Transcript
Akbar Shahid Ahmed: You’re listening to OnWriting, a podcast from the Writers Guild of America East.
Henry Grabar: In each episode, you’ll hear from the union members who create the film, TV Series, podcasts and news stories that define our culture.
Jaya Saxena: We’ll discuss everything from inspirations and creative process…
Jim Newell: To what it takes to build a successful career in media and entertainment.
Molly Olmstead: We’re news writers and each of us were nominated for the 2025 Writers Guild Awards Digital News Category.
Jim Newell: I’m Jim Newell. I am a politics writer at Slate. I mostly cover Congress and campaigns and any other thing that will come up. The piece I wrote that was nominated is a profile of Nancy Mace, who’s a member of Congress who likes to talk a lot and throw a lot of provocation out there, and I talk to a lot of her ex-staffers about what her motivation is behind all of that.
Jaya Saxena: Hi, I am Jaya Saxena and I’m a correspondent at Eater, so I generally write a lot about food and restaurant culture, but I feel like that can kind of encompass everything. So I end up writing a lot about labor, history, immigration, things like that all through the lens of food. And the piece that I’m nominated for is called The Food That Makes You Gay, and it’s sort of a very sprawling piece about food associations that I think we all have as a culture about what people think of you when you eat certain foods and foods that have been historically something that have queered the people who eat them, and how this phenomenon has been found in various cultures throughout history, but then also getting into the idea that food is something that can change your body, and how that has been used throughout history intentionally by queer and specifically trans people to attempt to actively change their bodies and how that’s sort of this wonderful thing, I think especially at this moment in time.
Molly Olmstead: I’ll go next. I am Molly Olmsted. I am a politics writer at Slate, mostly covering the various factions of the right, including the religious right. And for this piece, this was one about the religious right, it was specifically about a group called The New Apostolic Reformation, which is this sort of charismatic right-wing group that’s on the rise in the US right now. And I went to a tent revival political campaign event that was a fusion of worship and campaign strategy and getting out the vote and preparing people for a potentially contested election in Michigan. And it was just following what was going on with this group and one particular leader in this movement, a man named Lance Wallnau.
Henry Grabar: My name is Henry Grabar and I am a staff writer at Slate. And at Slate I write about cities, so I write about housing, transportation, the environment, climate change, infrastructure, architecture, and I’m nominated for a story, or series of stories that I wrote about the 2024 Olympics, Summer Olympic Games in Paris, and not specifically about the sporting angle, but about the investment and the promise of the Olympics as an opportunity to put the city on a different path and spend money in ways that align with the broader development goals of the city, whether that’s cleaning up the Seine River or bringing more economic opportunity to some of the poorer neighborhoods of the capital and evaluating whether those promises were kept in the midst of this global sporting event.
Akbar Shahid Ahmed: I’m Akbar Shahid Ahmed. I’m the senior diplomatic correspondent for HuffPost, formerly Huffington Post. I’m based in Washington DC and I write about foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East where the focus on Congress, the State Department, Diplomatic Corps, the White House. The piece I’m nominated for is called What is Hamas Thinking Now? It’s a piece I actually reported outside Washington DC in Doha, Qatar. It’s a feature based on interviews I did with two quite senior Hamas leaders who very, very rarely give in-person interviews. Hamas is very particular about their image and I wanted to meet them in person, understand how they operate, what the kind of situation is like that they’re living in in Qatar as the political leadership of this group that began a war in Gaza that was hugely devastating that the US was extremely integrated in and I was very curious about the Hamas perspective, having thought about it as something we don’t hear a lot in American media, though I was grateful for the sport to go out and try to make this happen.
Molly Olmstead: I would personally love to hear how you made this happen and how the union supported you in this.
Akbar Shahid Ahmed: Thank you for the interest. I have to say first, I mean love the union. I have been on the HuffPost Union Committee twice helping with various aspects, diversity, contract negotiation a little bit. I think that being in a union-protected job makes ambitious journalism a little easier in that you feel just a lot more secure taking big swings and risks. And this was a real risk. I mean, I’m going to talk to a listed terror organization. I think it’s really valuable for us as digital media outlets and many of us at smaller really nimble digital outlets, but frankly smaller, right? Do not the resources of CNN or New York Times with thousands of people and fixers and security teams to feel that web part of something bigger. With the Hamar story, I sort of raised it with my team internally at HuffPost. I had great editors.
