Interviews - Creator Interviews

March 19, 2019

Cherie Hu, the new wave of new media

A couple of weeks ago I interviewed one of the original bloggers, Jason Kottke, who started in 1998. This week’s interview is the perfect complement, as she represents the new generation of online media. Cherie Hu is a twenty-something music journalist from Brooklyn who runs an email newsletter and podcast, and earns revenue from these activities via Patreon.

March 12, 2019

Tiny Teee & the rise of Twitch for creators

Tiny Teee is a keycaps maker who videos her art process on Twitch, the live streaming service that evolved out of Justin.tv and is predominantly used by gamers.

Twitch has a young demographic, roughly 80% male, and most of the live streams are of video games and eSports. But it’s also increasingly being used by creatives, like Tiny.

March 5, 2019

Jason Kottke, OG blogger

Jason Kottke launched his blog kottke.org in 1998. That’s right, back in the twentieth century. Seven years later, he went full-time as a blogger and it’s been his professional identity ever since.

What I find most remarkable about Kottke’s story is that he’s never stopped blogging. The blog as an online publishing format is deeply unfashionable now. It was usurped firstly by social media and more recently by email newsletters. Yet Kottke the blogger persists.

February 26, 2019

The Internet History Podcast story, with Brian McCullough

Brian McCullough’s Internet History Podcast was initially launched to supplement his book on the same topic. But the podcast became a force in its own right. Now McCullough is a professional podcaster and making a mint as host of the Techmeme Ride Home.

February 19, 2019

Drawing inspiration from Sweeney Boo

This week’s creator interview is with a young comic artist and illustrator from Canada, who has 174,000 followers on Instagram and is making a good living to boot. She also has a crowdfunded graphic novel coming out soon, her first foray into the book world.

Her real name is Cécilia Dupuy, but in her career she goes by the screen name Sweeney Boo.

February 5, 2019

Breakthrough: interview with indie author Eliot Peper

Eliot Peper’s breakout book was Cumulus, a novel that got great reviews and went viral on Reddit. In the following interview we discuss more about how he promoted Cumulus and what the secret of its success was. We also discuss how he markets his work online, and how his recent experience with an agent and publisher has worked out.

January 29, 2019

Going viral: interview with YouTuber Tal Oran

Tal Oran is a popular video blogger, who has nearly 90,000 subscribers on YouTube and 160,000 on Facebook. In the following interview, Oran tells me more about how he runs his vlogging business. We discuss how he grew his audience over the past five years, to the point where he now makes a full-time income from it. He tells the story of when and how his first video ‘went viral’ in 2017, the trigger for a strong period of growth that continues to this day.

January 22, 2019

Cheeky Exploits bares all on Instagram

When Londoner Rachel Bracken started posting travel photos of her naked derrière onto Instagram in July 2016, it was only meant to be a bit of cheeky fun. But within a year, her Cheeky Exploits Instagram account had collected over 200,000 followers. The account is now bearing down on 300,000.

January 15, 2019

100% DIY: interview with cellist Zoë Keating

Zoë Keating is a cellist and composer whose music has appeared in tv shows like Breaking Bad and the Sherlock Holmes drama Elementary. She’s released several albums and EPs of her original music, and has recorded with artists such as Amanda Palmer.

All of this Keating does with a “100% DIY” approach.

January 8, 2019

The grand sweep of Doug Metzger’s Literature and History podcast

One of my favorite podcasts is Literature and History, launched nearly three years ago by a literature PhD from California named Doug Metzger. As the name suggests, the show is a history of literature – starting from the Tower of Babel origin myth and continuing on through Ancient Greece and much more. Each episode features textual readings, analysis, historical context, and Metzger’s endearingly goofy brand of humor.