Clare Malone is a staff writer for The New Yorker, where she covers the media. Her latest article is ”Hasan Minhaj’s ‘Emotional Truths.’”

“You're going to work a lot of hours if you want to be successful, and you're probably not going to make as much money as your dumb friend from college does. You're choosing it for a different reason, but I do think we have to make efforts to have the [journalism] industry be a middle-class profession.”

Gabriel Sherman is the national affairs editor at New York and the author of the New York Times best-seller The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News—and Divided a Country.

“There was a time when we got death threats at home. Some crank called and said, ‘We’re gonna come after you. You’re coming after the right, we’re gonna get you.’ That was scary because, again, you don’t know if it’s just a crank when you have right wing websites that are turning you into a target. You know, it’s one thing if they do it with a politician. They have security or handlers—I don’t have any of that.”

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Carl Zimmer, a columnist for the New York Times and a national correspondent at STAT, writes about science.

“[Criticism] doesn’t change the truth. You know? Global warming is still happening. Vaccines still work. Evolution is still true. No matter what someone on Twitter or someone in an administration is going to say, it’s still true. So, we science writers have to still be letting people know about what science has discovered, what we with our minds have discovered about the world—to the best of our abilities. That’s our duty as science writers, and we can’t let these things scare us off.”

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Grant Wahl is senior writer at Sports Illustrated and the author of The Beckham Experiment.

“I said to Balotelli, ‘I know you’re into President Obama. There’s a decent chance that he might read this story.’ He kind of perked up. I don’t think I was deliberately misleading him. There was a chance!”

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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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Nicholson Baker is the author of 18 books of fiction and nonfiction. He has written for The New Yorker, Harper’s, and many other publications. His latest book is Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act.

"In the end, I don’t care how famous you get, how widely read you are during your lifetime. You’re going to be forgotten. And you’re going to have five or six fans in the end. It’s going to be your grandchildren or your great-grandchildren are going to say, Oh, yeah, he was big. … So I think the key is, write what you actually care about. Because in the end, you’re only doing this for yourself. … So maybe do your best stuff for yourself and for the three, four, five people who know in the coming century that you ever existed. That’s all you need to do."

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