Doing the 4 New Feeling Fandom issue roundtable questions

New Feeling is a cooperatively-run Canadian indie music website. Longtime subscribers know that I've watched the outlet for a while, though I've never been directly involved.

In an article called "Balancing Love and Critique: A New Feeling Roundtable" from their recent issue titled "Fandom", New Feeling featured four contributors discussing what they describe as "tension inherent in this work", i.e. in music journalism. I don't identify with most of this preamble, but I do agree with the last part that I bolded:

"as journalists we are expected to be objective and unbiased in our writing, often represented as “authorities” on music, and yet none of us would be here today if it wasn’t for our own passion. That passion can be a very flawed thing: unchecked it can turn to favouritism or a conflict of interest, and too little can turn to cruelty or a complete disengagement with the people and communities at the heart of these sounds."

New Feeling said that "each participant in the roundtable (Tom Beedham, Sarah Chodos, Michael Rancic, and Daniel G Wilson) was asked to think of a question to help drive the conversation". I'll answer the four questions and add one of my own at the end.

What motivated [you] to start being a music journalist?

I don't call myself a music journalist. My path to Rhythm Changes is quite different than the ones that the music journalists who write for New Feeling have taken. My interest in starting Rhythm Changes wasn't to express my opinions about music. It wasn't to write for a bunch of other outlets, or to print zines in my scene, or to pitch editors or take assignments. I was interested to participate more in the Vancouver jazz scene after an absence of several years. It felt like a homecoming, to the scene in which I was raised throughout my adolescence, that I wasn't sure would work. I wanted to try it.

How do you separate your personal feelings of an artist as a fan of their work, from how you report on and write about them as a journalist?