In the summer of 2022, 3Views sent out a call for contributors. In our search for more voices, we began to talk about a lack of intergenerational perspectives in our work. That led us to ask, “where are the critics of color from the generation above us? And where are their elders?” We scanned the web, reached out to our mentors, spoke with colleagues across the field, and were fortunate enough to speak with three kind and brilliant Black critics of varying ages:
Jan Simpson (70s) – the critic behind the website Broadway & Me; host of the BroadwayRadio podcast “All the Drama”
Eric Deggans (50s) – NPR’s first full-time TV critic.
Regina Victor (20s) – an artist and critic; founder of Rescripted
Here’s how these three critics found their way to the field and what they see now. The interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity.
3Views: What were some early doors that opened for you in the field of cultural criticism?
My sense was always that newspapers were the training ground and the ladder for me. I always thought I would spend my entire career in newspapers. Initially, my idea was that I was going to be a Pop Music Critic and eventually land at The Washington Post or The New York Times. Or you know when I started magazines like Musician existed and The Village Voice, which was much more vibrant. Even Playboy had a lot of really good music coverage. So, my early hope was to land at a national publication covering pop music. And that morphed as I did the job for a while, and as the newspaper industry changed, as the publishing industry changed, and as the media changed.
The goal was just to find a place where I could do that job most comfortably and with the largest reach. And so I eventually just ended up at NPR and I'm doing a lot of the same kind of things I'd be doing if I was still a TV Critic at the Tampa Bay Times. But I have a national voice, getting paid better. I have more access and more impact. So I'm where I wanted to be when I started trying to become a critic. I just have wound up covering a different subject than maybe I would have expected when I started working towards all this in '89. And I'm working on a different platform than I expected.
This goes all the way back to when I was in eighth grade, ninth grade, and I was trying to figure out what I was going to focus on in my studies. I decided that a career as a journalist or a critic, a columnist, would be something where I would have fun with it and I could earn a steady paycheck. I was good at music, I played drums and bass guitar and I sang. And then I was also a good writer. So how could I put those two jobs together to something that was stable and would be worthwhile to focus on? I just decided a long time ago that I was going to aim myself at that. I worked towards that through high school and through college. In fact, when I was at college, I was in a band that was signed to Motown briefly.
So I worked as a professional musician. I worked as a recording artist. I toured with the bands, all that kind of stuff. And then when that was over, I felt like I understood the music industry in a way that a lot of critics didn't, because I'd been part of it. So I thought that aiming myself towards being a Pop Music Critic made a lot more sense. And indeed, when I started doing the job, I started doing the job for a newspaper in New Jersey. I had a lot of contacts, people that I had played with or people that I had gone to college with, were all in the business. A friend of mine from college is a drummer from Saturday Night Live. Another friend is in Billy Joel's backing band. Another friend plays with Smashing Pumpkins. Another friend plays with Bon Jovi now. Another friend is with Burt Bacharach. All my friends went off and got all these gigs.
You chose some good friends!
I didn't realize it at the time, but yes, I went to Indiana University and it was a really special time. Just the period! I was there from 1983 until 1990 — most of the 1980s — I took time off because the band got signed. But during the time I was there, we had musicians who went on to play with Miles Davis. This guy named John Harrington has been the guitar player for Steely Dan forever.
And these were all people that we kind of traded gates with, jammed with. We were all in bands together around the same time. The lead singer from my old band sings background with Burt Bacharach, the legendary songwriter. The keyboard player and guitar player from my band played with LL Cool J and Baby Face and all these people. I just decided not to, I didn't want to be a professional musician.
Why not?
I'm a drummer. And when you're a drummer, number one, you're not that involved in the songwriting. You come in after the songs have been written. So generally, drummers are just not that involved with the heart of the band, which is writing songs.