They thought I was slightly insane. They were really to let me try. I never to be honest, did not think I’d be able to get the degree of access I did. What it took was a combination of repeat trips. I wasn’t able to get these meetings on my first trip to Qatar at all. It took using truly the strangest angles and aims I could have caught of with various sources I’ve cultivated over years. And I think that is a place where, again, being in a union, being in a newsroom where is support for long-term journalism, I’ve been in a position where I felt able to build those relationships and then it was terrifying. It was terrifying to go be in this room with people who you feel have are on a daily basis, very oppositional and confrontational towards the US. I live in America now. I didn’t grow up in the US, but I am writing for a US outlet, and they’re very aware of that often. Of course, being out hate speech, quite aggressive speech, and then obviously are linked to a militant organization.
Add to that layer of that in a separate country that’s hosting them. It’s not a very warm hosting relationship though they’re quite careful about who gets access to the leadership. And then the third layer being how do we bring this material back and present it to the public at a time where there’s an active war? There’s Americans being held hostage by Hamas, and that was something I pressed on about in the conversations. How do we make to something that’s approachable and not scaring our audience, alienating them, maybe losing trust that we have built up over really tough coverage of the war in Gaza. I was terrified crossing an international border with these recordings and notes thinking, is my stuff going to be taken? How do I secure it? So digital security factors come in.
And I think the biggest factor was just feeling an editorial relationship that was able to stand up for this piece. And I felt that with a lot of my reporting on the war in Gaza, which was quite skeptical of US policy, asking if it could have been different. And for that, I’ve been called a liar by the White House and various other things, and my leaders really stood by me, so I felt able to get this out and we were really surprised I think when this dropped. We were ready to get hate to have people internally be concerned and the degree of support I got from other union colleagues in the newsroom saying, “Look, it’s not a perspective we hear very often in American media. We’re glad we’re getting it and we’re screaming it in a context that it needs.” Which I think we really wanted to do to make sure, yes, we’re trying to get American readers a perspectives they rarely hear, but we don’t want it to be an unquestioned assertion of that perspective, and I feel really grateful to have been recognized for it.
Molly Olmstead: I’m sorry to jump in with another follow-up question, but did you do anything, take any precautions for your own personal safety? How did you make sure you were safe?
Akbar Shahid Ahmed: Yeah, so I’d say two main things. One, we are lucky enough to still have a really good security team at HuffPost, which is kind of a vestige of maybe the heyday of digital news. Perhaps another heyday will come around, but we still have a really good security team. So they were kind of tracking me and knew where I was at all times, local contacts on the ground, and again, I was going in without fixers, which is something I’m really determined to do as much as I can, even in covering conflict zones, I just think to the extent you can, be the person rather than have it funneled, and to the extent you can have a sincere connection rather than feel like it’s often a broker to negotiate connection, that’s a really helpful thing. So I had kind of trusted contacts who knew where I was going.
I definitely wondered, and I talked about this a little bit in the piece, I mean the second interview with the bigger Hamas leader, I met Mousa Abu Marzook, someone designated by the US for many years, has actually been jailed in the US for raising money for terror acts, very much have been linked to killings of civilians to directing military strategy. That’s a situation where you are in a room, there’s many, many odd men and you’re in a country very far away from everyone you know. So I walked out extremely sweaty, but I felt good knowing that people knew what I was trying to do and that I had been clear throughout and that again, it wasn’t a situation where I felt, okay, I bought this access in some way. I really felt okay, I’ve tried to win trust layer to layer, to layer to layer where they want to talk to me and let me into their inner sanctums mean I was in their homes with them, observing how they operate with their deputies and then kind of talking to the people around them a little bit.
And that was interesting. I think just identity is something to think about through these contexts. I was raised in Pakistan and I am Muslim. I mean I’m culturally Muslim, I have a very Muslim name, but I think they were very perturbed by that in a way and asked me a lot of questions about this like you are a Muslim, Pakistani living in the US where your loyalties comes up very often. I think as journalists and as union supporting journalists, we can be very clear that our loyalties are to a set of values more than an identity predation any of that. And that felt good to be able to be honest about.
