Mona Chalabi is a writer and illustrator whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Guardian, where she is the data editor. Her New York Times Magazine piece “9 Ways to Imagine Jeff Bezos’ Wealth” won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Illustrated Reporting.

“I kind of think of protest as just saying what you believe. And sometimes, it’s considered protest because it’s outside of the institutions of power. So you’re saying, Hey, Palestinians deserve human rights, and that’s considered a form of protest, right? I want the work to change things and I think I’m quite unapologetic about that, and most journalists are like No no no no no, we’re just reporting the world, we’re just reporting things as we see it. There’s no desire for change. I think that is so messed up. This idea that your work has no impact in the world is incorrect. You can’t wash yourself of the consequences of the work, you have to be considering the consequences while you’re doing it.”

Tina Brown, the former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, is the founder of Women in the World. Her latest book is The Vanity Fair Diaries.

“I believed that my bravado had no limit, if you know what I mean. I see limits now, let’s put it that way. I do see limits. But you know, I’m still pretty reckless when I want something. That’s why I don’t tweet much. I’ll say something that will just cause me too much trouble.”

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Sabrina Rubin Erdely, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, has also written for GQ, Philadelphia and SELF.

"I think that people are, by their nature, good and want to act rightly. So I'm very interested in why people do these things that result in really bad actions. My lack of outrage actually is one of the things that probably helps me in my reporting because I really am propelled by this pure curiosity. ... I just want to know, 'Where did that come from?'"

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Seth Wickersham is a senior writer for ESPN. His latest article is "For Kraft, Brady and Belichick, Is This the Beginning of the End?"

“You want to write about something real. I hate stories that are, the tension of the story is, talk radio perception versus the reality that I see when I’m with somebody. I can’t stand those stories because to me, you’re just writing about the ether versus a real person, and that’s not a real tension to me. The inner tensions are the best tensions. You can’t get to them with everybody, but you try.”

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Adam McKay is a film director, writer, and host of the podcast Death at the Wing.

“Sometimes you do a project and then you look back and you’re like, Ah, shit. I let some of myself get in the way of that. It sucks, but it’s also a part of it. And there are so many times where you’re excited that the story did take off, the wind did catch the sail and it went off on its own. And that just feels so good that it far outweighs the times when you make a mistake, or let something go wrong, or too long, or hit the wrong tone. Which is going to happen. There’s no way around it. But those times when it all just catches perfectly—it’s just so exciting that you keep doing it.”

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Josh Levin is the national editor at Slate. He is the host of the podcast Hang Up and Listen and the author of The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth.

“I think it’s a strength to make a thing, one that people might have thought was familiar, feel strange. And reminding people - in general, in life - that you don’t really know as much as you think you know. I think that carries over into any kind of storytelling.”

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Nicholas Schmidle is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His latest article is "Virgin Galactic's Rocket Man."

“I think there’s a lot more pressure that I’ve put on myself to make sure that the next [article] is better than the last one. To make sure there are sourcing standards and expectations I have for myself now that I might not have had earlier. I’m putting even more priority on building long-term relationships in which I trust an individual. ... I feel like the pieces coming in are tighter in terms of sourcing, but story selection becomes a lot more difficult. You want to do a different story.”

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Meghan Daum's latest book of essays is The Unspeakable.

“As writers we think, well there has to be closure, there has to be a beginning middle end, the character has to go through a change. And then in life we're supposed to have some sort of arc or aha moment, as if the experience isn't legitimate unless we get something out of it. That's so culturally constructed, as they say. It's so artificial.”

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Mat Honan is a senior writer at Wired.

"[The tech] industry—especially as it relates to a lot the silly apps and the silly websites and the silly shit that we put up with—is ridiculous. It's just such a hype fest, people living off of jargon and nonsense. There are entire conferences devoted to nonsense! ... I like to skewer that stuff, because I don't want to feel responsible for it. I don't want to feel like I'm making someone go out and buy some piece of shit they don't need."

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Zach Baron is a staff writer for GQ.

“People love to put celebrity stuff or culture stuff lower on the hierarchy than, say, a serial killer story. I think they're all the same story. If you crack the human, you crack the human.”

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Beth Macy is an author and former reporter at The Roanoke Times. Her latest book is Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America.

“I learned how to interview by delivering papers. I didn’t know it was interviewing, but I would stop and talk to old people who were bored and lonely and have great conversations. I think I learned how to talk to people by delivering the papers. And there’s a certain thing you have to do when you have to collect the money and learn how to negotiate with people when you’re 11. That’s some reporting skills too.”

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Alex Perry, based in England, has covered Africa and Asia for Newsweek and Time. His most recent book is The Rift: A New Africa Breaks Free.

“I got a call from one of my editors in 2003 or 2004, and he said something like, ‘You realize someone has died in the first line of every story you’ve filed for the last eight months?’ And my response was, ‘Of course. Isn’t that how we know it’s important?’ It took me a long time to work out that the importance of a story isn’t established only by death.”

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Derek Thompson is a staff writer for The Atlantic and host of the podcast Plain English.

“I am an inveterate dilettante. I lose interest in subjects all the time. Because what I find interesting about my job is the invitation to solve mysteries. And once you solve one, two, three mysteries in a space, then the meta-mystery of that space begins to dim. And all these other subjects—that's the new unlit space that needs the flashlight. And that's the part of the job that I love the most: that there are so many dark corners in the world. And I've just got this flashlight, and I can just shine it wherever the hell I want.”

Rembert Browne is a staff writer at Grantland.

“I'm ok with not being at my most refined online at all times. It's happening in real time and some of that is therapeutic. I could write a lot this stuff privately, but I'd rather just hit publish and see what happens. It's a weird world. But I'm super deep in.”

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Ta-Nehisi Coates is an author and journalist. His next book is The Message.

“I don’t think we have the luxury as journalists of avoiding things because people might say bad things about us. I don’t even think we have the luxury of avoiding things because we might get fired. I don’t think we have the luxury of avoiding them because somebody might cancel some sort of public speech that we have. I then have to ask you, what are you in it for? Like, why did you come here? Did you come here just to make a living? Because there are many other things where you could make more money.”

Jessica Hopper is editor-in-chief of the Pitchfork Review and the author of The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic.

“I have an agenda. You can’t read my writing and not know that I have a staunch fucking agenda at all times.”

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Julia Turner is editor-in-chief of Slate.

“That’s what we’ve been focused on: trying to double down on the stuff that feels distinctive and original. Because if you spend all your time on a social platform, and a bunch of media brands are optimizing all their content for that social platform, all those media brands’ headlines say the same, all the content is pretty interchangeable. It turns media into this commodity where then what is the point of developing a media company for 20 years? You might as well take the Silicon Valley approach and just make a new one every three years for whatever that moment is.”

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Jason Parham is a senior writer at Wired.

“I think of myself some days as a critic. Some days I think of myself as a journalist. But I essentially mostly think of myself as an essayist, somebody who is trying to bridge those two traditions. My approach to writing now is kind of simple…I’m always writing about things I like and want to hear about.”

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Mishka Shubaly is the author of I Swear I’ll Make It Up to You and several best-selling Kindle Singles.

“I remember thinking when I was shipwrecked in the Bahamas, ‘I’m going to fucking die here. I’m 24 years old, I’m going to die, and no one will miss me. I’m never going to see my mother again.’ And then the guy with the boat came around the corner and my first thought was ‘Man, this is going to be one hell of a story.’”

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