Getting paid to attend the Grammy Awards as a journalist sounds like a thrill. And it is a lot of fun, even if it’s not necessarily as glamorous as it sounds.
We don’t actually sit in the crowd to witness the show. Reporters have to sit in a small room in the halls of the arena, watching the event on monitors. But we do get to talk to some of the winners.
I’ll never complain about getting to be a part of “music’s biggest night.” It’s an awesome experience. I thought fans might want a peek behind the scenes to learn about the challenges and logistics of covering an event like this.
If you’re curious what it’s like for a reporter to travel to the Grammys, read on!
A Day in the Life: Attending the 2016 Grammy Awards
I’ll use my 2016 experience to walk us through what happens when you get to attend the Grammys as a media member.
As one of the folks traveling in from out of town, I arrived a few days early. Two days before the show, I had to pick up my media credential. Security is understandably tight. We had to get our photo taken, which was placed onto the credential so that no one else could use it.
On show day, I hopped on the subway (yes, LA has a subway) by 11 am to get to the Crypto.com Arena (then known as the Staples Center) in time.
The first thing to know is that it was a very long day. The non-televised portion of the show, officially known as The Premiere Ceremony, began at 12:30 pm Los Angeles time, so I arrived before noon.
I hung around outside the venue for a bit to take in some of the pageantry. It was cool to see some of the nominees arriving, although these were not the biggest names.
These were all folks showing up to the non-televised ceremony.
The Grammys had two rooms for folks covering the event — one for tv/broadcast media and one for print/online media. I was sent to the print room, while my colleague headed off to the tv room.
Roughly 100 reporters were packed into a medium-sized room. We all had a table in front of us so that we could set up our laptops and connect to the (thankfully strong) wifi signal. Writers were also given impressive, full-color programs for the 58th Annual Grammys.
Covering an event like this means writing and tweeting in real-time, so there wasn’t much downtime. Once they started handing out trophies on The Premiere Ceremony, the endless writing began, and it wouldn’t stop for almost 12 hours.
Much of the time, our experience wasn’t any different than you’d get watching at home on your computer or tv screen.
The difference was that, periodically, Grammy winners and other important figures like Recording Academy then-CEO Neil Portnow were shuffled into our room, and we had a few minutes to ask them questions in a group press conference setting.
We didn’t get any of the true A-listers, like Kendrick Lamar, Taylor Swift, or Ed Sheeran. But we got some cool stars in the next tier.
Chris Stapleton, Mark Ronson, Alabama Shakes, blues legend Buddy Guy, and 20-time Grammy winner Kirk Franklin were among the folks who dropped by to speak after their wins.
We asked them questions while continuing to watch the Premiere Ceremony on the monitors. Audio recording wasn’t allowed backstage, so I was hurriedly trying to type down artists’ responses to questions. And that’s how the entire Premiere Ceremony went.
Watching the Main Grammy Broadcast
After the pre-show was over, we had the briefest of breaks to step away from the laptops, use the restroom, grab a snack, and recharge for the actual Grammy broadcast that was to begin shortly.
I had just enough time to grab a quick selfie with the giant gramophone that sat backstage. Cell phone cameras weren’t very good back then!
And then came the big show. It started at 5 pm west coast time, and for the next four hours, once again reporters were trying to type and publish as fast as possible, providing instant reaction to the show.
I was fortunate that I wasn’t on such a tight deadline, so I could focus on accumulating artist quotes to be used in a batch of stories I could publish the next day.
Since we were watching on tv screens and listening to the show over the hum of the room, we didn’t hear all of the nuances of the broadcast. This was the year that Adele had a technical problem during her performance of “All I Ask.”
I never even realized there was an audio issue until I started seeing tweets about it from viewers at home. So that’s one way in which watching from home would have been better.
Meghan Trainor came by and was still giddy after winning Best New Artist. “It feels unbelievable,” she said. “I still can’t breathe. I’ve been crying ever since I got off that stage.”
Mark Ronson came to visit us after winning Best Pop Duo/Group Performance for “Uptown Funk.” He would later win Record of the Year for the same track, so at least we got to talk to the night’s big winner.
Ronson provided some backstory for how the collaboration came together. “We were in Bruno’s studio in Hollywood and we were working on stuff for my record,” he recalled. “It just started off as a jam and a groove. We wrote the first verse and Jeff (Bhasker) came up with line ‘This hit, that ice cold / Michelle Pfeiffer, that white gold.’ Then it took us seven more months to finish the song.”
After the Weeknd performed a medley of “Can’t Feel My Face” and “In the Night,” Recording Academy Neil Portnow came to the media room, at the apparent request of a reporter who questioned why the rumors of Lauryn Hill joining the Weeknd didn’t come to pass.