Jaya Saxena: I feel like that brings up one of the other questions that I’m curious to hear from everyone about, the idea of unbiased writing and unbiased reporting. Because I think all of our pieces really do have a point of view and yeah, I’m curious how everyone sort of navigates that.
Jim Newell: I can talk about my piece. A lot of my work has a point of view. This one I really tried especially hard to just, here’s the information about this person. Everything has X, Y, and Z, several sources. And a lot of that was because even if a lot of what Slate does is from a left or center left point of view, this story I did was entirely, 100% everyone I talked to was a Republican, so I wanted to be extra careful to keep trust. And some people were pretty skeptical of talking to me. They were like, “You’re just going to try to go after all Republicans for this.” And so I just want to be especially diligent about not being, even more careful than I normally am. I really just try to keep everything straight, just not twist their words or transfer everything that I was reporting about Nancy Mace to a reflection of the Republican Party or anything like that with every article.
I just hope to, even if it does come in with a strong point of view, I want anyone who reads it to be able to think it’s a fair argument or a fair reading of the situation. And I think our former colleague Will Saladin, I think said it best once, when you’re engaging with an argument with someone you disagree with, you should be arguing with the best version of their argument. You shouldn’t just chase necessarily the low hanging fruit you should find whenever they’re the top way that it’s put, that’s the one that you should be engaging with.
Henry Grabar: How does that play out for you, Molly? Because in your story, you go to a place where it seems like the group that you’re writing about might be hostile to the aims of what you’re trying to do there.
Molly Olmstead: Yeah, my situation obviously is different from Jim’s in part that Jim is working with a group of people who, it’s a contained group of people. So when you’re talking about Congress, Jim is going to need to come back to these people and there’s an incentive for them to at least treat him with some decorum. This right wing religious group that I’m covering, they’re openly hostile to journalists. In fact talk about journalists as if they are working on behalf of the devil or possessed by the spirit of the devil. So it is a different dynamic. They’re never going to give me the kind of access that I would want to have. I attended this event, but absolutely was never able to get any sort of one-on-one interviews with the subjects that I was most interested in, meaning the leaders of this movement. I could only talk to attendees.
And what was different about that kind of situation, I think what helped actually was thinking about leaders versus regular people. So the leaders of this movement, I think I was able to be pretty clear whether or not setting aside the question of how much they’re true believers versus this has to do with ambition or whatever it is they are pursuing actually dangerous aims. And you can track that, you can track the actual danger of what they’re doing in terms of their behavior on January 6th and other things like that. Where I felt like I was able to still have this view but try and be as fair as possible is to treat the followers with as much dignity as possible. So the sort of regular people who are attending these events, I want to approach it with empathy and understand the motivations that the sort of fear, anxiety, whatever it is that has led them to be drawn to this movement.
And I think what I found really gratifying about covering an event like this was that I got to see how much pain there was that motivated a lot of the people who were sort of pulled in by a man who was himself dangerous, but they were coming at it or at least a lot of the followers seemed to be coming at it with something that could be seen as a lot more relatable. So for me, the thing about having this perspective that it gave me the clarity to be able to say there is different levels of agency here, and I found that really empowering.
Akbar Shahid Ahmed: I am always dying to hear people’s origin stories, so I would love to hear from some folks about that last story. Maybe Henry, I know you haven’t had chance to speak much yet.
Henry Grabar: Oh boy. My origin story before or after I became possessed by the devil, all journalists are apparently. I was thinking about maybe the first story I wrote, and I think it was a story for my high school newspaper about the prevalence of real estate shops on the street by our school, which I’m sure the story was no good, because I didn’t have any insight or knowledge of the kinds of trends that were happening in the American city at that time that would’ve made it meaningful. But I think the observation was actually a good one. And if I were to go back and write the story today, it might be a good story about the changing nature of local retail and speculation in urban housing markets, the high cost of living, gentrification, all of these things.
I mean, none of that was in the story, to be clear, but perhaps there was an inkling that I was looking at the urban environment in a way that as I learned more things about cities might make it possible for me to write and bring new information and stuff like that to these observations of what’s happening around us.
