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Illustration: Matija Medved

Welcome to the first edition of New York Night School: How to Write. 

I’m Genevieve Smith, New York’s executive editor, and over the next few weeks, I’ll be gathering some of my colleagues from around the magazine to break down the writing process, from how reporters gather facts and essayists plumb their internal depths to the finer points of revising and shaping a story. 

Learning how to write well is really learning how to think well. Writing with clarity and precision allows you to process your experiences and the experiences of others, to learn to separate truth from opinion and to drill down on the heart of what you’re trying to communicate. It also teaches you how to notice what’s going on both around you and in you. Whether you’re an aspiring journalist, a hobbyist Substacker, or just want to write a better email, I think you’ll come away from this six-week course with a keener eye and a more confident voice.

Before you can write a thing, though, you must face down the eternal question: what to write about. 

Writers, as well as the editors who guide them, are perpetually on the hunt for the spark that can ignite a bigger story. To help us learn how to spot a great idea and how to develop it into an actual story, I’ve brought in two especially crackling brains: the writer Lane Brown and the editor Joy Shan. Lane has worked at the magazine in three different stints over the last two decades. He was one of Vulture's founders and later headed culture coverage for both the site and New York in print. In the last few years, he’s been primarily writing, covering real estate, Hollywood, and many other things. He’s peeled back the rot at Rotten Tomatoes, gotten Hollywood insiders to explain how Netflix reshaped the industry, and gone deep on why movie projection has gotten so bad. Most recently, he wrote the deeply disgusting dive into the world of deli meats — a story that was edited by Joy Shan.   

Joy, who came to New York from The California Sunday Magazine, has co-captained many inventive projects, like our guide to the MAHA-verse and our investigation into how much the lives New Yorkers want would actually cost. She’s also come up with some truly out-of-the-box ideas, like a column on why women believe their bodies are controlled by the moon or our probing profile of The Body Keeps the Score author Bessel van der Kolk. 

Our conversation touches on how some of those stories came to be and on how anyone can start better tuning their antennae toward a great idea.

Genevieve: Lane,  maybe you should explain a bit more how the magazine generates story ideas, which is primarily through a weekly ideas meeting.

Lane: At the ideas meetings, which always happen Tuesdays at 11 a.m., all of the editors of New York Magazine convene around a table and pitch ideas they think could sustain feature stories. And then a smaller group of editors disappears and has its own meetings, and the larger group doesn't know what happens in those meetings, but you say yay or nay to all the ideas, and I assume you make fun of the people who pitched the dumb ones. 

Genevieve: Never!

Joy: What's cool about the ideas meetings is that even if an idea doesn't get fully green-lit, it provides a basis for recognizing other promising stories. Earlier this year, Alan Sytsma, who edits Grub Street, had this idea people loved, which asked “has everyone lost their mind?” But how do you actually assign that? Then, a few months later, we saw this tabloid item about a  woman who hurled a Chipotle bowl at a server and was sentenced by a judge to work fast food as punishment. I don’t think we would have latched onto that story so hard if the Alan idea hadn't already come up, because it seemed like it had potential to become a vessel for talking about post-COVID societal fabric being broken. 

Genevieve: Right. Even if an idea isn’t sharp yet, putting it out there creates a terrain for thinking about what's going on in the world and then the next idea maybe comes from it. In the end, that story became a different kind of allegory, once the reporter, Reeves Wiedeman, began digging into it, but it was seeing that there might be something deeper going on here that led us to assign it in the first place. 

Genevieve: You’re both really good at coming up with story ideas that both seem perfectly right and I can never figure out where they came from. Are you on a secret Reddit channel that I don't know how to search for? Or do you just have better shower thoughts than I do? Lane, maybe we start with your story on the dangers of deli meats. So the 2024 listeria outbreak was big news. How do you find anything new to say about it?

