Jess Zimmerman is editor-in-chief of Electric Literature. Her new book is Women and Other Monsters.

“My goals are to be exactly as vulnerable as I feel is necessary. And not that’s necessary to me—that's necessary to the observer, to the reader. If [my story] is out there, it's out there because in order to make the larger point that I wanted to make … I had to give this level of access. It does kind of feel more strategic than cathartic.”

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Katherine Eban is an investigative journalist and contributor to Vanity Fair. Her latest article is ”The Lab-Leak Theory: Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19’s Origins.”

”You can't make a correction unless you know why something happened. So imagine—if this is a lab leak—the earth shattering consequences for virology. For the science community, for how research is done, for how research is regulated. Or if it is a zoonotic origin, we have to know how our human incursion into wild spaces could be unleashing these viruses. Because COVID-19 is one thing, but we're going to be looking at COVID-25 and COVID-34. We have to know what caused this.”

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S.L. Price is a senior writer at Sports Illustrated.

“The fact is, if you write about sports and people think they're just reading about sports, they'll read about drug use. They'll read about sex. They'll read about sex change. They'll read about communism. They'll read about issues they couldn't possibly care about, issues that if they saw them in any other part of the paper they would just gloss over. But because it's about sports—because there's a boxing ring or a baseball field or a football field—they'll be more patient and you can get some issues under the transom.”

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Megan Greenwell is the editor-in-chief of Deadspin.

“I’m the first external hire to be the EIC in Deadspin history, so not everybody knew me or knew anything about my work. I don’t think there was resistance to me being hired, but I do think when you’re coming in from outside, there’s a need to say, ‘Hey, no, I can do this.’ Somebody told me about a management adage at one point: Everybody tries to prove that they’re competent when they first start, and what you actually have to prove is you’re trustworthy. That is something that I think about all the time.”

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Pablo Torre is a senior writer at ESPN the Magazine and frequently appears on Around the Horn, PTI, and other ESPN shows.

“Most of my friends are not sports fans. My parents aren't. Brother and sister — no. So I just want to make things that they want to read. That's the big litmus test for me in deciding if a story is worth investing my time into: Is somebody who doesn’t give a shit about sports gonna be interested in this?”

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Liz Hoffman, a former The Wall Street Journal reporter, is now the business and finance editor for Semafor. Her new book is Crash Landing: The Inside Story of How the World's Biggest Companies Survived an Economy on the Brink.

“I think these systems are hugely important and are wielded by people who are not that accessible. If you can sort of open the aperture a little bit and unpack that and explain to people what’s going on and leave them to sort of, you know, come away with their own conclusions about the morality of the whole thing — that's where I’m most comfortable.”

Amanda Hess, a staff writer at Slate, has also written for Pacific Standard, GOOD, and ESPN the Magazine.

"I ended up not loving the fact that I was getting a bunch of calls from MSNBC and CNN, who mostly wanted to talk about people threatening to rape and kill me and only a tiny bit about the story I'd written. ... It was tiring, and it seemed dismissive of me as a person. It's a strange thing to become somebody else's story, especially when the story is: You're a victim of an insane online harasser. That's who you are."

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Peggy Orenstein is a journalist and author. Her latest book is Unraveling.

“The challenge is… to not want to say, I need to know what the book is about. I need to have my chapters. I need to know what exactly I'm looking for. Because it's really scary to just go out and report and have trust that there's going to be interesting things and that if you just keep going, you're going to find them. So to not foreclose possibility and options and ideas is the biggest reporting challenge for those sorts of books for me.”

Joshua Davis is a contributing editor at Wired and author of the new ebook John McAfee's Last Stand.

"This is a pretty unique situation [for me]. Never has a multimillionaire tech pioneer gone on the lam for a murder and called me from hiding. Yeah, this is a first."

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