Jaya Saxena: I recently reread my first ever story, which was for my elementary school newspaper about going crab fishing with my family. It was not good. This was not awards nomination worthy prose, but it was sort of adorable to revisit that. But I think the first story I remember being actually proud of, when I was in college, started writing for, I went to college in New Orleans and I started writing for OffBeat Magazine, which was a local music monthly, and I got it by, I was taking a music class and an editor from the magazine came to the class to talk to us, and I just followed them around to be like, “How do I write for you? How can I prove myself?”
And they gave me a shot and I wrote a piece about the resurgence of vinyl, how more bands were putting things out on vinyl instead of digitally. And I remember it just feeling really good. I think at that point I had only ever written for things like school papers, so to make that leap to something that didn’t have to do with the place actively giving me an education, it made me feel like this was possible for me.
Jim Newell: I don’t really have a good one, unfortunately. I thought about this, there’s no defining piece that stands out for me. So I first got my job right about politics in 2007, and there are some defining moments though that I’ll never really forget and made me think about my job and what I could do with it more. I went to the 2008 Republican Convention, which was, John McCain was nominated and it was so sleepy the first few days, he just wasn’t going to win that election. It felt like you could just kind of walk in the side door of the arena. No one, I mean as opposed to Obama’s nomination where there’s a mile wide perimeter. And I just remember thinking how boring it was, and then I remember it changing on a dime that Wednesday night when Sarah Palin spoke. It was as if the place aflame.
I think that to me that was kind of like a moment I think back a lot to when I think about the trajectory of the Republican Party and sort of a move to the way it is now. And I also remember that convention, during John McCain’s nominating speech, there was a protester stood up and started shouting, doing the speech, and a couple of security guards just tackled him onto the stairs. And I was there and I was like, this is going to be the story the next day. This was an incredible scene of violence here. But of course it wasn’t a story at all because the cameras weren’t on it. So that just kind of framed how I think about when you’re in person, what your job is to do, to just look around and see what others can’t see. So that’s kind of tangential to what we were talking about, but those are just a couple of early experiences.
Molly Olmstead: I can ask the next question, which is how did you get your first Writers Guild-covered job?
Jaya Saxena: Well, for me it was this job at Eater is my first explicitly Writers Guild-covered job. Though I was a big fan of the Writers Guild because before this, when I was a freelancer, I was working to organize what’s now become the Freelance Solidarity Project and the WGAE gave their New York offices to us for organizing space and that was really wonderful.
But when I was hired at Eater, which is under Vox Media, Vox was in the middle, the Vox Media Union was in the middle of bargaining the first contract, and I remember I think two or three days after I started, there was a lunchtime hour long walkout. And then a week after I started, there was a day long walkout, and I remember being so nervous because I’m still very, very new. I think the day of the walkout was the day my first piece went up and I wasn’t going to share it on social media, I wasn’t going to talk about it or do anything like that, but I still had all these jitters about like, no, but I want this job. I love this job. But the energy of entering the workplace in the middle of this union drive, in the middle of bargaining was just so electrifying. And ever since then, I’ve been on the union committees and we’re actually in the just beginning bargaining on our 3.0 contract right now, and I’m on the bargaining committee. So yeah, it’s just been a really rewarding experience.
Molly Olmstead: Jim and Henry, did you guys have union jobs before this one?
Henry Grabar: I didn’t, and I think I was there in New York when Slate decided to unionize and was part of that process. I remember going to all the meetings at the WGA offices and thinking about what we wanted from this process and how we could bring some stability to an industry that was then and is now constantly in flux. And I think now, looking back on it, what was this six years ago, maybe more, it seems clear that at least in that respect, we succeeded, and I’m proud of the work we did to unionize the magazine, and I feel like it’s one of the reasons that Slate has felt like a bastion of stability in a complicated landscape for journalism.
Jim Newell: This is actually my second, I believe, because before Slate, I was at Salon for a couple years and that was while Salon was organizing as well, but I had left there by the time I think a contract was negotiated. But yeah, I guess I’ve got two of these experiences since digital media began kind of organizing as an industry, which I guess was around 2015 or so when it really picked up.
Akbar Shahid Ahmed: I’ve actually done HuffPost now coming onto 11 years, and I came in through our fellowship program, which was amazing and has been one of the victims of the retrenchment of investment in digital media. But I was also at HuffPost when we got involved with the Writers Guild and kind of helped find out some more reluctant colleagues. I think there was a period where people very much felt in a way shielded by the longevity of some digital outlets. And HuffPost is coming up on our 20-year anniversary in May. Slate obviously has been around for a long time too, but I think that there’s been a lot of unfortunate awareness of how much the union is supporting all of us.