When you're recording a record, it could be really boring because you only do the beginning. I worked for 10 days when we recorded our record, and then I had to kill time for two weeks while everybody else recorded their stuff. And bands were starting to go out of favor in the industry anyway. I got the sense that if I was going to try to make it as a player, I really needed to be good at reading music and to be more of a session kind of person so that I could take advantage of any opportunity. And that wasn't where my head was at. There was a lot of down time and a lot of sitting in dressing rooms and a lot of waiting around for other things to get recorded. It also seemed like the kind of life that was very hand to mouth and very uncertain. I wanted to come out of college and have a job where I was making a decent amount right away.
It doesn't sound like much now, but my first job paid $23,000 a year. I'd only made about 13, 14, 15,000 a year as a musician. So it just made sense. Once it became obvious that the band I was in wasn’t going to go on to stardom or anything, I decided I was going to finish my studies as a journalist and then follow that side of my career. And I've been very happy with that. I've been very happy seeing all my friends do well as musicians and their experiences have just reinforced that I made the right decision that I wasn't cut out for that life.
How did you find your way to your first journalism job?
At Indiana University, which has one of the best journalism schools, I joined the school newspaper as a Features Writer. The outgoing Features Editor was Ryan Murphy — the guy who created Glee, American Horror Story, all that. All the people that I was hanging out with at Indiana University have also gone on to have really amazing careers as journalists.
My internship in summer 1989 was as a Music Features Writer at The Pittsburgh Press. I also reviewed a lot of concerts that the staff critic didn’t want to cover. That’s when I wrote the story about the shooting between crews for Guy and New Edition. Then, in May 1990, they hired me as a News Reporter in Pittsburgh’s northern suburbs. That’s when I constantly offered to write music features on the side, in order to build up clips of my music writing.
The Pittsburgh Press, an afternoon newspaper, was bought out by its main competition, the morning Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and I worked there for about six months. Then I went to The Asbury Park Press.
I always had in my head where I wanted to be in 5 or 10 years. Which I think is important for that stage of a journalist's career, where you have to go through a series of experiences to build momentum. In those first few jobs, you really have to keep that in mind. What are you doing at that moment to lead to those 2 or 3 things?
I was a Pop Music Critic at The Asbury Park Press for about 2 and a half years. It was a great experience because it was close to the New York market and it was close to the Philadelphia market. There were a ton of artists and celebrities and people who lived there. Because I had a friend who played with Bruce Springsteen, I eventually got to know him. When I first got there, Bon Jovi kind of courted me because the previous pop critics had always been obsessed with the downtown scene in New York City or grunge rock or whatever. He had a chance to cultivate a writer who would be fair to him. He reached out to me almost right away and we wound up spending time together. It was great to report on celebrities that big and have access to them.
Then I got the same title job at St. Petersburg Times. The Asbury Park Press was going to be sold. I just had a sense it was going to get worse. I felt like I wasn't getting the kind of editing and development that I needed to get better as a journalist. The St. Petersburg Times was known for winning Pulitzer Prizes, even then. It was known for being a “writer's paper,” so you would be given the freedom to really try things. And on top of all of that, a lot of the people who worked in management at the paper were grads of Indiana University. They were invested in trying to help me succeed because we had that shared experience.
After I did pop music for a little while, I realized that pop music is a young critic’s game. There are few critics who are really effective at it as they get older — we get tired of chasing what young people are interested in, which is the most successful pop music. I found myself hearing a band and I could immediately hear the five bands that they were influenced by. I couldn't judge them on their own merits. I heard The Killers and I could immediately hear The Police and The Clash. I didn't feel like I was being fair to the artists. I switched over to cover television in 1997. I've been back and forth between doing that since then.
I had a brief stint on the Tampa Bay Times editorial board in 2004 because I thought I might turn my career around and become like Clarence Page and Jonathan Capeheart, where I'd be on the editorial board of the paper and also be a columnist who could have their own separate editorial voice. But I realized that people who controlled that part of the paper were not willing to give me that platform.
