The Fan-Journalist Tightrope
Low pay, minimal worker protections, and pushback from both publicists and fellow fans. Is covering the thing you love even worth it?
by Kayti Burt
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Last year, I had a K-pop culture story killed. As it lay dying on my home office floor, I wondered if there was something I could have done to save it from this cruel fate.
The “killing” of a story—industry parlance for when an editor cancels an assigned piece prior to its publication—is not an infrequent occurrence in journalism, even if it had never before happened to me. If the writer is working with an outlet that has both the capacity and will (like this one did), the writer will have a contract with a “kill fee,” a percentage of the agreed-upon rate to be paid if they decide not to move forward with the story.
Still, I couldn’t let it go. The article was about the translation of the BTS memoir, which was published in English as Beyond the Story: 10-Year Record of BTS. The memoir was a surprise for fans, meant to be announced on the 10th anniversary of BTS’ debut and released on the anniversary of the day their fandom, known as ARMY, was named. Speculation that the secret project was actually by Taylor Swift wound up changing the announcement plan—but not the release date. This meant the book’s translation was done with extreme secrecy and speed by a team of three Korean-English translators. As pitched, my story was a chance to demystify the undervalued process of translation and the role it has played in hallyu, aka the Korean Wave—pegged to what promised to be one of the most successful books of the year. It would also be about the role BTS’ massive, global fandom (of which I consider myself a part) played in the translators’ choices.
As a freelancer, I’m usually working on multiple things for multiple outlets at once, so this piece was incorporated into my broader workload. Over the course of six weeks, I read a 544-page book, conducted interviews, did research, and wrote the first draft of the story. Then, I spent another week and a half in intensive edits and conducting additional interviews under the guidance of my editor. But as we got closer to publication, it started to become clear that the story I wanted to tell was not the one the outlet wanted to run. A few hours before it was set to go live, the piece was killed by my editor’s editor.
Where did it all go wrong? The incident made me take a long, hard look at what it meant to be a fan-journalist. Did my editors misunderstand this thing I felt certain I knew deeply—or had my fannishness kept me from seeing the real story clearly? And in an extraordinarily perilous industry, was my own fandom an asset or a liability?
As a kid, I don’t think I ever dreamed about being a pop culture journalist; until the internet blossomed into something more complex when I was in high school, I honestly didn’t even know it was a job. Sure, I dreamt about stories all the time, wrapped up in them as tightly as a warm blanket on a cold day, but never considered writing about them. Instead, I dreamt about a career on a Federation starship, or as a speech writer in the West Wing, or as a double agent working to avenge the death of her slaughtered fiance who was just trying to become a pediatric cardiologist because his brother died from a heart condition as a child. It took me a long time to realize that the only thing these diverse imagined lives had in common was their origin in my fannishness—I realized that instead of losing myself in stories, I could do something with stories instead.
So I went to college for Film Studies and English and, after a brief stint as an underpaid, overworked newspaper reporter, I became an underpaid, overworked entertainment journalist. In 2013, I got my first freelance media gig churning out dozens of pieces a week for the now-defunct entertainment gossip site Wetpaint. I was paid $15 an hour, but we were expected to write news pieces in 30 minutes and features in one hour, so I was paid $7.50 or $15 per article.
(For many freelance journalists working today, the rates aren’t much better, and the profession is marked by precarity and poor labor conditions. Even prestige publications that brag about high readership numbers pay paltry rates for the amount of work writers put in. Study Hall, which compiles resources for freelance media workers, sorts its work board into “above fair rates” and “below fair rates.” They currently define “fair rates” as “above $200 USD for around 700-800 words and above $0.20 per word for longer pieces.”)
Maybe I should have asked for more from Wetpaint, but as someone who grew up poor, that was more than I had ever made before, even though I had been working since the age of 14 (yes, including how much I was paid as a local newspaper reporter). I was grateful for the opportunity, even as I was being massively exploited. I got to write about The Vampire Diaries, Pretty Little Liars, and Once Upon a Time. Occasionally, I got to write recaps like the ones I had spent my teen years reading on Television Without Pity. Sometimes, even as I struggled to make enough money to pay my rent and student loan bills, I felt lucky. I negotiated a raise to $17 per hour, trying not to think too much about the roughly 30% tax rate for self-employed workers in the U.S.
In the decade since, I’ve worked consistently as a pop culture journalist—both as a salaried staff editor and as a freelancer. I’ve been to the sets of major superhero franchises, and interviewed some of the world’s biggest stars for outlets like Den of Geek, MTV News (R.I.P.), TIME, and Rolling Stone. My work has seen me moderating a Wynonna Earp panel in front of thousands of people at San Diego Comic-Con, and flying to London for the Birds of Prey world premiere. To many people, I probably appear successful—and by some metrics, I am.