We are currently in the middle of a complicated reduction process that because we have a really strong union committee is involving a buyout, which I really don’t think it would otherwise, which amounts to a longer period of effectively guaranteed severance for people and has given us a much stronger hand when management has, as so often happens in digital media, come to us suddenly with very little logic and set our jobs are at risk.
I know this isn’t a question on the list, but I hope I am not overstepping by putting it out there, but in this vein, I’d love to hear how folks think about continuing to produce ambitious work in the digital media space, given the chaos of it. I sometimes just, I mean feel like I keep trying, but many of us keep trying, but I also think it’s really disheartening and I hear it especially from younger colleagues, something I see as almost 32 years old myself, but I hear it from people who are 22, 23, 24 in our newsroom and don’t see a few traditional media that has incredible ideas, incredible insights that need to be somewhere. And I’d love to hear some thoughts from folks on how you are thinking about transitioning your ambition, your experience into this moment that very much needs really critical and thoughtful coverage.
Henry Grabar: Well, I have something that’s slightly optimistic to say about that, which is that one thing that I’ve noticed in the years that I’ve been doing this is that the stories where I invest the most attention and the subjects that I think are the most important also tend to get the most readers and elicit the biggest responses. And so obviously having readers is no guarantee of having a solid financial model for journalism, that’s clear. But it is nice to feel like there is some alignment in terms of what the kinds of things that I’d like to work on and the kinds of things it feels like our readers want to read. And that’s been gratifying.
Molly Olmstead: Similarly, I mean, I wouldn’t say I’m necessarily optimistic about any element of the industry, but I do think we have gone through some darker periods in which it seemed like our financial future was just in churning out content, and those models failed, thank goodness. I mean, it doesn’t seem like we have a good model at all, but at least it does seem like our experiments with sort of the worst version of content production, those didn’t go anywhere. And I think that at least causes us to have some optimism that even if we are running into problems funding more ambitious journalism, at least we are not in the darkest era. I don’t know if you all agree with that, but that at least gives me some hope.
Jaya Saxena: Yeah, no, I was going to say, I think I agree with you, Henry, that often my wildest, weirdest ideas are the things that readers seem to respond to, and that’s always heartening to see that it’s not Molly, I think as you said, the churn, the just sort of producing as much as possible as fast as possible that people react to. People love deeply researched, well-written, interesting, funny, compelling work, and I think they can tell when that craft and care has been put into something. Yeah, I don’t love where the industry is right now. Vox Media recently went through two rounds of layoffs, one in late November and one in January, and that’s been really frustrating. But I think, again, speaking about the union role in all of this, I think what it allows us is to have any semblance of agency in what our work looks like.
I think working non-union jobs, the risk of being laid off is always there, but with a union, I can guarantee severance. I can guarantee a baseline of dignified treatment. I can fight back if I think something is happening unfairly. And I know that I have many, many people behind me that way. And I think having agency and having the ability to dictate what we think this industry looks like, just in terms of maybe at the very least, making it more expensive for them to lay us off if it comes to that, I think really does mean something.
Jim Newell: I think even though it is harder and the demands are more difficult, and especially now with just the sheer amount of news that we’re going to have for the foreseeing future, just staying on everything that’s happening and doing shorter things on that is going to be kind of necessary. But I found at least at Slate, but I think this is somewhat universal. You just really got to insist. If you think you have something incredible that needs to get done, just keep trying to convince your editors as much as you can and almost make yourself an unstoppable force. I think that’s not going to be realistic in every case or for every person. But yeah, if you’re going to go to Doha and talk to Hamas, you got to insist that’s going to happen. And I’m glad you did. You can’t let that follow the wayside of just need to get up, quick stuff on the news cycle.
Henry Grabar: Jaya, I’m curious how you got the idea for the piece that’s nominated, speaking of following your wildest suspicions and ideas.
