Q+A: Scaachi Koul, Senior Culture Writer at BuzzFeed News

On trading essays for reporting, tackling controversial subjects, and advice for newcomers to the industry.

As senior culture writer at BuzzFeed News, Scaachi Koul has written the profiles that have created the most buzz on Twitter (and maybe also in your group chats). Most recently, Lauren Duca dubbed her a “thrillingly, thrillingly adept journalist” for her deep-dive on the #Resistance figure and her disastrous NYU class; before that, she revisited the Kathleen Hale saga, prodding the author’s rationale for tracking down an unkind Goodreads reviewer and then including that widely-panned misstep in a new essay collection.

Before her recent pivot to reportage, she was known for moving and funny personal essays and wrote a debut collection One Day We’ll All Be Dead And None Of This Will Matter.

Interview by Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs. (This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.)

Study Hall: How did you decide you wanted to be a writer? How did you start down that path, and how did it develop?

Scaachi Koul: It’s a pretty short story. I went to journalism school in Toronto and I started working in magazines and I was a freelancer for a hot second, then I was hired at Hazlitt. From there I got hired at BuzzFeed and I worked in the Toronto office for three years and got transferred over to the New York office in January. It’s a very short, boring story. I wish I had more twists and turns for you.

SH: That feels increasingly rare these days.

SK: It is increasingly rare, yeah. I’ve only really worked at two places. In Canada there aren’t that many options. If you think the New York media space is crowded and cloistered and tiny, you should go to Toronto for a couple of months.

SH: I was actually going to ask what you felt the fundamental differences are between Canadian media and the media here.

SK: It’s smaller. I think a lot of Canadian media organizations are less willing to take risks, in a lot of ways. I cannot tell you how many conversations I’ve had with executive-level editors in Canada who wouldn’t work with me because they thought I was racist against white people. It’s really just the dumbest shit. It’s a really tough place to work as a person of color. New York media is certainly deeply flawed; American media is deeply flawed; it’s not a super diverse place — but I would say that you guys at least have a few more [people of color] than are let in the door up north.

SH: In your career, do you feel like you have moved from writing more about yourself, almost exclusively, to writing about other people?

SK: Yeah, I think I started my career the way a lot of young writers who aren’t white and a lot of young female writers start, which is you start doing memoir. That’s still where I’m most comfortable and that’s where a lot of my talents are, but I felt like at a certain point I was going to start cannibalizing my own life and it was getting really unpleasant. I didn’t want to feel like I was ever in a position where I was writing about myself because I had to and not because I wanted to, so I pivoted [away from that].

SH: Do you generally feel comfortable writing about yourself?

SK: Yeah, I don’t lose a lot of sleep about that. I have a criminal lack of shame, which is my best quality and my worst failure, I think. I don’t experience shame in the way I think I’m supposed to.

SH: That’s useful though, in this industry.

SK: It’s useful, yeah. I guess it’s good to have a thick enough skin that it takes a lot to be embarrassed — which, I mean, I’ve embarrassed myself so much in my life that at this point it would require a great deal to do it. I cracked an agreement with my parents a long time ago that if they read something I wrote, it was their own fault if it upset them. So they have smartly made the choice to not read a lot of the personal stuff that I write. That also allows you to write about your family like they’re dead — or rather, like you are dead, so you can write about yourself in ways that you don’t have anybody checking in on you.

When you write about yourself it’s a little uneasy because you’re pulling parts of yourself off and giving it to an audience and hoping that they treat it with care, and that’s not necessarily always what’s going to happen. It can be uncomfortable to have people have very different perceptions of you and your life — and they’re entitled to draw their own conclusions. But ultimately, I’m happy to be able to be one version of a voice of people who rarely get heard.

SH: [Personal writing] gives me a lot of anxiety, and I think it’s good to be able to table that and think, “I just do not have control over how an audience is going to receive this.”

SK: You don’t have control over how an audience is going to receive just about anything. That’s something I’ve learned as I’ve done more reporting, features, and profiles. It doesn’t matter. I’m still going to get an email from some guy named Trevor at four o’clock in the morning who thinks I’m an asshole. As soon as I made peace with that, it mattered less to me.

SH: You’ve done two very good profiles recently of controversial figures. You’ve profiled both Kathleen Hale and Lauren Duca in a way I thought was tough but also empathetic. How do you anticipate reactions to that while you’re writing, if at all?

SK: I go into those pieces with an earnest kind of curiosity. Sometimes there’s a perception that a lot of journalists go into pieces fully knowing what it’s going to be, and though I might have an idea of what the angle is before I go in, I am going into a lot of interviews curious and interested in having somebody change my mind. Both of those stories didn’t end the way I thought they would. I also go into those pieces feeling empathy for the subject, even if they’re wrong or even if they made a bad choice.

SH: How do you deal with [the internet] in your own life and career? Do you set boundaries for yourself when it comes to being online?

