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Episode 108—Katie Baker on Working Outside of Journalism and Cultivating Enthusiasms
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“Working outside of journalism before working in journalism can be a useful thing in terms of seeing how the world works,” says Katie Baker. Hey there, CNFers, it’s The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak to the best artists about telling true stories, whether that’s narrative journalists, documentary filmmakers, essay and memoir writers and radio producers, I try unpack their lives and their work so you can apply those tools of mastery to your own work. I’ve been a fan of today’s guest for quite some time. Today for Ep. 108 I welcome Katie Baker to the show. She’s a staff writer for The Ringer. Prior to that she worked for Grantland, so there’s a Bill Simmons continuity thing going on there. Her work often focuses on a singular subject and she’s one of those writers that when you see her byline you know you’re in for some fun. Naturally I’ve linked to some of her work in the show notes. She’s @katiebakes on Twitter. Hey, if you enjoyed the show, let me know. I’m @BrendanOMeara and @CNFPod on Twitter. You can also email me. I’d ask that if you like this episode and others that you kindly subscribe to the podcast and share it across your social platforms. Also, please consider leaving an honest rating or review on Apple Podcasts. Head over to brendanomeara.com for show notes and to subscribe to my monthly reading list newsletter. Once a month. No Spam. Can’t beat it.
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Transcript
Introduction to Hippocamp 2018
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Speaker
Creative Nonfiction Podcast is sponsored by Hippocamp 2018. Now in its fourth year, Hippocamp is a three-day Pennsylvania writing conference that features 50-plus speakers, engaging sessions and four tracks, interactive all-conference panels, author and attendee readings, social activities, network opportunities, and optional
00:00:24
Speaker
intimate pre-conference workshops. The conference takes place in lovely Lancaster, PA, from August 24th through August 26th.
Discount Code Details
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Speaker
Visit hippocampismagazine.com and click the conference tab in the toolbar. And if you enter the keyword CNFPOD at checkout,
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Speaker
you will receive a $50 discount. This offer is only good until August 10th or until all those tickets are sold. There are a limited number, so act now. Hippocampus 2018, create, share, live.
Interview with Katie Baker
00:01:03
Speaker
either see an efforts it's the creative nonfiction podcast show rise speak to the best artists about telling true stories whether that's narrative journalist documentary filmmakers essay and memoir writers or radio producers and try to unpack their lives and their work so you can apply those tools of mastery to your own work
00:01:27
Speaker
I've been a fan of today's guest for quite some time. Today for episode 108, I welcome Katie Baker to the show. She's a staff writer for The Ringer. Prior to that, she worked for Grantland.com, so there's a Bill Simmons continuity going on there. Her work often focuses on a singular subject, and she's one of those writers that when you see her byline, you know you're in for some fun.
Baker's Writing Process
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naturally I've linked to some of her work in the show notes she's at Katie Bates on Twitter as Tom Petty's to say don't bore us get to the chorus I hope you enjoy this conversation with the great Katie
00:02:12
Speaker
you're working on these pieces, you're kind of on some deadlines and so forth. So I wonder how do you set up your days when you're in the throes of a writing project so you can accomplish what you're looking to get done? You know, I guess first of all, I definitely, you know, people would let the people close to me would probably laugh to hear me discussing process because from the outside, it
00:02:40
Speaker
correctly looks like, you know, a lot of chaos going on. But I'd say, you know, in general, I just, I just had a new story go up today about the Sacramento Kings. And it wasn't like a super intense, you know, it wasn't anything. I basically had worked on it since, you know, for less than a week, I went to on Thursday to
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their NBA draft party and went from there. So, um, so I'd say kind of for something like that, you know, a lot of it is just, I like to do things where I can include reporting. Cause I just, anytime you can just go somewhere and be on the scene and look at details and it can, it can never hurt. It can only help. And so it's, it was fun to, I just got back from maternity leave. So it was fun to do that again. And
00:03:31
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On a day like today, when that went up, now it's time to turn toward kind of the next batch of things. So there's, you know, I have kind of different ideas and various levels of activation and optimism. So I'm kind of trying to do some organization and figure out how to prioritize those.
Balancing Pitches and Assignments
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Do you generate most of your own story ideas or are you getting them from from other editors and colleagues?
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I'd say it's a mix. I mean, I'm definitely expected to and do pitch occasionally and kind of try to keep kind of a regular appearance on the site even when I'm working on something longer. So that means working in, you know, maybe a shorter post here and there. But at the same time, they definitely direct a lot of ideas my way. You know, there's kind of two hubs and
00:04:26
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LA and New York and I work remotely from Northern California. So they're definitely having kind of creative discussions and planning meetings much more frequently than I am. So they often come out of those meetings with ideas and I'm always, I love getting ideas. I'm kind of, I love getting assignments and ideas. I would say coming up with ideas is probably one of
00:04:52
Speaker
I find it to be one of my bigger challenges versus just being told what to write about and just digging into it. What do you find the challenges of writing features and doing the kind of work you do remotely?