Lane: After the listeria outbreak happened, the USDA released the inspection reports for the Boar’s Head factory in Virginia where it originated, and they were completely disgusting. Inspectors found roaches, moldy walls, and leaky pipes. So I wondered, are all processing plants like this, or just this one? The USDA makes it hard to access most of its inspection reports, but I spoke to lots of people who told me about other plants that were even grosser. My sense is that the conditions in lots of U.S. meat plants are worse than we’d like them to be. Other types of meat are usually cooked at home, which thankfully kills most bacteria. But what makes deli meat particularly dangerous is that it’s typically eaten cold, so it’s great for transmitting pathogens from dirty processing plants.

Genevieve: So you took that big headline news and then you kept pushing past it — what’s the story behind the story? There’s another story you did that I loved that was also inspired by interrogating the existing reporting, and at the same time it felt like you drew on everyday observations most of us would have glossed over. It was a story trying to answer the question why rents were surging even though the New York population was not. 

Lane: The apartment story was something I’d been thinking about for a while. New York City’s population has been shrinking for years, especially since COVID. Almost 700,000 people moved away between 2016 and 2022, and more have probably left since then. So then why are rents going up? In 2021, I was reading lots of bad stories in supposedly credible outlets claiming, despite the data, that New York’s population had rebounded and that people were “flooding back” to the city. This was supposedly creating competition for a tiny number of vacant apartments and driving up prices. Lots of real-estate reporting is terrible and comes straight from unscrupulous brokers, but I thought these stories were especially stupid. I remember walking my dog through Brooklyn during COVID and watching entire blocks of people empty their apartments into moving vans. It didn’t look like anybody was flooding back. 

Genevieve:  You turned this thing that everyone was taking for granted and you recognized that there was a mystery in it.

Lane: I started looking at the Postal Service’s change-of-address data, which isn’t perfect but great for showing broad trends. It was clear that New York’s population was still in decline. There were some research firms — most of them in the real estate industry — claiming to have different data that showed the opposite. But I talked to all of them and none could show me anything convincing. There was one company that said it could measure foot traffic based on cell phone data, and they claimed Manhattan had more people in 2022 than it did in 2018. But the founder admitted to me that his data is heavily extrapolated and pretty much useless for gauging population size. Anyway, in the midst of this obsession, I was rehired by New York Magazine as a writer, and I begged my poor editors to let me write a story about this, and they finally relented.

Genevieve: Lane, you wrote a great story about how bad smart door locks are, and that was born out of an actual thing that happened to you. What made it worth turning into a story?

Lane: A theme of most of my stories is that they begin with me being annoyed by something. Annoyance is a powerful feeling and if something annoys you, there’s a good chance it annoys other people, too. A couple of years ago, I moved into a Brooklyn building where we have to use a phone app to unlock our doors instead of keys. I like technology, so at first I was excited. But it turns out these smart locks, made by a company called Latch, are the worst product ever invented. I wanted to warn our readers. In fact, I just got locked out of my apartment again a couple days ago because my phone died when I was out grocery shopping.

Genevieve: And something similar happened with the movie-theaters story.

Lane: As soon as theaters opened again after COVID, I went to see a bunch of movies and was shocked, coming back with fresh eyes, by just how bad the projection was. I saw the Robert Pattinson Batman movie, which is a dark movie to begin with, but at the theater where I saw it, I almost couldn't make out the action because it was so dark. The next week, I saw another movie and the picture was hanging off the screen by a foot. So I talked to our movie critic Bilge Ebiri, who visits movie theaters more often than I do, and asked, how widespread is this problem? Is this just happening in the theaters that I go to? And he said, “No, it's actually pretty bad,” so I started investigating.

Genevieve: Did your own experience factor into your big story on the streamers — Netflix, Peacock, etc. — you co-wrote with Josef Adalian? 

Lane: I was at home watching television and just thinking, Wow, these streaming shows have become terrible. Netflix came along and completely destabilized Hollywood, they converted everybody else to their way of doing business, and then they pulled the rug out from under the whole thing. So now the TV industry is less profitable, and most of the shows are junk, and nobody knows what to do about it. I wondered what people in Hollywood thought about working in this broken system. Josef Adalian and I called around, and luckily, people like Steven Soderbergh and Shane Ryan talked to us and shared some of our pessimism.

