Brittany Martin, The New Wine Review
Brittany Martin, The New Wine Review
💭 Thoughts on using AI to actually improve journalism, NPR’s Up First podcast, and the pitfalls of pursuing creative work.
Brittany Martin is a journalist who has written and edited for outlets including Los Angeles Magazine, Time Out, American Public Media, and Refinery 29, covering political and local news in addition to writing about food and culture. In 2023, she helped launch The New Wine Review, where she now serves as vice president of operations. For the past decade, Brittany has lived in Los Angeles – a city and region she genuinely loves – but is currently considering the idea of moving away. Also, if your music venue has a mezzanine, she will be watching the show from up there.
🎯 Current focus
Six months ago, we officially launched The New Wine Review to the public. It’s a media brand and online community for all the people out there who are really serious and passionate about wine, but don’t really see themselves represented by old school wine media brands. It’s so fun to talk to people and show them what we’re doing and see them light up because they get the value of what we’re doing. We’re helping people connect with something they love, in a way that is fun, smart, and inviting.
For me personally, it’s my first start-up and my first time in a role where, instead of writing, I’m here to oversee our product and marketing and do all these business functions that are honestly pretty new to me, and it’s been a whirlwind. I made a comment to my boss not long ago that I feel like I’ve had a new job every four months since we started this project a year-and-a-half ago, and I stay excited about seeing what is coming up next.
I’m an extremely curious person and I have this obsession with constantly learning new things. That was what attracted me to journalism in the first place. As a reporter, you kind of know you’re going to get to wake up and ask someone a new question or go research something new; you’re learning something in the process of working on each new article. Giving that up for a more executive role, I was really anxious I wouldn’t have that stimulation and I would get bored. Happy to say that hasn’t really been the case and I’m still constantly tinkering and figuring things out and going down my little rabbit holes to learn how to do things we haven’t tried before.
🦾 Using AI to actually improve reporting & journalism work
Artificial intelligence is obviously changing how all of us work and think about the world. As a journalist I pay a lot of attention to how these technologies are changing the future of news. We’re already seeing huge and largely negative impacts on how audiences consume and think about the news they’re reading – and to journalism as a career, in a time when trying to make a living as a journalist was already a pretty perilous and unsustainable thing.
What stays on my mind is that there just have to be ways we can harness these technologies to actually improve reporting work, particularly to support small, independent, and under-resourced newsrooms outside of the traditional legacy media outlets. There are so many stories that aren’t being told right now because of consolidation, lack of on the ground reporting, and overwhelmed journalists being asked to do more and more while being given less time to actually dig deep into their stories. Unfortunately, that type of thing isn’t really where the money is and even attempts like the one recently made by California to maybe sort of get Google to pay for some of the original reporting that feeds into the AI machine are really falling short. So I don’t know. But any future without real human reporters is such a scary thought.
🕉️ Mantra of the moment
My aunt once gave me the advice to “not let the perfect be the enemy of the good” and while the turn of phrase stuck with me for the decades since, it’s really only been in the last year or so that I’ve been focusing on applying that to myself and my work. My inclination is to not let anything out in the world until it feels polished to glass. I stay so afraid that I’ve missed something, that I’ll look stupid, that I will blow whatever chance has been given to me and I will never get another one. Then at some point I realized: I was actually missing more chances by not just getting something out there and seeing what happens.
Before I took my current job, I was working on a personal project that was 90 percent ready to launch, but I just didn’t feel like it was perfect yet, so I delayed and drew it out, then put it away entirely, and now the time has probably passed. There are whole folders on my Google Docs of article pitches and book proposals languishing because the ideas don’t feel “ready” – or maybe I don’t feel ready to assert that I’m qualified to tell these stories. Even within The New Wine Review, we spent months working on a project to show critic scores of wines in this really innovative way – and I’m proud of the work my team and I did – but we workshopped and refined it long enough that, by the time we brought it out, Google dropped their own version of something similar using AI just a few weeks later. We had to sunset my project because we just weren’t positioned to compete.
🕳️ The pitfalls of pursuing creative work
I was already pretty hooked on audio storytelling in general and This American Life in particular by the time I got to college, but I still remember seeing Ira Glass come to my school and give a talk and it was so thrilling. I’m so impressed by how he was able to carve out a space for doing really innovative, creative work, and then grow and sustain that for so long and kind of help inspire almost a whole movement or community of creators who have come up in the generation since. But I particularly love that he has always made talking about the work and the process itself so much a part of what he does. There’s a recording of him from a very long time ago that I think about all the time (and I’ve probably forced on everybody who’s ever worked for me). He talks about how when you pursue creative work there is inevitably going to be this gap where your taste, your understanding of what good is, gets ahead of your ability to actually make something to the level of quality you know you want to achieve. It happens to everybody and that’s not just ok, it’s kind of a good sign.
I’m very much a podcast person. If you’re going to be on the freeway anyway, you might as well be using that time to be taking in the news or listening to interesting people’s ideas and voices. I love NPR’s Up First for quick headlines; for entertainment I’ve listened to Sound Opinions for so long I feel like Jim and Greg are my parasocial uncles. If I’m by myself, I’ve probably got my podcast or audiobook at 1.25x or 1.5x speed, but my husband cannot stand the sped-up sound, so I’ll slow down when he’s in the car.
🛁 The importance of bathtubs
You would have to find me the deal of the century to convince me to move to a house without a bathtub ever again. For about seven years I lived in a shower-only place and it was fine, but now that I have a tub, I make good use of it. My husband and I both work from home, but my ‘office’ is an alcove off our living room without a door, so a lot of days taking a bath is the only time I’m actually able to close a door and be alone.
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