Michael Hiltzik: Chuck Philips (1952-2024) singlehandedly made music industry journalism better

Few people outside the music industry may know the name Chuck Philips, but few inside the industry will forget it.

As the leading music industry investigative reporter of his generation and a mainstay of Times entertainment coverage for more than a decade, Chuck aimed to force a celebrity-driven corner of journalism into taking seriously how the pursuit of money by industry bigwigs often left the artists themselves at the side of the road.

He may not have entirely succeeded — the coverage of celebrity lives is still a fundamental feature of music writing — but he set a standard that has seldom been matched. Chuck died last month at 71.

"There are two ways to look at investigative reporting in the world of pop music journalism," says Robert Hilburn, who as The Times' pop music critic and pop music editor began publishing Chuck's freelanced stories in the 1980s. "There's pre-Chuck Philips and post-Chuck Philips. Before Chuck, the coverage, nationally, was mostly timid and sporadic. Chuck turned it into something relentless and uncompromising."

That's a global perspective. Here's a personal perspective, drawn from my working with: Chuck was the most tenacious, scrupulous and principled journalist I've ever known.