BEHIND THE BYLINE • DAN BARRY
The reporter Dan Barry on finding stories, his central purpose and how he ends the work day.
Oct. 6, 2021
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Dan Barry has worked as a reporter at The New York Times since 1995. He has written for the Metro, Sports and National desks; his longest running beat here was This Land, an 11-year search for stories across America. Before coming to The Times, he was a reporter at The Providence Journal in Rhode Island, where he shared a Pulitzer Prize for investigating the state’s court system.
More recently, he has written about the inner lives of a cabaret singer who died in the early days of the pandemic, a local newspaper’s last reporter, a former deputy police chief avoiding certain memories and a small-town mayor heartbroken by a baseball team that moved away. His varied subjects don’t follow a traditional journalistic beat like transportation. Although he has written about that, too.
What about Mr. Barry’s own inner life? “I’d say that transportation is far more interesting than my inner life,” he wrote in an email exchange. Here he talks about themes explored in his work, his approach to storytelling and an average workday during the pandemic. The following interview has been edited.
How would you describe the beat you’ve been on since This Land ended?
I would call my beat “open to anything.” It’s been a mishmash of narrative projects, general essays, photo essays, deadline reporting and writing, and the occasional riff in sports and the arts. I also spent a year as a senior editor and writer for The Times’s documentary unit.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/06/reader-center/dan-barry-interview.html
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