However, financially is probably not one of them: from 2013 to 2022, the first decade of my work as an entertainment journalist, I have made $311,422 before taxes, which averages out to $31,142 per year. Some years I made less, and some years I made more. It’s possible to make much more as a seasoned entertainment writer, but in my career choices, I’ve often prioritized creative freedom and the responsibility I feel to my own fan identity and fan communities over financial stability. That being said, it’s difficult for me to parse how much more I could have made over the last decade in this industry. Even if I had made different choices, there weren’t actually that many entertainment writing jobs—especially for someone who doesn’t live in New York or L.A.—and there are far fewer now than a decade ago.
In the past few years, my professional interests have shifted to foreign-language media that inspires global fandoms—usually Korean media, but also Thai BL dramas, Japanese film, and anything tangentially related to Best TV Show of Our Time The Untamed. In related news, my own personal fannish interests have shifted this way, too! Like so many, I became a BTS fan during the first year of the pandemic. I was initially drawn in by the clips of their theatrical performances—and especially their dance choreography—that ambled down my Tumblr feed. Music and parasocial relationships were not, traditionally, my fandom bread and butter, but my brain jumped at the possibility that they could be—that this was a different kind of storytelling and worldbuilding to explore.
Because K-pop fandoms are so global and the artists are so consistent in their output, K-pop fandom can feel more alive than other kinds of fandoms. There’s always something new happening—which could be a bit intimidating from a weary entertainment journalist point of view, but mostly made me excited. I found excuses to cover K-culture, including BTS, on top of my regular responsibilities editing and writing nerd-centric TV, film, and book coverage as a staff editor at Den of Geek. My first article about BTS shamelessly exploited a brief Star Trek mention made during BTS’ pre-recorded comedy sketch on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Probably written in an hour, the article asked “Did BTS Invent Star Trek?” It was silly and playful, but it also spoke to the growing presence BTS—and Korean pop culture more broadly—had in traditional American media.
In early 2022, I left Den of Geek to become a freelance culture journalist again. If I cared more about financial security and less about my own fannish interests, I would have stayed. But I longed to write more stories about Korean pop culture and its fandoms without having to shoehorn Star Trek into the situation.
Like most writers who do this as their full-time job, what I cover is always at least partially dictated by what I can get paid to cover. Post-Squid Game, which was watched by one in four Americans, it has become easier to get K-culture coverage greenlit. However, mainstream interest in Korean media—or the fandom that surrounds it—has coincided with the ongoing collapse of online journalism. Additionally, good old-fashioned systemic biases like sexism, racism, and xenophobia keep some editors from seeing the potential of serving K-pop and K-drama fans. The people who care about K-dramas and K-pop are diverse, but they include notable numbers of Black, Latina, and Asian-American women and nonbinary folks—not the audiences who usually get thought of first when it comes to entertainment coverage.
For me, the rise of Korean culture globally represents a major and fascinating shift, as an increasing number of people are finding their identity and place of belonging outside the world’s dominant pop culture for decades, American-based storytelling. I wonder: What does the rise of Korean pop culture, and other foreign-language media coming from outside of the West, say about the diminishing influence of American pop culture and the erosion of American political and cultural power more broadly? To me, the answers to these questions are worth pursuing, and they are directly connected to my own fannish obsessions.
Within many corners of entertainment journalism, it’s not cool to be a fan, and I often downplay the degree to which I identify as one. There’s an assumption that fannishness can create a bias that gets in the way of objectivity, of telling the true or whole story; there’s also the widespread perception of “fan” as “booster,” totally incapable of critique of their faves. I think there is merit to those concerns, as there is when it comes to any potential conflict of interest—but I think it’s levied too often against women journalists in particular, where it’s often treated as a given rather than a possibility. (Note that no one questions whether sports reporters are also fans of the game they cover—and probably even an individual team!)
These biases are also often removed from the context of entertainment journalism’s work conditions—and how much expertise fans build up for free. Should the hours and hours I have spent listening to BTS music, watching BTS variety shows, and talking with other BTS fans be considered work? I don’t think of them that way, but if those hours of fannish indulgence didn’t happen, then my work as a journalist who covers BTS would not be nearly as well informed.
In most cases, I’m just not paid enough as a cultural critic to warrant or sustain a deep level of research otherwise. This lack of acknowledgement that, especially for freelancers and overworked staffers, our passion and curiosity as fans informs so much of our coverage is frustrating. When freelance rates around video game or TV coverage are determined, they often don’t factor in the number of hours it will take to play through a video game or to watch a season of television—even though those activities are necessary to complete the job. My understanding of both BTS’ work and the fan culture around them has tangible value to many places I’ve written for—not just media outlets, but also companies like Duolingo and Apple Music. It’s frustrating when “girlish” fandom is dismissed as silly in the same breath that institutions tap into its value for their business.
