Frank DiGiacomo - Profile and Journalist Details
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Frank DiGiacomo
Verified
Executive Editor, Investigation Enterprise, Billboard
New York
Beats
Biography
I joined Billboard in 2014 after stints as a freelance writer, the editorial director of Movieline.com, and a columnist at the New York Daily News. That run of gigs was preceded by six years at Graydon Carter's Vanity Fair, where I had the good fortune to be edited by the supremely talented Bruce Handy. I landed there after almost 11 memorable years at The New York Observer, under Susan Morrison and Peter Kaplan. Susan hired me at the Observer to write the paper’s gossip column, The Transom, but promised to develop me into a feature writer. She kept her promise, and after she departed, Peter and a number of exceptional editors, including his future wife, Lisa Chase, pushed me to develop even more. I eventually made the transition to editor, but it was the writing that I loved at the Observer, particularly profiling Leonard Cohen, Martin Scorsese and Chris Rock, as well as the annual pieces I did on the Oscars and those great spectacles of comic savagery, the Friars Club roasts. In late 2001, my coverage of comedian Gilbert Gottfried’s unhinged performance at the Friars roast of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner brought a phone call from comic Paul Provenza, who invited me to appear in a documentary he was making with Penn Jillette called The Aristocrats. I was interviewed in then-Observer owner Arthur Carter's well-appointed office, which looked like the set of Masterpiece Theater. Appearing in The Aristocrats was a pretty wild experience, but the wildest would have to be the job I held as a reporter and, later, co-editor of the New York Post's Page Six, gossip column. Working at “The Page” was like having my head shoved into a gigantic light socket that was connected to all of the power and muscle that makes things happen. There are benefits and liabilities to a job like this, and I wrote about some of them in my first Vanity Fair piece: an oral history of the column. The job eventually proved exhausting, but it was a hugely formative period in my career — when my small-town naiveté was replaced by an unsentimental understanding of how power, fame and wealth are won and lost. That small town was Youngstown, the Ohio city that inspired a Bruce Springsteen song, and the place that news organizations send their reporters during presidential election years to take the political temperature of a typical Rust Belt town. I grew up in the largely middle class suburb of Boardman, a pleasant place that bordered — but was insulated — from the decay and corruption that plagued the inner city, even before the steel industry abandoned it in the 1970s. Today, I live in Astoria, Queens. As I write this, it's September 2020, and I suspect New York is about to go through another period of decay and struggle, as it did when I was here in the early '90s. Meanwhile, the media business has been withering for decades. Staying in the game often feels like an advanced level of Frogger, but I persist — because I'm good at it, and because I can't think of another line of work that would satisfy my insatiable curiosity.
Music Industry , Streaming , Touring , Publishing, Vinyl, Music Industry , Streaming , Touring , Publishing, Music Industry , Streaming , Touring , Publishing, Bands , Festivals
Topics that are not connected in some way to the music business or the creation of music.
Content
Company Info
Billboard
New York, New York, United States
'+1 212-493-4100
Founded: 1894