Gannett, the biggest newspaper chain within the United States, introduced on Tuesday that it might rent a reporter to hide some of the greatest names in track: Taylor Swift.
As Swift’s prominence grows all over her record-breaking excursion, Gannett mentioned it was once searching for a reporter who may just seize the importance of her track, in addition to her “growing legacy” and “the effect she has across the music and business worlds.”
The reporter can be writing for USA Today and The Tennessean, the writer’s newspaper in Nashville, the place Swift started her occupation as a nation darling ahead of promoting out stadiums throughout North America on her record-breaking Eras Tour.
The task displays the frenzied fandom that has surrounded Swift, whose cultural resonance turns out to deepen with every album, together with the re-recordings of her previous track. Her fanatics have spent hundreds of greenbacks on live performance tickets and shook the bottom so exhausting at one live performance that it registered as an earthquake on a seismometer close to Seattle.
Reactions to the task posting were combined, together with reward for Gannett for making an attempt to succeed in a new target audience and complaint over how the corporate has laid off native newshounds lately.
Kristin Roberts, Gannett’s leader content material officer, mentioned in a observation on Tuesday evening that the United States Today Network, which the corporate owns, is dedicated to serving its readers with very important journalism, and that “includes providing our audience with content they crave.”
“As Taylor Swift’s fan base has grown to unprecedented heights, so has the influence of her music and growing legacy — not only on the industry but on our culture,” Ms. Roberts mentioned. “She is shaping a generation and is relevant, influential and innovative — just like us.”
Newspapers continuously make use of track critics and leisure journalists, however hardly ever assign a reporter to hide a unmarried artist.
The acclaim for Swift, although, has proved to be a robust power over the summer time, culturally and economically.
A Federal Reserve survey of commercial contacts reported that Swift fanatics, or Swifties, had strengthened hotel revenues within the Philadelphia area. Although Swift, 33, and her promoters don’t publicly file box-office figures, the business newsletter Pollstar estimates that she has been promoting about $14 million in tickets every evening. By the top of her deliberate international excursion, which is booked with 146 stadium dates neatly into 2024, Swift’s gross sales may just achieve $1.4 billion or extra — exceeding Elton John’s $939 million for his multiyear farewell excursion, the present record-holder.
Some newshounds expressed worry about Gannett’s reporting priorities. Last December, Gannett lower about 6 p.c of the corporate’s more or less 3,440-person U.S. media department. Media analysts mentioned the transfer may just aggravate the state of the native news business, which has reduced in size lately, developing information deserts in communities around the nation.
Laura D. Testino, a reporter for Chalkbeat Tennessee, mentioned on X, previously referred to as Twitter, that whilst Nashville is getting a Swift reporter, “Memphis is still without an investigative reporter.”
Gannett has employed 225 newshounds since March and now has greater than 100 open roles, Ms. Roberts mentioned.
Vrinda Jagota, a track creator who has reported on Swift’s cultural importance, mentioned in an interview on Tuesday that whilst Swift is a complicated pop icon worthy of journalistic research, there are different stars who’re simply as giant, akin to Beyoncé.
The Beyoncé album “Renaissance,” for instance, has resonated with many Black and L.G.B.T.Q. other folks, she mentioned.
“I think the question that comes to mind for me is which fandoms and which moments of connection are taken more seriously,” Ms. Jagota mentioned. “And Taylor Swift’s fandom is very white. It’s a lot of white women.”
Robert Thompson, the director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University, mentioned on Tuesday that such a hiring “is not as absurd as it looks at first glance.”
In an more and more fragmented cultural setting, “where mass culture has broken up into a million little pieces,” he mentioned, there may be an greater worth to the only factor that emerges that necessarily everybody can touch upon.
“You cannot be conscious in the United States without on some level having to come to grips with Taylor Swift,” Dr. Thompson mentioned. Covering any individual like her, he added, is a “perfectly sound activity for a journalist to be doing.”