Hello David, thanks for talking to us. How are you doing these days?
I’m ok. We’ve all been working from home for a while now. Obviously I’ve been pretty busy these last few months, what with everything that’s going on right now. (Laughs.)
You’re the New York Times’ New York Times Correspondent. Can you tell us about what a normal working day involves?
Honestly it depends. In essence, my job is to make sure that everyone in the world knows about every single thing that’s happening at the New York Times, all day, every day, more or less non-stop, regardless of whether they read it or care. That means some days I’m writing about editorial policy, sometimes it’s hanging a journalist’s dirty laundry out to dry – some days it’s just because a columnist has written something incredibly stupid and everyone needs to know that. So in that sense it’s a pretty varied beat.
How has working from home affected your work?
Honestly, less than you might imagine. At the Times we think of ourselves as less of a like, old-fashioned ‘paper’, and more of a global juggernaut that’s cannibalising the discourse whilst acting as a strawman for everyone’s sense of ideological embattledness? If that makes sense?
That’s a really neat way of putting it. So how does this beat differ from other jobs you’ve had?
Well, I used to be the New Yorker correspondent for the Washington Post and that’s a whole different thing: interviewing fact-checkers, cartoonists, getting security clearance if you wanna talk to Remnick, blah blah. That’s all more rarified and complex. What I love about covering the Times is you’re writing for this huge audience of seven or eight billion people, all of whom want and need up-to-the-minute information about the Times style guide, its editorial meetings, spats between the staff and so on.
