I feel like a bit of a fraud covering TV, music and pop culture for the Onion, given that I wasn't even in my actual A.V. Club in high school. And that I have incredibly low opinion of how valuable my opinions are. (Cue Rollins Band's "Low Self-Opinion.")
http://www.avclub.com/users/kenny-herzog,77588/
When I was 20 and a something-or-other in college (i.e. waaaaaasted!), SPIN's Top 90 Albums of the '90 Issue played a huge role in shaping my critical perspective. Presumably, my own contributions to the mag and its accompanying website since 2008 have not been as influential.
http://www.spin.com/writers/kenny-herzog
At some point, it occurred to me that, as an antisocial shut-in, it would only make sense to contribute regularly to New York's pre-eminent nightlife/recreation bible.
http://newyork.timeout.com/search/apachesolr_search/kenny%20herzog
My work covering television for Microsoft's online pop-culture portal has really opened up a lot of.... Windows of opportunity for me.
http://tv.msn.com/search/tv/?q=Kenny+Herzog&p=1
Any club that will allow me to write about Kathie and Hoda has me as a member. I contribute TV news, reviews, features and interviews for Xfinity/Comcast's multimedia editorial hub. And love Kathie and Hoda.
http://xfinitytv.comcast.net/blogs/author/kennyh/
Every so often, you get a chance to still explore the topics that matter to you for printed publications that care about their audience, and vice versa. Thank you, Wax Poetics, for letting me put a spotlight on Latin Freestyle, and to all you WP readers, I got more stuff in the works :) It's a hard one to find in digital form, but for now, it's inside this awesome issue in question if you can find it.
http://www.waxpoetics.com/2010/05/wax-poetics-issue-41/
MTV Iggy covers global music. Naturally, I've been pitching stories about Polish black metal's relationship to anti-semitism and Japanese prog-rock legends first crossing over into the States. Here's an example. More to come. (And in several languages no less!)
When Harp magazine closed, its editors had the gumption to launch another glossy music mag. I'm glad they did. I write for them and their website about things like international metal and the tomb-raiding of Jeff Buckley. Below is a handy Google cheat sheet to some of Blurt alerts.
Let's face it: A lot of new music stinks. And some of it doesn't. American Songwriter only covers the good stuff, and I've been happy to pore over the lives and output of everyone from Amy Ray to Donovan thus far for them in print and online. Good times.
http://www.americansongwriter.com/author/kenny-herzog/
Once upon an online era, AOL had an irreverent humor and pop-culture site known as Asylum. Unfortunately, the inmates escaped it. Or, rather were forced to exile when papa parent company cut off funding. I got to write about porn and underwear though, so there's that.
http://www.asylum.com/bloggers/kenny-herzog/
Road Runner has a great online content hub. Ya know, like MSN's and AOL's, including the dubious choice to have me contribute. TV recaps specifically, of shows ranging from Whisker Wars to Louie. Good times.
http://www.rr.com/entertainment/tv
Back in 2008, Village Voice Media asked me to develop, edit, write for and generally shepherd a pop-culture/humor blog. It was fun. I worked with writers from Letterman, Huff Po and beyond, and generally had a blast. And then it ended, because websites don't make money. Which makes me wonder why I've now decided to launch KennyHerzog.com.
http://www.nudecelebritydeathsuv.com/
Getting to cover everything from the DIY Bloody-Mary trend to where a person can find quality cobbling for my hometown paper was one of the highlights of my career. Not all the articles made it online. Because daily papers be busy. But here's some generic search results to what did. It's essentially the last real reporting I ever got to do. I miss it.
http://bit.ly/lzHq7U
I was the last-ever Editor-in-Chief for a monthly music bible that I grew up reading and generally taking cues from. Their website kinda stinks, so below is a TinyURL that directs you to a gallery of fully perusable .pdfs from all the issues I oversaw. In there's lots of stuff I wrote, and the rest is stuff I edited, and with mildly reliable capability and taste. R.I.P., CMJ NMM.
http://tinyurl.com/KennyHerzogCMJNewMusicMonthly
I can still remember attending one of the very first meetings of the HEEB magazine staff in an NYC basement in 2001. Over the next several years, I was proud to be a regular contributing editor and writer to the brand, and extended member of its family tree. The magazine has since given way to a Web-only format, and I wish it well, and given the nature of what we published during its heyday, I'm just glad Judaism doesn't believe in a hell. Most issues are out of print and impossible to find. Unless you're in my apartment. Below is a link that gives the jist. I have no idea why I got Dr. Seussian about this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heeb
In 2010, I was brought on board with subscription-based music-streaming site MOG.com to launch its blog network and standalone editorial entity, MOGMusicNetwork.com. We did great. It was a blast. There's lots of cool musician interviews, thinkpiece list features and witty news postings in the archives. The site has no search function, which is why you can't find any results in it for, "I was let go from this job because websites don't make money." So this TinyURL to a pretty thorough Google-results itemizing of my work for MMN will have to do.
http://tinyurl.com/KennyHerzogMOGMusicNetwork
The first love of my career was working as part of the upstart skeleton crew for then-fledgling alternative-weekly newspaper (yep, old enough to reference my early days at a new alt-weekly paper)Long Island Press. We did some amazing things, and could have really made a difference. But then, print died, and my initiation into journalism via cover stories on high school hazing scandals, Nipple-Gate (oh, how quaint that seems now), fringe presidential hopefuls and, naturally, celebrity gossip, became a ghost of poor online archiving. See a pattern emerging? I do have all my work on file in .pdf and physical form, however, if you'd like to see where my occasionally interesting output really took root.
In 2010, my former Long Island Press Editor-in-Chief and generally close friend and colleague Robbie Woliver and I launched a website called REVIEWniverse, hosted by the fine folks at Examiner. We own the real URL and do plan on designing and properly hosting it ourselves soon. It did well. We had a blast. But then I got the above job at MOG and REVIEWniverse went on hiatus. Yeah, that worked out well. But we have resurrected it and post when the spirit moves, so stay tuned, and also enjoy some of the fun, equally meta- and timely pop culture/media coverage (and even the occasional broken news) in our archives. And props to Ryan Green for helping us with both the below logo and me with KennyHerzog.com in general.