Jaya Saxena: Totally. Yeah, I think there are sort of two prongs to it. On one hand, I think as we’ve seen sort of a resurgence of some real reactionary thought, I had seen in a couple places, some more conservative talking heads, making some really childish jokes about men eating essentially phallic foods, men eating ice cream, men eating bananas and being like, “No real man would do something like that.” “Real man” of course being code for straight man, white man, all those things. And at first I was just really interested in where these associations come from, why are they put on some people and not others, which led into sort of a deeper look at the way being feminized by society is always sort of the risk, because if a woman eats a traditionally masculine food, if a woman eats a steak, there just aren’t the same sort of risks and connotations around that.
But then also, I had read this book, Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin, which it’s a horror novel and it takes place in a future where there is a plague that goes around affecting anyone with over a certain amount of testosterone in their bodies. And the two main characters who are both trans women have to find ways to suppress their testosterone. And they do this in the book by eating a lot of different herbs and making a lot of different teas out of those herbs. And it lit up something again in my brain of like, oh, right, food, herbs, edible things have effects on our bodies.
And I sort of just spent a long time thinking about these two separate things and figuring that there was a way to tie them together. And I wrote the piece for our Queer Table series, which during pride month, we sort of focus a lot more pieces on queer culture in food and in restaurants, though it’s a subject that we cover all throughout the year, and I think I’m queer, and it was just something that I was really fascinated by, and I appreciated that my editors let me sort of run with this instinct, even though I didn’t really have a clear idea of where it was going to lead me. But yeah, ultimately it led to that piece. Yeah. Henry, I’m curious about the process of writing yours and just what it took from you.
Henry Grabar: Well, I’ve been interested in the Olympics for years because, well, if you know that there used to be in fact gold medals distributed in urban planning back in I think the 1920s and 30s, and they got rid of that maybe for obvious reasons, along with all the other kind of artistic pursuits that used to be a part of the Olympics. But the Olympics themselves are of course an urban planning exercise, and they have become this increasingly bloated spectacle over the last two decades that now involves spending sometimes tens of billions of dollars on preparing cities to get ready for this competition. And the requirements are onerous in terms of the numbers of hotel rooms that you’re required to have.
The International Olympic Committee used to require all kinds of commitments to build new venues, and there’s been a big backlash against that. After Athens, Beijing, there was a feeling that all this money had been spent on sporting facilities without really a good plan for how they were going to be integrated into the life of the city, and whether that money could have been spent on social policy or real city planning needs. And into this void steps the city of Paris with a proposal for the 2024 games that’s supposed to be light on its feet, cheap, making extensive use of temporary venues or adaptive reuse of existing venues, and in a way, an attempt to reinvent the Olympics and I think save the Olympics from themselves because nobody wanted to do this anymore. No cities were volunteering to host these games.
And so I’m not sure to what extent we can say that Paris succeeded in doing this, but I definitely wanted to find out how it was going. So I was there and sort of watching every day as they tried to pull off these things that seemed very ambitious, like doing the triathlon. And the send, for example, and I think this is true for a lot of journalism, but it’s especially true of the Olympics, it’s very hard to assess things in the moment that they’re happening. And the cliché is that journalists write the first draft of history. But if you really want to understand the impact of something like this, I do think you need to go back. And so I think the work that I did there was sort of showing how this was all playing out in real time, but I think the jury is out on just how successful this effort was.
Molly Olmstead: A question for I guess any of you, but one thing I’m curious about, because there are very different kinds of stories in this set, is how much you felt the reporting research part of this was something where you were able to work off of your editor or a colleague, bandy ideas about felt like there was some elaborative element, or whether you were just siloed in your own head as you sorted through these things and honed your angles and came to the piece that you came to.
Jim Newell: Mine took a few twists and turns along the way before becoming what it ultimately was. I mean, eventually I was just thinking about doing a little 800 word explainer of who this person was who just kept popping up in the news for a while. But then I just started, I reached one former staffer who talked my ear off for half an hour. That person gave me more names, and it just filtered down like that for a while. So that’s how we get a 5,000 word piece, which could have been 15,000.
And as I did that, I do tend to work kind of in a silo a lot. This one, I’ve had pretty regular check-ins, not just with my direct editor, but our editor-in-chief about, okay, what should this be now if I get this person to go on the record, does that become its own individual piece and then we do other things or is that the end of it? Which of these six or seven aspects should I focus on? So when I’m just writing a daily, a one-day thing based on what’s going on the news, that’ll largely be on my own. But something like this, I definitely am collaborating throughout with my writers. I don’t really co-write with other writers or reporters that often, but yeah, for this, I checked in a lot.
