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?
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?
