Sarah Bahr's favorite Times Insider assignment to date was when she shadowed The Times's chief theater critic, Jesse Green. (She's a big Broadway buff and spends most of her free time seeing shows.)
Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.
For the past four years, I've been the audience for a series of master classes, delivered by more than 200 of the best minds in journalism.
David Marchese, a longtime columnist for The New York Times Magazine who has spoken with hundreds of celebrities, talked me through conversations with prickly interview subjects. Adam Ferguson, a photographer whose work often focuses on conflict and citizens caught amid geopolitical forces, showed me how to put an anxious subject at ease.
Guilherme Rambelli, a senior 3-D artist, patiently explained to me -- once, twice, three times -- the exacting process behind the immersive mapping technique known as photogrammetry, which The Times has used to virtually transport readers inside spaces, giving them a 360-degree view. Eden Weingart, an art director for the team that produced the much-beloved animated athletes during the 2024 Olympics, laid out the inspirations -- including Animal Crossing -- that went into a single sound effect.
These conversations were for articles I wrote for Times Insider, which, as we proudly state atop each article, "delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together" through interviews with the reporters, editors, photographers, designers and others who produce it.
My full-time job is on The Times's Flexible Editing desk, where I edit articles, newsletters and social media posts from across the newsroom, but I remain an enterprising reporter in my free time. In fact, I recently published my 100th Insider since 2020, when I joined The Times as a reporting fellow for the Culture desk. I'm often asked, as the most prolific writer of Insiders, why I enjoy reporting them so much.
The answer is simple: I love my job. And I love getting better at it.
Think about it: There are dozens of Pulitzer Prize winners on staff, and countless others whose work makes feats like The Times's round-the-clock coverage of Russia's war in Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas war possible.
And here they were, taking 20 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour -- sometimes more, sometimes between conducting their own interviews -- out of their chaotic lives to let me ask them questions.
Dan Barry, a longtime features writer, showed me the magic-making potential of refining stories by reading them aloud, each extra-long sentence suddenly clanging like a cowbell on the set of "A Quiet Place."
Jill Cowan, a reporter for the National desk, shared the basics of covering a wildfire.
Marc Lacey, then an editor who managed live news coverage and now a managing editor, explained how The Times decides when to identify a suspect in a mass shooting.
Of course, they couldn't always answer my questions on the record, whether because they were still reporting or because they needed to protect a source. (Yes, there are some things that are too insider even for Times Insider.) Like any journalist, I needed to probe deeper into their responses, ask for more details, fact-check when necessary. But answer they did, almost always, even if their responses didn't make it into the final article.
I came away from these conversations with an ever-deeper admiration for our journalism, as well as lessons I could -- and do! -- apply to my own stories. (There's nothing better than three personal essay specialists offering advice while you're writing a first-person piece of your own.)
That's not to say it was always easy. People want to be helpful, but sometimes they're so enmeshed in the nuances of a project they've been working on for months that they have difficulty taking a step back and explaining the basics.
The trick was asking them questions about the most fundamental parts of their jobs: how to animate a ball, or how to talk to a community that's grieving, or how to glean the most important insights from hundreds of pages of documents. The most basic parts of the job are the ones they know so well -- and the ones I, and readers, wanted to better understand.
I always prepare, but sometimes it's hard to know what to ask about thorny technical topics like immersive mapping. As embarrassing as it can be to ask questions that reveal that your knowledge of a topic is roughly on par with that of a classmate who never does the reading, my most accessible Insiders have often ended up being those in which I've written about fields other than my own -- about the process of animating a disaster simulation, for instance, or how the print paper is produced each night.
I've had some off-the-wall ideas, too: like the time I tracked down journalists who draft their stories by hand, or the time I got the inside scoop on our Subway tuna sandwich test, or the time I wrote an Insider about how our weekly news quiz comes together ... in the form of a quiz. (It was too hard, I know, I know!)
And I've had the opportunity to share what I've learned from my own reporting: After I covered the opening of an exhibition about the painter Bob Ross during the coronavirus pandemic, I was moved to pick up a paintbrush for the first time in years -- a story I shared with Insider.
But as I reflect on publishing so many Insiders -- 106 and counting! -- what jumps out at me is not just the insights themselves.
I have interviewed people from their hotel rooms as they were finally sitting down to lunch -- at 6 p.m. -- after they spent the day covering a wildfire.
I've talked to them as they were driving to a vigil after a mass shooting.
I've caught them at a small apartment in a war zone between air raid sirens.
Sure, I'll remember the advice. But what I'll remember more is the generosity of the journalists who shared it.