One Hollywood Editor on Finding Balance: Katey on Work/Life/Passion Balance
This lady is pretty damn cool, and I’m excited I was able to nab some of her thoughts on work/life/passion balance. She’s got the kind of job that most of us drool over, and her beautiful weaving of interest/work/relationships is even more drool-worthy if that’s even possible.
Hi! Who are you?! What do you do?
Hi! I’m Katey Rich, and I’m the Hollywood editor for VanityFair.com. I’m responsible for all of the Hollywood-related content that winds up on the website, which is everything from movie trailers and TV casting news to longform reported stories to photo galleries to interviews to recaps . . .it’s a wide gamut. Vanity Fair the magazine obviously has a longstanding relationship with Hollywood, and it’s my job to keep up the magazine’s tone while also getting in synch with the tone of the Internet– which is how we’ve discovered surprising things, like how Vanity Fair readers are huge, huge fans of Emma Watson and Game of Thrones.
When you work on the Internet it’s very easy to start thinking that work time is all the time, and there are definitely days when I’m kicking off work from 7 am on my couch and not leaving the office until 7 pm (or, if I’m going to a screening, getting home at 10). But I have a husband who’s very very good at reminding me when to shut things off, which helps me just walk away for a little while from even the parts of work that I love. And the world of movie writers is fairly close-knit and full of great people, so even work events wind up being social and relaxing. Right now I’m at the Toronto International Film Festival, which in some ways is as much about catching up with friends as it is seeing movies.
When you were a kid, what did you think you were going to be when you grew up?
I definitely wanted to be a writer from an early early age, but what that meant changed a lot over the years– I wanted to be a novelist for a long time, like any kid who thinks that writers can only write books. In high school I started working on the school newspaper and realized that was something I really loved, and a little bit later got into movies just as a hobby, and had some vague notion of wanting to be a film critic while never thinking that could actually happen. What I do now is a little different from being a film critic– pretty much no one anymore makes their living only writing reviews– but I have written lots of movie reviews, so in a way, I did wind up achieving that dream.
Hopefully better at organizing my life than I am now– not exactly a great trait for an editor who’s supposed to be in charge of a lot of things.
Thanks for chatting! Where can folks find more info about you?
VanityFair.com/Hollywood (or regular VanityFair.com, there’s my stuff and lots of other great stuff there too). I’m on Twitter at @kateyrich too. And you can listen to me on two podcasts: Fighting in the War Room and The Film Experience.
Pitch me if you want to write about Hollywood! We don’t take many of the pitches we get but I love getting them.
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