As soon as her piece came out online, the blowback began.
Olivia Krupp had written an opinion column in the Daily Wildcat about a fellow student, a University of Arizona senior who was a popular online influencer of young men.
That senior, Lucas Pakter, didn’t like Krupp’s piece. And so he did what an influencer naturally would do: He posted a TikTok video about it, criticizing Krupp, then a sophomore, and posting screenshots of their text-message exchanges.
"Olivia, you wanted your quick, easy rise to fame," he said. "I'm handing it to you right here."
Those screenshots showed Krupp’s phone number, so texts and calls started pouring in from Pakter’s followers. Some criticized her appearance, threatened sexual violence, or said journalists like her should be shot.
The harassment, Krupp said, lasted about five months, into the second semester of her sophomore year. Krupp's mother wanted her to transfer out of the school.
But in the aftermath, Krupp concluded she had found her calling: She wanted to be a journalist.
That's a blessing and a curse in this time in American journalism history.
“I feel very fortunate to not see myself doing anything else for the rest of my life,” Krupp said. “But I also, on the other side of that coin, feel unfortunate to not be able to see myself do anything else for the rest of my life.”
Olivia Krupp, who is graduating Friday from the University of Arizona, says months-long online attacks over a column she wrote helped affirm her commitment to journalism.
Krupp graduates this week with a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Arizona. In an awards ceremony May 8, she was named the department’s outstanding senior. (My wife teaches in the department, but Krupp wasn't one of her students.)
It was an unlikely outcome, and not just because she got embroiled in an online blow-up that ended up landing her experience in the pages of the Washington Post and other publications.
Krupp, who is from Chicago, didn’t want to go to the U of A, but she didn’t have good enough high-school grades to get into the schools she preferred, she said. That didn’t lead to a great freshman year.
“I was like, this isn't the school for me,” she said. “I just was like, ‘I don't like Arizona. I want to leave.’ And everyone told me to give it time. So I came back again. Sophomore year felt better, and that's when I started thinking about journalism.”
Krupp had started working for the Wildcat in her freshman year. The opinion piece about Pakter came out in September 2022 and was her first published writing in her sophomore year.
In it, 19-year-old Krupp questioned why so many young men were seeking advice from Pakter, a former fraternity president who styled himself an “alpha male.” She likened Pakter’s relationship with his followers to that of Andrew Tate, the notorious manosphere influencer and misogynist, with his followers.
Her main point: Young men need real friends, mentors and counselors to talk to. The opinion piece ends; “The obsession with being the hyper-masculine gym bro, the guy who ‘gets hot chicks left and right,’ is nothing but a futile chase and an empty promise for a lot of these young men.
“If only their role models were telling them that.”
Pakter, in a response video that was only online for a couple of hours, accused Krupp of using him to try to gain fame for herself. In truth, it did work out that way, though she said she stands by the column.
“I look back and I think maybe I could have been more careful, because, again, it really wasn't a personal attack,” Krupp said.
She acknowledges he probably felt humiliated by her writing, which wasn’t her intention.
“But I think you know the piece is, it's a strong piece, certainly, and it's a strong piece about someone who's on your college campus, and quite frankly, had a lot of social power at the time.”
While Pakter wasn’t right that her intent was to seek fame with the piece — and certainly not the harassment that followed — she acknowledges in retrospect it felt good to be the center of attention for writing about something important and topical. And it made her want more to be a journalist, not less.
There were bumps. She was ousted as opinions editor the following year following an in-house dispute at the Wildcat. It was disappointing not to have that journalistic home anymore. But she kept on writing freelance pieces and most recently was an intern for Tucson Spotlight.
She wrote an article for Vice Magazine in 2024 about the pro-Trump spirit in many U of A fraternities. And for the Spotlight, she’s even touched on subjects I have wanted to but haven't gotten to yet, like profiling a Tucsonan who has made a popular YouTube channel with his sympathetic interviews of local addicts.
She’s found a natural home exploring eddies in the currents of our culture. But that’s not necessarily what a declining industry focused on cranking out content will pay her to do.
“I really cannot picture myself doing anything else. And it's almost depressing, because I think about the state of journalism right now,” she said.
The days when a quirky, brave writer like Krupp could expect to graduate and tuck into a paying job at some publication have passed. But there are advantages to the era, too, and prospects.
Much the way Pakter made a name for himself on TikTok, platforms all over the internet allow writers to publish themselves and create their own audiences. And Krupp has already experienced working for a non-profit news start-up — a good trend but one that needs to be funded better, faster to make the needed impact.
This dangerous moment for journalism could be a beneficial one. Many Americans might appreciate the need for clear-headed journalism now than they did before Jan. 20.
Certainly, the need for journalists who can tolerate a harassment campaign and still love the job isn’t going away.
