Gannett, the largest newspaper chain in the United States, announced Tuesday that it would hire a reporter to cover one of the biggest names in music: Taylor Swift.
As Swift’s profile grows during her record-breaking tour, Gannett said it was looking for a reporter who could capture the significance of her music as well as her “growing legacy” and “the impact she is having on the music and business worlds.”
The reporter would write for USA Today and The Tennessean, the publisher’s newspaper in Nashville, where Swift began her career as a country music darling before selling out stadiums across North America on her record-breaking Eras Tour.
The job reflects the rabid fan base that has surrounded Swift, whose cultural resonance seems to grow with each album, including re-recordings of her old music. Her fans spent thousands of dollars on concert tickets and at one concert shook the ground so hard that a seismometer near Seattle registered it as an earthquake.
Reaction to the job posting was mixed, including praise for Gannett’s attempt to reach new audiences and criticism of how the company has laid off local journalists in recent years.
Kristin Roberts, Gannett’s chief content officer, said in a statement Tuesday evening that the USA Today Network, which the company owns, is committed to providing essential journalism to its readers, and that “includes providing content to our audience.” those who long for it.”
“As Taylor Swift’s fan base has reached unprecedented levels, so has the influence of her music and her growing legacy – not just on the industry, but on our culture,” Ms. Roberts said. “She shapes a generation and is relevant, influential and innovative – just like us.”
Newspapers often employ music critics and entertainment reporters, but rarely assign a reporter to cover a single artist.
However, Swift’s popularity proved to be a powerful force culturally and economically over the summer.
A Federal Reserve survey of business contacts found that Swift fans, or Swifties, had increased hotel revenue in the Philadelphia region. Although Swift, 33, and her promoters don’t publicly disclose box office results, trade publication Pollstar estimates she sold about $14 million worth of tickets each night. By the end of her planned world tour, which is fully booked with 146 stadium dates well into 2024, Swift’s sales could reach $1.4 billion or more – surpassing Elton John’s current multi-year record holder of $939 million Surpass farewell tour.
Some journalists expressed concerns about Gannett’s reporting priorities. Last December, Gannett cut about 6 percent of the company’s roughly 3,440-employee U.S. media division. Media analysts said the move could worsen the state of the local news industry, which has shrunk in recent years, and create information deserts in communities across the country.
Laura D. Testino, a reporter for Chalkbeat Tennessee, said on Xformerly known as Twitter, that while Nashville is getting a Swift reporter, “Memphis still doesn’t have an investigative reporter.”
Gannett has hired 225 journalists since March and now has more than 100 open positions, Ms. Roberts said.
Vrinda Jagota, a music writer who has covered Swift’s cultural impact, said in an interview Tuesday that while Swift is a complex pop icon worthy of journalistic analysis, there are other stars just as big, like Beyoncé.
The Beyoncé album “Renaissance,” for example, resonated with many Black and LGBTQ people, she said.
“I think the question that comes to mind is which fandoms and which moments of connection are taken more seriously,” Ms. Jagota said. “And Taylor Swift’s fan base is very white. There are a lot of white women.”
Robert Thompson, the director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University, said Tuesday that such a stance “is not as absurd as it seems at first glance.”
In an increasingly fragmented cultural environment, “where mass culture has broken down into a million little pieces,” he said, there is greater value in the one thing that is emerging, on which essentially everyone can comment.
“You can’t be conscious in the United States without having to deal with Taylor Swift on some level,” Dr. Thompson. Reporting on someone like her, he added, was a “perfectly reasonable job for a journalist.”