Roy Christopher
As seen in:
Medium,
CorranCast,
behance.net,
The MIT Press,
Substack,
Boing Boing,
Vulture,
Literary Hub,
PopMatters,
LitReactor
Covers:
music, media, culture, hip-hop, skateboarding
Doesn't Cover:
politics
Get in touch with Roy
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Roy Christopher’s Biography
Read Full Bio →I marshal the middle between Mathers and McLuhan. I’m an aging BMX and skateboarding zine kid. That’s where I learned to turn events and interviews into pages with staples. I have since written about music, media, and culture for everything from self-published zines and personal blogs to national magazines and academic journals. I hold a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin and am currently an Instructor in the School of Communication at the University of North …
Roy Christopher’s Journalist Portfolio
Interview
See all 5 answers →Have you ever used a typewriter?
Yes.
Why did you become a journalist?
One of the things I have found when teaching writing to others is that students have the most difficulty coming up with something to write about. More than any other part of the writing process, topic selection stumps them, more than the challenge of the initial blank page, or coming up with titles, thesis statements, headlines, leads, or anything else. I tell them to find something they already like, that they want to know more about, and that they want to tell people about.
That impulse, that desire to tell others about something cool, is the core reason I do just about everything I do. It's the reason I'm a writer. It's the reason I'm a teacher. It's the reason I made zines. It's the reason I made websites. It's the reason I'm writing this right now.
What advice can you offer to aspiring journalists?
Give them something they can't get anywhere else.