Meet Gail Worley | Writer, Photographer, Publisher of Worleygig.com

We had the good fortune of connecting with Gail Worley and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Gail, what is the most important factor behind your success?
I would say that for Worleygig.com, the important factors behind my success — the success of Worleygig as a brand — has to do with two things. One is tenacity, never giving up, which has allowed me to outlast virtually all of my peers who started a personal blog-based website at the same time I did. Worleygig.com just celebrated 20 years on the web this past June — which is a phenomenal accomplishment for personal website — but the brand goes back may be five or more years before that. Worleygig originally ran as column in a local New York City entertainment monthly, before moving to Pandemonium online (based in Seattle), and then on to another now-defunct artist development website, Star Polish. The second factor is authenticity. Even when I was a Music journalist, I tried to write about music that I felt passionate about, although the most successful entertainment writers will tell you that this is not really possible if you want to make a living. I was able to keep from being personally compromised because I’ve always had a day job (in finance) in addition to my writing career, so money was not a deciding incentive when choosing what to cover. This kind of autonomy has allowed me to be authentic with my voice, and to write about subjects that I’m passionate about. I think that the passion I bring to the content on Worleygig allows me to connect with a wide audience. There’s something for everyone.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
I first started writing about music when I was in college in the early 80s. After graduating, I did some freelancing while I still lived in California before I moved to New York in 1988. It wasn’t easy to reestablish my practice as a writer here in the city, and it took a lot of footwork work and, again, tenacity. You just have to start at the very beginning, and I was lucky enough to find a local entertainment newspaper here in the east village where I live that was willing to let me write for them, of course for free, but that got me published clips. Having good clips allowed me to start getting serviced by record labels, back when that was a thing. It just snowballed from there. The more you get published, the more people there are that want to publish you. I mentioned before that I’ve never had to really rely on writing for an income, which means it’s a passion project and that allows me a lot of freedom. As far as challenges of finding outlets that will let you write about what you want to, the only way to really do that is to start your own site. After I lost interest in writing about popular music, I switched to my other passion, which is art and design. I’ve also had fellow journalists get me into different niches like wellness, product reviews and restaurant reviews, so I’ve worked that into the site as well. Everybody loves food! The one thing I want people to know about Worleygig, is that this is a brand that’s about what I like and what I want to tell people about. If it resonates with you great, if it doesn’t, that’s great too. There’s a great bit of freedom in an outlet that allows you to be yourself.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
This is funny, because that literally just happened to me. My best friend is an artist named Geoffrey Dicker who I met when he lived in New York City for 10 years and now he’s back home in LA. Geoffrey visited me for a week in May and he told me all of the different things he wanted to do, so I literally made a spreadsheet with our itinerary for each day. We visited all the major museums — which I definitely recommend to anyone who loves museums, and is visiting New York for the first time. We went to The Met, the Guggenheim, Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and then some of the smaller museums, including the Cooper-Hewitt (a design museum housed in Andrew Carnegie’s former mansion) the Museum of the City of New York, and The Museum of Arts and Design. I think the only one we missed was the Museum of Natural History.

It’s possible to arrange your schedule to do multiple museums on the same day. For example, the Met and Guggenheim are fewer than 10 blocks apart, and the Cooper-Hewitt is two blocks up from there and the Museum of the City of New York is also within walking distance. I believe we did all four of those on one day. They are all located on 5th Avenue, which is known as a Museum Mile for a reason! Central Park is also right there.

I also recommend trying to walk everywhere that you can, because New York City is like a living museum itself. If you’re into street art, you absolutely must go to Fremin Alley on the lower east side, which is an alleyway that leads to a Restaurant, and it is completely covered with original Street Art. It changes every few days, so you can go once a week and see something completely different. I’d also recommend taking the L train into Williamsburg and just walking around, going to some of their great restaurants. It’s super easy to get to. Central Park is also a must-see if you can fit it in.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
When I first started to build the website, I needed technical assistance and I turned to my friend Ian Koss, who had given me my start in print journalism in his then-print publication Ink19 (now on the web at ink19.com) when he published my interview with Marilyn Manson in probably 1995? Ian has not only been responsible for multiple site redesigns over the years, but he’s always made himself available for any technical support and advice to this day. He’s a terrific friend and an extremely gifted engineer.

The second person I have to give major kudos to is Ken Pierce (piercingmetal.com) a fellow writer I met when we were both contributing to the late Metal Edge magazine. At the beginning of lockdown a few years ago, Ken offered to assist me in improving my Alexa rating and general traffic by overseeing a complete overhaul of the back-end of the site, which meant revisiting codes, tagging practices, categorization, social media practices, and other vital checkpoints that all go on behind the scenes of what’s actually being written and published. Ken was able to take Worley Gig from an original Alex of rating of 4 million to, at the time Alexa ceased to operate, 618,000. I certainly could not have done that without him. Ken is not only a terrific writer, but extremely gifted engineer as well.

Image Credits
Some images By Geoffrey Dicker, Dean Haspiel