter.

What haven’t you accomplished yet that you would like to?

That’s a good question. I’m excited to be an author when this is all said and done. That’s a childhood goal of mine. I want to do some podcasting, audio and speaking engagements. I think the thing that makes me unique as a journalist is I’m very fluid. If it comes to me, it comes to me. If it doesn’t, cool. I think I’ve learned to really submit myself to the work because when you write you’re in a position of control. You control the words and even in the editing process you still have some control over the piece and your words. All the big opportunities I’ve gotten have really just fallen into my lap.

My first print piece, I did not know the difference between writing for print and writing for digital. Two different things. That Megan Thee Stallion review, I had never really reviewed music before. My first review was trash, but let me tell you, Pitchfork will put you through the fire to make sure that review is good. So I’m really in the place of like whatever falls into my lap, I’ll go for it. I don’t wanna ever be like a power lustful journalist that wants all the commissions. Most of the time, I refer to my other writer friends for commissions. Like alright, go hit up Trey. Go hit up Keisha. That’s what I would like to be known more for. Taylor put me on game.

Did the hot girls win last summer?

It was a really good summer. Meg has this ability. Like right around when “Cash Shit” came out it was time to find a pony. This summer we got “Girls From The Hood.” I don’t know what it’s going to be like being a hot girl in quarantine. Kehlani is filming stuff from her computer. So we’ll see what we’ll do. Somebody called me “Shea Butter Taylor” the other day and it just didn’t hit right.

What’s your favorite album this year?

That’s a good question. Kehlani’s album was in my head for months. It’s hard for me because when I interview artists I go through their entire discography so I always joke that my end of year playlist isn’t accurate. I’ll just sit there and listen, listen and listen. I can’t even say one off the top because I’ve been listening to so much old school Dallas Hip-Hop. My most listened right now is Purple Hulk by Big Tuck. That came out in like 2004.

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