Akbar Shahid Ahmed: I’ll jump in mostly because I’ve been dying to say this to Jaya, which is, I really appreciate that you noted that the key to Alaska is economically queer food, really important for us to give it its flowers. But I’ll just quickly answer your question, Molly, which is, I had so many, and I feel like all of you must have had these experiences. I had so many moments for this piece where we thought we were at the finish line and were about to publish and then freaked out, went back and thought, no, no, no, actually if we put this up top, this will go so much better. And I really do think that it benefited from that, the period of doing that, especially in a time sensitive issue. We were really begging this to the six-month anniversary of the October 7th attack and how Hamas is thinking six months on from having done that, begun the war in Gaza, Palestinian suffering really more than they have ever. And Israelis as well, of course with the US very involved.
And I think it was maddening. But I do think that having people, and I think that really often we don’t give enough credit to people outside the traditional writer/editor relationship. There are so many people now in the newsroom who I think have huge insights into when something should drop and how it should be packaged, whether it’s the people running your front page. We are really lucky to still have an amazing huge front page audience that have both, but the folks who are managing your photos and social media and all of that. Getting in that insight, I think helped us make it a lot more successful. And the waiting worthwhile, even though I was truly punching the walls, my next door neighbor actually works for Slate, and I’m sure he was hearing me hitting my head against my office wall. So apologies to your colleague.
Jim Newell: Can I just do a quick follow-up? Do you guys get, aside from getting the finishing details right, do you get freaked out the night before a big story goes up?
Jaya Saxena: Always.
Jim Newell: I was losing my mind the whole weekend before the story went up. What if I got something wrong? Nancy Bass, she tweets a lot, she’s going to drag me. That’s the one thing about having something really big that you’ve been working on is just the week leading up to it. I’m like deep breaths all the time.
Jaya Saxena: No, I’m always freaked out. And I think that all of our pieces are about these really nuanced subjects that people have a lot of opinions about, often very sensitive subjects too. And so I’m sitting there thinking, well, I think that I’m representing what I want to say well, and I think I have good ideas and I think I’ve done my research and can sort of point to the things that led me to what I wrote, but right, there’s always the nightmare that you’re going to hit post and suddenly everything you thought that you did right, you did wrong. You actually, I always have a nightmare where I’m like, oh, I completely forgot that I wrote three paragraphs in there that actually are just terrible. But I think that’s one thing that I was very grateful for this piece because on one hand, because it was so strange and so sprawling, my editors really let me, I think they really trusted me to go into my little hole and then come back with my first draft.
But then I was so grateful to have them as people who both understood what I was trying to do and didn’t want to destroy that, didn’t want to flatten it, but also, yes, wanted to make sure that this was understandable to anyone who didn’t live in my brain. And so I think I really appreciate the ability to have that back and forth and editors that I really trust to, they want me to say what I want to say and they want to support me, and that’s just so valuable. And then yes, as Akbar said, our entire design team finding a great illustrator for this, all of our copy editors, all of our social media people making sure that this gets in front of people and can describe it in a way that makes people actually want to click on the story. It’s just so, so valuable having everybody involved. I’m curious about everyone else’s fears though, what it felt like the night before.
Molly Olmstead: I’m always scared, but I get extra scared when I know someone I’m writing about is really mean, and I’m always worried they’re going to get on the internet and say really mean things about me. There was a piece I wrote, not this piece, but a separate piece I wrote about Steve Bannon, and his co-host is like this 23-year-old mean girl, and I’ve never so scared to publish a piece. I felt like she was just going to tear into my fashion choices and stuff. But you know what? She mostly, she did respond, but she didn’t say anything about me personally, and that felt great. But yes, I’m always scared.
Jim Newell: Henry’s fearless. I can see it in his eyes.
Henry Grabar: No, I was trying to reflect on that. One of the things that was funny about this reporting that I was doing last summer was that the city of Paris had set up a media center for the Visiting Press Corps, not the press who was covering the actual Olympic Games. I mean, they have IOC press passes that they applied for years in advance and that permit them to enter any venue and watch any event. But the City of Paris realized that there would be a lot more reporters than that who would be interested in what they were trying to do. And so they set up this press center, which was really nice, and every day they would have these press briefings where they’d bring in these elected officials, or people who were otherwise involved in planning the games in one way or another who would speak to you about what was going on.
