Keeping Up With the Hip Hop Beat

Devin Morton

Internship Reflection - Summer 2024

Being an intern at HotNewHipHop was a fulfilling experience for me. It was an ideal scenario for me, as I’ve been a hip-hop fan for as long as I can remember and I had been a consistent visitor to their website for years. They helped me discover some of my favorite artists and songs, so being able to intern for them for part of the summer felt like I was giving back to a part of the internet that helped shape (in its own little way) me into who I am today.

My internship at HNHH was more than me focusing on hip-hop music and artists. Of course, the site prioritized that focus, but hip-hop itself has never exclusively been about the music. There is a culture, one that celebrates fashion and art, while also shedding light on political happenings and other social issues. That is what hip-hop was intended to be, more than just the musical aspects of it. As an intern and as a journalist, it was necessary for me to stay updated on the latest trends and developments. The news cycle never stops moving, and I often found myself writing multiple stories a day, though I didn’t care much for the more gossipy (TMZ-like) articles I sometimes had to write. I also had to make sure I was doing proper research and providing the right information to ensure that readers are receiving exactly as much context behind a story that is available. Interest levels do vary by story, but several thousand daily viewers saw the bulk of my work. It was nice to know that there were people reading my work and getting some level of information from me, no matter how significant (or insignificant) the story was.

Besides writing news articles, I also wrote album reviews and feature stories. I covered three albums. One by Childish Gambino, one by Ice Spice, and one by Logic. Logic was a favorite of mine when I was younger, so having the opportunity to cover a new album of his for a website I’ve been following for years felt like a small personal victory. While doing those reviews, I was in close contact with the features editor, and those conversations allowed me to reflect on the quality of my writing and think more deeply about how to get my point across. I have written for other websites in the past, but this is the first outlet I’ve written for where the structure was such that it felt like the editors cared about the quality of the work going up every day. I also wrote several posts about new songs and new albums that were out (though those were not full-length reviews), as one of HNHH’s goals is to promote the spread of new music as much as possible.

The biggest takeaway I had from my time with HNHH is that it is essential to keep up with everything that’s going on. This is something I already knew, but seeing how quickly stories change in real time was eye-opening. There were times where I wrote a story in the morning that was completely out of date just an hour or two later. New music is also being released every single day, and it is important to keep up with trending artists or songs since those are things that daily readers of the site expect to be told about. I thoroughly enjoyed my time writing for the website. I learned a lot about how to contribute to a platform with a consistent, active reader base, which will certainly benefit me as I enter the field after graduation. It was an enriching experience, and I hope to get the chance to commit to another semester with them.