Samantha Hissong is a multifaceted storyteller, skilled at creative, scripted, and journalistic writing. She's well-versed in the music business and digital culture at large, and she loves crafting profiles around innovators, rule breakers, and passionate underdogs.
Growing up on film sets as the daughter of an actress and a director of photography, Hissong's love of the arts emerged early on. That she decided to major in Media Studies at Emerson College came as no surprise. Almost immediately after school, she started her writing career as a reporter at revered music trade HITS Magazine. She spent six years at HITS, rising from intern to editor, and became an expert on music's behind-the-scenes ecosystem. During that time, she also created and brazenly hosted her own outlandish radio show, Prescription Playlists — prescribing songs for listeners’ problems — on Dash Radio’s primary alternative rock station. After a year, she left Dash to take on more responsibilities at HITS; she later left HITS to pursue a job opportunity at Rolling Stone. Established within the walls of record labels, management and publishing companies, agencies, and entertainment law firms, Hissong was hired as one of Rolling Stone’s first music business reporters, tasked with injecting the famous publication’s pages with insight into the inner workings of the modern-day industry. In analyzing music’s increasing globalization and entanglement with tech, she led Rolling Stone’s crypto coverage as it pertained to entertainment. In the first few weeks of 2021, she published "A Field Guide to Music’s Potential Crypto Boom," which generated record-breaking traffic and predicted the emergence of NFTs. Adept at breaking down complex topics in an exciting way, she started working as Rolling Stone’s first-ever digital culture reporter — a role in which she studied social media influencers and the creator economy, augmented and virtual reality, and Web3 — until she decided to venture off and explore the literary world. Born in the Hollywood Hills, Hissong currently resides in east Los Angeles, where she’s writing a book about a feminist figure, sex symbol, and pop culture star’s turbulent romp through 1970s America. Her inbox is open to freelance pitches!
Samantha Hissong has moderated conversations for Sotheby's, the Recording Academy's Grammy Museum, and Mondo NYC. She's also been tapped as an expert commentator by the BBC, CBS' Inside Edition, and more.