SK: I didn’t have Twitter on my phone for years. I just downloaded it [recently] — I needed it for work and I was like, fine, I’ll give in. I have a lot of people in my life who will see if I’m writing a bunch of tweets that are insane and will call me and say, “Maybe you should take a nap.” Then I’ll know maybe I’ve overshot.

Everyone’s entitled to act out a little bit on the internet, I think, as long as you’re not a total jerk. It’s inevitable. I don’t know anybody who hasn’t said something goofy online just because they’re feeling sour. That’s the problem with a public diary, which is what Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr and Instagram all are. They are public catalogues of our feelings and inevitably some of those feelings are unattractive.

SH: Yeah, you don’t have an editor for your Twitter, which sometimes I wish I did.

SK: Yeah, so my editor will email me and be like, “Stop it.” [laughs] So that’s a nice thing. I’ve surrounded myself with reasonable people who are smarter than I am and will tell me to cut it out.

SH: As a culture writer, you have a knack for exploring cultural phenomena through specific pieces of culture. With the Friends piece, you tapped into how we have this misplaced nostalgia for things that are frankly bad, and with Always Sunny you explore the fallacy of the fixation with cancel culture. I’m curious how you approach topics like that — do you think of the show first, or do you think, “I want to say something about cancel culture”?

SK: It depends. With Always Sunny, I’d been trying to figure out how to write about it for a while and then it coincided quite perfectly with all these ding-dongs yelling about cancel culture even though it doesn’t exist.

SH: A writer’s dream.

SK: Yeah, exactly. But usually I think of the topic first, then work backwards and see what we can say about it. At BuzzFeed, we are mindful of moving a conversation forward, which is why I don’t think I often do straightforward reviews.

SH: Yeah, like your review of Aladdin was not just a movie review, it was broader cultural criticism.

SK: That was an opportunity to yell about a movie I didn’t like, which I always relish. People get real upset about the movie reviews, I gotta tell you. They get real mad, which I find exceptionally funny. I know I shouldn’t, but I think it is so funny how mad people get about just dumb, dumb things.

SH: I can’t imagine Disney’s new Aladdin being the hill you’re going to die on.

SK: I got so many emails from people who were like, “Fuck you, I saw it anyway!” And it’s like, that’s fine. Every time you see a movie that I said I didn’t like, I don’t lose money. Go ahead and see it. It’s the same thing with the Friends piece — everyone was like, “Do you think we should remove Friends from the streaming service?” and I was like, I don’t care, you can watch whatever you want! I’m just saying it’s bad. It’s not my fault that your taste is terrible. That’s between you and your god.

SH: I love that idea that you get an angry email and you’re just like “Aww, Trevor!”

SK: It’s sweet! Unless they’re threatening to kill me, I’m open at this point to reader mail that disagrees with me.

SH: Well, I was going to ask what the most challenging part of being a culture writer is today…

SK: Yeah, it’s the death threats. I don’t think a lot of my white male counterparts are receiving those emails, but I am. My husband is also a journalist — he’s a business reporter which is obviously very different, but he doesn’t get the reader mail I get. He’s writing about things that affect the economy, and I’m out here writing about Aladdin. People are far angrier about Aladdin than they are about the stock market.

SH: Yeah, that checks out. So going from personal essays to writing about others, what skills did you find were transferable?

SK: I think a lot of personal writing is transferable to reporting. A good story is a good story, so if you can tell a good yarn you can do it about pretty much anything as long as you’re willing to abide by facts, which I am. In my essay writing, there are people in my family who would disagree with my interpretation of events, and that’s fine, but I believe that they are true. If you write a profile of somebody, the subject might disagree with your interpretation of a set of facts — it’s the same thing. It’s just about how you want to frame it and angle it.

SH: My last question to you is what your advice would be for people entering the industry, recognizing that the industry has changed since you entered it.

SK: The obvious answer to that question is “Don’t,” because it’s such a hostile industry and it is so tumultuous and it’s not very lucrative. But I think the people who are really successful in the kind of writing that I admire are experts in some sort of specific field — experts in that they consume and they care about the thing they’re writing about. If you read anything by Taylor Lorenz, she has dominated the Gen Z internet beat. She understands it so uniquely, and is therefore uniquely equipped to talk about what’s happening on their corner of the internet.

If you can find a space like that and get recognized as an expert on something really specific, I think that ends up getting you a lot of work. Find something that you really care about and that you’re interested in and then turn it into something you can write about consistently.

I hope I’ve done a version of that with the kinds of stories that I’ve written. I do a lot of profiles on people who are a little forgotten and a little lost and maybe didn’t have a fair run. I did a piece on Courtney Stodden a little while ago. I was very fixated on her for a lot of my life and went to my editor and was like, “What happened to her?” I think that piece did well because it came from a place of real earnest curiosity, so I guess I’m coming back to that same thing of — if you care about the topic, it usually will turn out well.

That’s advice that’s easier said than done, because everybody’s gotta work and you don’t necessarily have the opportunity to do exactly the kind of work you want to do. So I don’t know, it’s hard. Marry rich, that’s my advice. Marry rich.

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