When Katie was 13, her mom suffered a massive stroke and she went to live with her grandparents. As a homeschooled teenager living in a new neighborhood with no other kids her age around to hang out with, she became more entrenched in the Twitter fandom communities that shared her pop penchants for the “it” boys of music during the early 2010s, the Justins, Austin Mahones and Cody Simpsons of the world.

“I started making these connections with other fangirls online, and we would FaceTime all the time,” she says. “If I was having a bad day with my family, like they were the first people I would call. So I ended up feeling much closer and more connected to these people online than I ever did with people in person.”

That’s also when she realized just how much influence the fandom community had. When pop singer Austin Mahone parted ways with his label, Cash Money Records, in 2015 and started self-releasing his music, Katie and her fellow fans essentially became his marketing department. They gifted his singles on iTunes to fans who couldn't afford them to push him up the charts, ran streaming contests with merch prizes and handed out points for hanging flyers in public or getting someone to buy a concert ticket. One contest she helped promote offered a meet-and-greet with the singer as the grand prize.

"At that time, I didn't even know that's what a marketer did," she says.

It clicked during a college application call with an adviser at a Los Angeles fashion school, who pushed past her laundry list of dream jobs and asked what she could see herself doing every day for the rest of her life without being miserable.

"I would think back to those experiences of running contests and trying to get ticket sales and trying to get charts," she says. "The feeling of supporting someone's craft at that level, I was like, of course I can do that every single day for the rest of my life."

So she moved to New York City at 18 to study for her eventual career, but was forced to drop out during her senior year after losing her financial aid. Her big break came when MTV hired her as a social media coordinator, a job uniquely suited to her skills, whether she had a college degree or not.

For two and a half years, she ran MTV's Twitter account. When she asked her boss what was kosher to post, the response was simple: You're a fangirl. Treat this like your fan account.

So she did. Katie was one of the first people to spotlight up-and-comers like Sombr and Rachel Chinouriri. And she tweeted about Reneé Rapp so relentlessly, and so affectionately, that Reneé’s fans went on LinkedIn to figure out who had started at MTV around the time the posts began. Katie was nervous when the first DM came in. Instead, the fans embraced her: About 20 of them left their spot at the barricade after Reneé’s Governors Ball set in 2024 to meet her in person, and later that year, a group in the bleachers at the All Things Go festival chanted "MTV!" when she walked onto the floor.

"I think once they discovered that my love for Reneé was genuine, and it wasn't just me trying to get clicks or views, I think that's what really connected us," she says.

Katie stayed at MTV for a few years, and now she is the marketing manager at Fast Friends, a label management company where she plans promotional strategies for releases, meets weekly with artists and their teams about social media and manages a group of interns who run fan accounts. One of her favorite job wins was texting fans of singer Grentperez ahead of a show in Hawaii to find someone who could come teach him how to hula dance in the green room.

"It's little moments like that that I would have died for," she says. "I get to make them now."

Early in her career, when she was interviewing for a marketing internship, Katrina Morgan remembers the hiring manager asking who her favorite artist was. She answered Harry Styles and gave one example of a 2019 marketing campaign from his team where fans had to piece together clues from social media ads promoting a fictitious island. Unsatisfied with her answer, the interviewer then threw her a curveball: “If Harry Styles walked into this room, how would you react?”

"I just reacted by saying that I don't really understand why that would be an issue,” Katrina says. “But I think for a lot of people, they still question whether fans can hold their composure in professional spaces, especially ones that come with access. And so for me, it was never something that I especially led with.”

As a kid, Katrina dove headfirst into the One Direction fandom, which didn’t exactly go over well with her friend group. "I came from a predominantly Black area, and a lot of my friends teased me for listening to what they called 'white girl music,'" she says. She signed up for a Twitter account when she was 11 years old and eventually found a community of Directioners who understood her in ways her real-life friends didn’t.