Portnow candidly explained that Hill had been expected to join the Weeknd as a surprise guest, and she had even come to rehearsals that morning, but she simply didn’t come back for the show. “We were ready for her even up until the first beat of the song,” Portnow told us.
As the night went on, we hoped that more A-listers would stop by, but most opted not to speak to the press.
Most of the same artists visited both the tv and print rooms, though my colleague told me they did get a few extra guests over in the tv room.
While we could walk around the lobbies a bit, the reporters were mostly confined to our assigned room. We didn’t have unlimited access to the venue.
So we never got to see folks like Taylor Swift and the Weeknd pose with their Grammy Awards backstage, even though such footage exists. I guess there was a separate room for photographers somewhere.
The Overall Experience of Attending the Grammys
In general, the experience of being at the arena for the Grammy Awards is special. They don’t call it “music’s biggest night” for nothing.
The buzz, the excitement, the energy in the air, it’s all thrilling. When the winners come see us in the media room, they are, without exception, basking in the afterglow of a major career achievement, and they’re excited to talk about their music and their accomplishments.
I had grown up watching the Grammys every year as a kid, so it was cool to achieve a journalism bucket list item by covering the event.
It’s very difficult to get inside the building for any Grammy ceremony. Tickets are not usually sold to fans. Generally speaking, the only way inside is to know a nominee who can score you tickets. Or to have a connection with a sponsor. Or to get hired as a seat filler.
So being there in a professional capacity is a privilege, and I’m happy I’ve been able to attend the Grammys as a reporter. Hopefully there will be many more to come.
Quotes From Backstage Interviews at the Show
I’ll close with a few more quotes gathered from artists in the media room backstage at the Grammys.
Best Gospel Song winner Kirk Franklin was the life of the party in the media room. When asked about working with Kanye West on the rapper’s album The Life of Pablo, Franklin got serious and disregarded the music itself, speaking instead about developing a personal relationship with West, who has had his ups and downs in recent years.
“I want to be a light,” he said. “I’m not trying to be a spiritual leader to the stars – I think that’s corny and wack. I wanna be a light to whoever. If you’re a Christian, you can’t just talk it. You have to be available for people.”
Lifetime Achievement Award winners Earth, Wind & Fire lost their founder, Maurice White, on February 4. The remaining members said that White knew about the honor before his passing and had intended to attend the ceremony.
Maurice’s brother Verdine said, “I made the call to Maurice about the Lifetime Achievement Award. I told him, ‘You might wanna go to this one!’ He was definitely aware of it and proud of it.”
Chris Stapleton nabbed two awards, including Best Country Album. He confirmed that the songs which made up his album Traveller were not all new compositions. “They were written over about a 15-year period,” he said. “They’re drawn from the whole catalog.”
The singer is having a hard time comprehending the past 12 months, which keep getting better and better: “It’s an incredible, surreal, snowballing thing. We’ve been so busy that it still doesn’t sink in.”
He took part in a Grammy tribute to BB King when he joined Gary Clark, Jr. and Bonnie Raitt to sing “The Thrill is Gone.” Stapleton told the press that the idea was pitched to him as a duet between himself and Clark, but he suggested that Raitt join the tribute since she personally knew the late bluesman: “I never played with (King), never got the opportunity to meet him. I thought we needed a bridge to this generation. Bonnie was kind enough to agree to step in.”
Another blues legend, Buddy Guy, won Best Blues Album at age 79 and used his press conference to honor the King of the Blues. “BB King taught us all how to squeeze the strings,” he said.
Guy lamented the fact that blues music isn’t as popular as it once was. “You can’t drive down the street and hear Muddy Waters singing ‘Hoochie Koochie Man’ like you did 50 years ago when they had AM stations,” he said.
When someone backstage called Guy the best guitarist alive today, he shook off the compliment: “I don’t know about the greatest guitarist. I’m just in a family with a bunch of great guitarists.”
Best New Artist winner Meghan Trainor noted that her early exposure to Caribbean soca music helps her craft bouncy pop songs today: “My uncle was from Trinidad and Tobago. Since I was seven years old, I’ve been listening to not only top 40 radio like Britney Spears, but I would also put on soca and Machel Montano. I love writing soca. I think it helps my rhythm a lot.”
Jason Isbell captured two awards in the Americana field and spoke openly about his struggles with alcoholism. “I never quite hit bottom, as people say, but there was a point where I realized that my wife Amanda was not gonna put up with my drunk ass any longer. I told her I couldn’t do it on my own, she held me to it, called a lot of people. From then on, I’ve been a lot more focused and have enjoyed my life a lot more.”
For more behind the scenes info, see our article about who can vote for the Grammys.
Last Updated on February 3, 2026