So from a reporter’s perspective, it was amazing because you had so much access to all these people who in an American context, you would’ve had to send an email to the PR person and get bounced around and then get back to you 48 hours later, and that wasn’t going to work in this scenario. So it was really nice to just be able to walk up to them and be like, “Hey.” Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles just walked through one day and I was like, “Excuse me, can I ask you just a quick question about how you’re planning the Olympic Games in Los Angeles?” And she was a little taken aback, but then answered my question. So that was great.
But in order to get back to the question, it meant that every day after I would publish a story, I was going in and running into the same people who I’d been interviewing and writing about. But I think there are some exceptions, but for the most part, I think if you try and engage in good faith with what people are trying to do, and you make clear that you listen to both sides on the issue and you did your best to be fair to everybody involved, I think most people can respect that and can see that. So yeah, I mean obviously it doesn’t always work out that way, but I guess I think the night before I publish, if I’ve done my best, then that’s the best I can do, really.
Jim Newell: And just real quickly, I think one thing that can help alleviate those nerves is everything I put in, I look through and make sure that I’m capable of defending that to that person in-person the next day if I need to be. And I think maybe that means you take out some cheap shots or whatever, but it also makes you tougher because you still do have to be critical of people, and you have to be able to defend that to them face-to-face. Should we do a little final lightning about where people write? At home, from the office, wherever? Anyone want to kick it off? Me, okay. I mostly write from my couch at home. I do not have a desk in my house. I just sat on the couch. But as Molly knows well, I am not one who goes into the office, the Slate offices in DC. I do a day or two a week, go up to Capitol Hill to work from there, but otherwise, I’m at home. I’m just a slob on the couch with stuff strewn about me.
Henry Grabar: You have to go to Capitol Hill twice a week. You deserve a little time on the couch, I think.
Jim Newell: Yeah, exactly. It all nets out.
Henry Grabar: I work from a desk at home, not very interesting. I used to love going to the office when I lived in New York, but I live in Boston now, and so it doesn’t have an office here yet.
Jaya Saxena: Yeah, I also work from home. Vox does have an office in New York, but it’s a 45-minute commute for me. And also I’m really bad at writing at the office, because it’s one of those big open office plans, so everyone’s always talking and milling around, and I get so distracted. I have a desk. I try to write at my desk a lot, but like Jim, I think when I really need to hunker down and write, I move to my couch, and I’m surrounded by a lot of little drinks and snacks the entire time.
Molly Olmstead: I’ll just say that I feel similarly that when you’re doing your most ambitious writing, you got to be as comfortable as possible. I think the office for me is ideal for any sort of shorter pieces where you really just want to be quick. But if I’m going to produce smart thoughts, that’s got to come from the couch. So I agree.
Akbar Shahid Ahmed: I’m very not economic, and I write from my dining table. I have a beautiful view of Rock Creek Park and very grateful for it. I should work from [inaudible 00:49:28] more because it’s absolutely stunning, but that’s even more distracting because people are trying to burn it down all the time or tell lies or whatever it may be. I also write from the floor a lot. That’s a strange, neutral habit that’s never left me, horizontal on the floor.
Jaya Saxena: Wait, horizontal stomach down, or horizontal on your back? I’m trying to…
Akbar Shahid Ahmed: Actually. I had a back spasm recently, and I was doing a lot of horizontal on the back, but often it’s horizontal on the floor, on the carpet, often with a record. I try to do a very wise and more prolific friend of mine told me that I should try to put on a vinyl and write based on, set myself the goal of writing before I have to flip the record, which I try to do, and that sometimes brings some discipline into my life.
Speaker 6: OnWriting is a production of the Writers Guild of America East. The series is produced by WGA East staff members Jason Gordon, Tiana Timmerberg, and Molly Beer. Production, mix, and original music are by Taylor Bradshaw. To learn more about the Writers Guild of America East, visit us online at wgaeast.org, or follow the guild on all social media platforms at WGA East. If you enjoyed the podcast, please subscribe and give us a five star rating. Thanks for listening. Until next time, write on.
