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Shivani Gupta is a multimedia journalist, announced as an Environmental Initiatives Intern at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles today. She recently graduated from the University of Southern California. While working as an after-school elementary school teacher, she reached out to art contributo Alexandra Bregman with questions about how to be an art writer herself.

Hi Alexandra, I hope you are doing well and thank you so much for your time! This is Shivani Gupta, the aspiring art writer following up from LinkedIn at LinkedIn.com/in/shivanigupta123/. Here are the questions I wanted to ask you. Please let me know if you have any thoughts or if there's anything I can clarify. Thank you!

Alexandra Bregman: Saying yes to every weird blog that would hire me, even for no money; cultivating relationships with sources who were pleased with articles to continue writing about them and strengthening my reputation; recognizing that breaks in editorial output are not necessarily gaps, and that each piece was part of my longer and greater fabric.

AB: Empathy and sensitivity are a lot more important than people realize. For example, after I mentioned [a fellow art writer]

Staying informed. Another student recently misspelled the places she had received interviews, which indicated to me she was deeply unfamiliar and made me question her longevity.

For now, being a good writer is still important.

AB: Keeping in touch with contacts, reading trade publications, and going to events whenever possible all help. Also, not being afraid to step outside your niche and bring things back in, like politics or science.

I am not sure. This field may die all together. I think a lot of the content churn will be irrelevant, but great investigative storytelling and humanity cannot be replaced by machines.

TikTok is under utilized. If I had any video skills, I would be a TikTok art news reporter.

AB: I think you should get a full-time role in the arts or environmental science and use that to build a communications platform.

AB: Conflict of interest abounds, and it is very poorly paid, so people get desperate.

AB: Almost any story can be an art story if you want it to be. Learning how to be an art writer can be as simple as learning how to be a writer in general.