Genevieve: So, how do you keep those receptors really open to new ideas? We’re all inhaling new information about the world in some way, whether we like it or not, but the difference seems to be somehow you are attuned to what could make a good story.

Joy: I love looking for ideas. It's my favorite part of the job, and I'm still trying to figure out the best methods. One thing I do is subscribe to maybe a hundred newsletters and try to read those every morning. 

Lane: What is your morning reading syllabus? 

Joy: I look at Hacker News. I look at Marginal Revolution, which is Tyler Cowen's blog. I get too many newsletters at this point, but there are a few I reliably look at, like this one called As Seen On, that’s about beauty, health care, pop culture. The other thing that’s helpful for coming up with ideas — and this is something I always feel like I’m falling short on — is to read a lot of great magazine articles, including from years or decades ago. That way you build a catalogue of storytelling forms in your head, because sometimes an idea only feels like a good idea once you have a template for how it can be told, whether it’s a historical piece or a great personal essay or a yarn. 

Genevieve: Lane, what's yours?

Lane: It usually depends on the story I’m working on. I like a movies site called World of Reel that sometimes just publishes rumors, which is helpful when I’m looking for ideas. There’s Slashdot, which is a very old tech news site that’s still helpful and has great comments. I always check arXiv, which runs preprint scientific papers. I read a lot of sub-Reddits. My favorite is probably r/collapse, which is about all the things that might end civilization, from hurricanes to microplastics to bird flu. It’s a good way to get a head start on things we’ll all be worrying about in six months.

Genevieve: Joy, I often imagine when I hear your story ideas that you are having a conversation with someone and where everyone else would just take whatever is being said at face value, there’s a part of you that can’t help but ask, “Why do you actually believe that? Where did that come from?” I remember one time you came to an ideas meeting and pitched “why do so many women believe their bodies are controlled by the moon,” which I thought was a very funny observation. Most of us just unquestioningly accept that there are people in our lives with woo-woo beliefs, but you stopped and asked where does that notion come from and then assigned it to a writer to figure out. 

Joy:  I've noticed there's a strong correlation between how socially active I am one week and how many ideas I can pitch the following week. And for some of the weirder, more left-field ideas I’ve had, they often originate from a conversation. For what became Emma Alpern's moon column, I was talking to my mom and had just made a passing remark about how women's bodies are tethered to the moon — an idea I'd probably gotten from being way too online. She was actually the one who said, “Wait, why do you think that?" What made that idea worth a column versus, say, a tweet is that when you started scratching at the idea, it became a microcosm of this larger conversation that we’ve been having, partially prompted by RFK Jr’s movement. We'd been noticing this political horseshoe that's been happening where far-left, anti-Establishment, anti-pharma, crunchy people can wind up at the same place as traditional conservative far-right people who also don't want, for instance, to use birth control. And the belief that women’s bodies are wedded to the moon happened to be a meeting point of those two camps.

Lane: I liked your observation that you get more ideas approved depending on how social you were the previous week. Over the years, I’ve noticed something about the ideas that find their way into our magazine. Usually when a pitch begins, “So I was out at dinner last night, and I overheard something interesting … ” it will get a thumbs-up from our editor-in-chief. It’s like it has extra juice just because it came from a social situation. 

Genevieve: I stand by that approach. Having heard it out in the world is confirmation that that idea is not just your own strange thought.

Lane: You're right.

We’ll see you next week for part two: Reporting It All Out. Here’s your syllabus:

Suggested Reading:
➽ There Is No Safe Word by Lila Shapiro
➽ Dead Wake by James D. Walsh
➽ Everyone Knew About the A-Team by James D. Walsh and Bridget Read

Extra Credit:
➽ The Undoing of Joss Wheedon by Lila Shapiro
➽ The Stolen Kids of Sarah Lawrence by Ezra Marcus and James D. Walsh
➽ “I Want the Bloody Hands Recorded” by Lila Shapiro

And please send us any questions, comments, or feedback at newyorknightschool@nymag.com.