“Coffee with a Journalist” host Beck Bamberger spoke with Fortune senior writer Aaron Pressman about his work.
Here is an excerpt:
Beck: I like it. Now, what about actually creating a story? We like to chat with folks about, well, where do you get the idea for a story? Does it get handed down to you and you go, “Oh, okay. Now I got to go write about this,” or are you standing in the shower? You’re on a walk with your dog and you go, “Oh, this sounds interesting.” Or are you scrolling through Twitter and you’re like, “Wait, something’s happening.” Or, do you ever get it from pitches? How does a story come to light?
Aaron: Look, it is all of the above. It’s 2020, it’s the web. I’m writing some stories that take me an hour to write, and I’m writing some stories that take me six months to write. I have stories that haven’t been written, that aren’t out yet, that I’ve been like sort of noodling and working on and reporting on for months and months and months. I think one way that I am definitely trying to orient myself a little better and that some of my younger colleagues at Fortune are great at, Jeff John Roberts had a great story over the weekend about the Holocaust weirdness on TikTok.
Beck: What? What’s on TikTok now. God, it’s so crazy, that world. I can’t even keep up. Go ahead, go ahead.
Aaron: I am trying to keep up more on social media, on Twitter. I have three teenage-ish, two of them aren’t teenagers anymore, but three kids who also help me really kind of … I listen in on what their, what tech topics they’re listening in on. It is a wide spectrum wide, a wide funnel. Is that the right analogy?
To listen, go here.
