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Time bureau in Atlanta in the early sixties. I remember, for instance, covering a sort of wildcat sit-in
in a coffee shop. The guy who owned the coffee shop was a Greek immigrant, and you could tell that
he had a lot of sympathy with these black students. But he knew that if he served them he could lose
his business. That’s a situation that seemed to me a lot more interesting than, say, who was going to
run for governor.
Do you do most of your research before, during, or after your reporting?
I do most of my research during and after the reporting. I usually know very little about a piece
when I start, so it is difficult for me to know what kind of research it will require. I might read a
chapter of a book about a city or region I’ll be reporting in, but not much more than that.
When I have downtime during my reporting, I visit the local library. There are a few libraries
around the country that still have vertical files, with clips organized by subject. So I might find an
entire file of clips on, say “water rights” or “race relations” in the town. I sometimes find some
amazing information in those files.
But you don’t feel the need to prepare much before you start a story?
With a few exceptions, most of my pieces haven’t required much specialized knowledge. I once did
a piece about the Critical Legal Studies movement at Harvard Law School that practically killed me,
because I had a lot of trouble understanding what they wrote [“A Reporter at Large: Harvard Law,”
The New Yorker, March 26, 1984]. And when I first got to The New Yorker, I did a long piece about
rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. I found that if I turned around and walked in the other direction
every time I saw the phrase “central nervous system,” I could sometimes understand what was going
on, but it was difficult [“A Reporter at Large: A Third State of Existence,” September 18, 1965].
Of course, reporters are always working in someone else’s field of expertise. You obviously can’t
become a law professor or a scientist in order to write a story. So you have to trust your instincts. It’s
partly a matter of deciding which people actually know something about the subject.
How did you learn to be a reporter?
Well, “learned” may be too strong. My daughters used to say, when some telephone number had to
be found or some research had to be done, “Let Daddy do it—he’s practically a trained reporter.” I
worked on the paper in college, and then I had a temporary job with Time magazine between college
and the army. After I left the army, I went to the South, to Atlanta, Georgia, for Time. In those days,
Time divided the responsibility for stories between reporters out in the field, and writers in New
York. They used to say that being a reporter in the field for Time was a very good job unless you read
the magazine. You got to cover good stories, but your reporting often didn’t have much relation to
what was published.
Looking back on it, I think it was valuable for me to work for a year on essentially the same
subject. Virtually all my reporting was on race. I was unmarried, and young, and reporting was pretty
close to all I did. I was off somewhere in the South reporting during the week, and then I’d go to a