I’m still not quite sure what led to the killing of my story about the BTS memoir translators. From what I could glean in the final email, the outlet seemed to be looking for a story about the unreasonable demands of a foreign corporation, driven by the intensity of a women-led fandom. But that wasn’t what I had pitched, or the article I had been working on for weeks with my editor. From my perspective as both a fan and a journalist, that framing reinforced the flattened cultural narrative about the rise of Korean pop culture that I was looking to complicate. More than that, it was not based on the reality shared with me by the multiple sources I had interviewed. The editors seemed to think there was a deeper, darker truth hiding beneath the surface, and that the only possible value of the story lay in digging it up.
I’ve come up against the myopic framing of fan communities outside of the “mainstream” on a fairly regular basis—and the cross-cultural nature of K-pop only heightens the problem. Often, American outlets only seem interested in stories about K-pop fan culture if they’re simplistically positive or simplistically negative. The social processes that have flattened much of online discourse into “good or bad?” often manifest in stories that frame K-pop and its interconnected fandom in one of two ways: as a potential panacea to all global inequalities, or as a hivemind of girls and women unable to think critically about their own fannish identities.
Both of these extremes frame K-pop fans as a single massive unit, and they’re driven by the same pandering attitude: if the story is positive, then K-pop girlies will eat it up, and the value will come solely in the clicks it produces. If the story is negative, then it must inherently be important, because what value or complexity past infantile escapism could a K-pop fan community have? As the writer Keidra Chaney pointed out on Fansplaining itself, the reality is much more complex than either of these extremes, and not removed from systemic issues like racism or the prioritization of profits over people that shape our broader world.
As is often the case for a freelancer, I didn’t have access to the outlet’s larger strategy to better understand what went down behind the scenes when they killed my story. The editorial process works best when the editor and writer have some mutual knowledge and trust, which is impossible to build in a one-off situation. This isn’t a condemnation of the particular outlet, but rather of the industry as a whole. According to a 2022 Pew Research study, 57% of entertainment and travel journalists are freelance or self-employed journalists. This means the majority of the entertainment writing you read on the internet is done without the kind of steady, institutional support that more often produces people’s best work.
In these labor conditions, deciding when and where to push back against edits can feel like a minefield. Discussion around both structural changes and specific phrasing is a vital part of a good editorial process, but a lack of knowledge around a specific editor’s work style and capacity can make me hesitate, weighing where to object and where to let something go. If I’m considered a difficult writer to work with, either consciously or unconsciously, will an overworked editor be more hesitant to greenlight a future pitch? Maybe.
And in an industry driven by access, these kinds of concerns parallel freelancers’ relationships with publicists and the networks, studios, or labels they represent. If I cover a TV show, film, or album critically—which is, to be clear, a critic’s job—and a publicist doesn’t like that coverage, they may be hesitant to grant me access to the next project. Because I don’t have sustained institutional support from an outlet, which would guarantee me that access regardless of how a publicist felt about my past coverage, this could impact my ability to get future assignments. But if I don’t do my job as a critic, then I risk alienating and losing the respect of my readers and colleagues. And if my work is indistinguishable from a media conglomerate’s marketing department, then what is any of it for?
These concerns affect all freelancers navigating the entertainment space, but to be a fan-journalist specifically can mean carrying an additional weight. I know the level of discourse already happening in fandom spaces, and to write anything simpler or less nuanced feels, at best, useless and at worst, like a betrayal of that community. Publishing a piece can sometimes lead to estrangement from a fan community I find solace in, either because of explicit comments or behavior from other fans, or because I now associate that space with paid labor.
And to be clear, freelancer concerns reflect the precarity of the media industry as a whole. I’ve been on the other side of the equation, as an underpaid, overworked editor, and the situation can be just as bleak when working from within an outlet, as most institutional support these days isn’t particularly steady or sustainable. Salaried workers are often asked to write multiple stories per day, which means less reporting and less time for an editorial back and forth. Ridiculous hat-wearing venture capitalists strip-mining publications means the constant threat of sudden layoffs, and if you’re lucky enough to keep your job, you’re taking on larger workloads and possibly being told to wrangle AI-generated swill.
To be in entertainment reporting and cultural criticism today means to constantly be fighting to do a good job in an industry that feels increasingly designed to chisel away at the dignity of the work and profession. Most days, aspiring to a higher quality of writing feels less like a fight against intentional industry bias—as fans may assume is the case—than it does a fight against the negligence that comes from ongoing institutional decay.
In the case of my killed article, I was given a dignified choice: I could take the full rate for my work but I would not be able to pitch it elsewhere, or I could take half of the rate and hold onto the rights to my story. I chose the latter, and a version of the article—not the one I had worked so hard to shape with my previous editor—was published elsewhere. I made less than the original agreed upon rate for my work, but I didn’t have to sacrifice my framing of the story in the process—and like Riker playing the trombone, some things aren’t about the money.
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Kayti Burt is a pop culture writer and editor based in New England. She’s been published in Rolling Stone, the LA Times, Vulture, TIME, Polygon, Den of Geek, and more. At Paste, she explores Korean idol music from an American perspective in her “K-Pop Talk” column. She is a member of the Television Critics Association and the Freelance Solidarity Project.