Throughout her school years, Katrina and the One Direction army would light up Twitter with chatter about the band and swarm online voting polls for awards shows like the MTV Video Music Awards, hoping to cement a win for the group. The countless hours she spent on social media bolstering her favorite band and creating content to engage and activate the fandom prepared her for the bigger opportunities that came knocking. She went on to join Island Records' digital street team, where she got to work on marketing campaigns while she was still in high school.

"I realized that the throughline through all of it wasn't just, 'Oh, I like entertainment,' or 'Oh, I really like marketing,'" she says. "I liked any part of culture or media that moved people and that got people organized around something."

She studied digital media at NYU, where her fandoms branched out into late-night comedy, Broadway, film and TV. She eventually worked her way up to her current job as a national digital content producer for broadcast giant TEGNA, where she writes stories for its 64 local news outlets across 51 markets nationwide.

"Last week we were covering the Ed Sheeran news, and I've been following Macklemore for years. I already knew all the context and everything that he's been doing. I knew what Ed Sheeran was doing, so people could turn to me, and I'd be like, 'OK, we're missing several gaps here,'" says Katrina. "And it's just because I know from being a fan. It's being able to just jump in and say, this is what fans would want to hear, because I'm a fan and I've been around them and I've talked to them, so I know that's what they're interested in."

While many women like Katrina and Katie have spun their fandom experience into successful careers, they both say the stigma of being a ‘fangirl’ hasn’t really gone away. Some of that stigma comes from the way the media has portrayed fangirls in movies, shows and music videos, as hormonal teenage girls wailing and fainting at the sight of their favorite idols. And that’s on top of the broader gender stereotypes that play a part in how seriously these women are taken in professional spaces.

“I always think of Philly when the Eagles won the Super Bowl. Men are climbing light poles and do all that stuff, and nobody bats an eye at it,” Katie says. “Not that someone necessarily should, but imagine if Justin Bieber released a new album or won a Grammy, and I went and climbed a light pole. I would be sent for a mental evaluation."

Katrina started a Substack, Fangirl Forward, as a way to highlight the work of women building fandom communities and how they’re reinventing media. That’s not to say Katrina sees that world through rose-colored glasses. She’s frequently brought up the ethics of fandom communities and where admiration can turn into unhealthy fixation, using “stage dooring,” where fans wait outside a theater door in hopes of meeting their favorite actor, as one example of how boundaries between fans and celebrities can be crossed.

“If the actor wants a stage door, stage door, but they can opt out of it because it's not a requirement. And so for me, crossing the line in that situation would be harassing an actor online, complaining because they didn't come out to the stage door, or trying to follow them to their cars, which, unfortunately, I have seen stories of that happening,” she says.

Katrina has seen labels start hiring fans to run fan accounts for their artists, an entry-level pipeline she's glad exists, even if she's wary of the manufactured feel of some of those accounts. She's also seen studios snap up fan creators directly. In a recent Fangirl Forward piece on the 'Heated Rivalry' fandom, she interviewed a fan editor who landed a job at HBO after her edits went viral on TikTok.

Still, both women say the entertainment industry hasn’t fully embraced the fandom community yet. "I just think overall, treating fans less like a bank and like a transactional exchange will get us really far," Katie says. "I can tell when I'm being marketed to just for funds."

Katrina is trying to build the room where those conversations happen. She’s hosting Fangirl Forward’s first in-person event in New York City this Friday, and it’s already sold out. The half-day conference brings together women who’ve made the same leap Katrina and Katie did, from fan to professional community builder.

"I noticed that a lot of media outlets are starting to pick up on the fan-to-pro pipeline," Katrina says. "But I wanted to really push beyond simply validating that it can happen and talk about what happens once fans actually get through the door."

And that door is starting to open. According to Katie, that shift is not really a matter of if, but when.

"It may take time," she says. "But if there's one thing I know about fangirls, it's that they do not give up."