Do you know why?
I had no idea. I think a contributing factor could be that the Editor-in-Chief was a real centrist democrat, and I'm much more liberal. I was pushing the newspaper to be more aggressive in speaking out about liberal issues…and I just don't think that was going over particularly well.
When I decided to leave the editorial board, Neil Brown, the editor of the Tampa Bay Times, allowed me to take a new role. I did a lot of reporting and columnizing about the media industry in the mid 2000s, just as the economic engine was falling out of the newspaper industry and print industry. I wound up becoming a TV and Media Critic where I covered the entertainment and the more business-y side of the industry at the same time. I went over to NPR in 2013, and I was able to focus a little more on entertainment and develop my voice nationally.
You seem like a writer first, audio storyteller second.
Yeah, I've always felt like a writer who does radio. I feel like I create radio pieces that are more radio-oriented than say the critics of “Fresh Air,” who I think write pieces to be read.
When theater collapsed during the pandemic, I got a job as a live events producer at KQED, which is California's local NPR member station. I've been very impressed with the turnover that I've seen in just the two years I've been there, particularly journalists of color. I'm curious where you saw other critics of color present in newsrooms and why do you think people left? What made you stay and some of your peers stay?
Being a critic at NPR is a rarified thing. There's only five of us, I think, and we're all on the culture desk. There aren't that many people at NPR whose job it is to say their opinion on air.
Just five?!
The vast majority of NPR’s newsroom staff is mainstream journalists. What I'll say about NPR, since you brought it up, is that I think people who don't work at NPR, who are looking at that situation are seeing it through all of the stereotypes that people have about NPR. The first thing that I tell people is that NPR is the most diverse newsroom that I have ever worked in. It is far more diverse than most newspaper newsrooms. It is inching ever closer to having the diversity that we would need to actually reflect the nation's diversity.
But most media outlets are nowhere near that. NPR takes a lot of crap over diversity issues, but it’s pretty diverse and it works hard at trying to be better at that. And especially now with John F. Lansing as our CEO, he made it plain that diversity was one of his biggest priorities, like the second he walked in the building. And people have been able to build on that. When I joined NPR in 2013, I was the only Black person on the Arts Desk. Now we have Ciera Crawford, a Black woman who's the Deputy Culture Desk Editor and the Culture Desk Editor is Nick Charles, a Black man.
I've seen diversity skyrocket just in the Culture Desk in the time that I've been there.
But the frustration I have is that people who are not stars in NPR, who are people of color especially, often feel like the institution doesn't do enough to help them achieve the goals they have for their careers. I think that's a problem at every media outlet. If you ask me what's the problem with people of color leaving NPR, it’s not the people that are in these stories. It's the people who aren't famous enough to get written about. They leave because they got trapped working on shows where people didn't value their talent. Or they got trapped working on something when they really wanted to do something else. Or maybe somebody's not quite ready to transition from whatever they're doing to what they want to do, but you should be able to sit down and work out a plan. I think too many people of color didn't feel confident that NPR was going to help them get to where they wanted to be once they told their supervisors, “here's where I see my career going.” And that, to me, is the real problem.
So now as far as critics go, critics of color in general, particularly critics of color in the print industries, one of the biggest issues is that regional newspapers stop having arts critics. There was a Black TV critic at The Palm Beach Post. Well, they messed around with his job to the point where he was hardly able to do TV criticism anymore. There was a Black critic at The Fort Worth Star Telegram, and I don't know if they even have a TV critic any more. When I started covering television in the mid '90s, The Chicago Tribune had two critics covering TV. One was a Black man. He unfortunately died of a heart ailment, but I don't think he was replaced. So, that's where I've seen a lot of attrition. The restructuring of media, especially newspapers, forced out a lot of people of color who were poised to become major voices of criticism.
Intro photo of Deggans by Carrie Pratt/Simply Blue Studios