Remote Work Challenges
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I think probably the biggest one would just be losing. Writing is already kind of a solitary activity when you're actually putting the words down.
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and a mentally taxing activity. And whenever I do kind of go to the LA office for a few days or something, I emerge just feeling so creatively energized and confident and excited. And then I get in my own head for a week at home and I'm just convinced that everything's bad and everyone's mad at me. And I'm playing it up a little bit more than it is, but that would be
00:05:48
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probably the biggest and maybe even my only, uh, you know, complaint or not complaint, but, um, you know, challenge. I think the other thing is that at the ringer in particular, we, they do so much kind of video and audio work all the time. That is also taking place kind of at the, you know, at the, on the movie studio where the, for the TV studios in, in LA where the ringer is located. And it would be fun to,
00:06:17
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to be more of a part of that on a day-to-day basis, but that's the trade-off I make for not having to
00:06:23
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know, sit in LA traffic, I guess. Right. And that, I think a lot of people and especially me can relate to that, you know, being being at home is your your main hub. And even today, personally, I just, it's like my mind has been in mud, like I just can't get anything going. So I was looking forward to speaking to you because this is my chance oftentimes throughout the week to
00:06:47
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Have an interaction with with a peer and someone whose work I deeply admire and sometimes I find that very Most of the time almost all the time I find that very energizing and and you kind of alluded to it to like get it getting home and it's just kind of you can feel a bit lost and definitely lonely and so how do you Process that and cope with that. So you're still able to get what you like done Yeah, I mean, I guess it's
Career Transition from Finance to Writing
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I've definitely learned to just be able to recognize it. When I first, I used to work in finance and in 2011, I made the full-time switch to writing full-time. I just remember just thinking how crazy it was that I had gone from working at Goldman Sachs in my early 20s.
00:07:43
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you know, being worked around the clock and that sort of thing to being a writer. And, and yet it was so much more stressful. I was feeling, you know, I was having so much more anxiety. We had just gone through the big recession and crash and it was a really stressful time at work. And even that didn't really like match up to just the ongoing, you know, stress and anxiety that I felt early on. And I think I didn't know what it was at first, but when you're,
00:08:13
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the work is just so different. I went from a very, you know, it was still a people business, but it was much more quantitative. It was much more discreet in terms of numbers, like here's the work you have when it's done, you're done onto the next thing. And instead of, you know, a blank page and a blinking cursor. So I think the difference between then and now is that now
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I just kind of know that there's going to be those those dark nights of the soul and those weird moments and I'm much better recognizing like, you know what, it's I need to I need to take I need to go to sleep right now, even though
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I'm trying to finish something. It's going to be better for me to go to sleep for a few hours and then scramble to get a ton than it is for me to just try to slog through the night. So, um, or, you know, just in general, kind of when I look at my schedule, I can identify kind of how the work is going to like the, what the workflow is going to be like a little bit better. Um, and maybe that means knowing that on one day or one morning, like I'm,
00:09:20
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kind of resigned to the fact that I probably won't get a lot of work done. So I'm not going to torture myself about it and instead I'll make that a productive day in other ways. So those are some of the things that I've just kind of learned to do to kind of snap myself out of those moments. And I'm also making myself sound probably more doomsday than I am, but it really does get
00:09:43
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There really are those kind of crazy times when I just feel like I'm typing through molasses and everything. I've been working on the same sentence for like two hours and I know that that sentence is going to get cut anyway because I just know at this point it's not even good. It's good to have perspective on the fact that that's normal and that's going to pass.
00:10:06
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And that's a big, big moment for you in 2011 from Goldman Sachs being on that sort of career track. And then, of course, you had some writing experience that you were doing on the side ever since you were a teenager. And so you always kind of had that muscle.
00:10:27
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What was the thought process as you were looking to make that transition to full-time sports journalism after being on a finance track? As you said, even going back to when I was probably in middle school and around that age, I always loved writing. Even as a kid, I was always writing little books and poems and whatever. But as you said, I had that
00:10:56
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You know, I had that kind of going all the time. And then I always loved sports. I was a big Knicks fan and high school and college. I wrote for the sports section of the school papers and all that sort of thing. So when I went to Goldman Sachs, it was for a summer internship and I
00:11:15
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like sadly had to turn down a summer internship at Time Inc. at Sports Illustrated, you know, for like, you know, college juniors. And I remember just crying over the decision. And so that was always in my mind. Definitely got very sucked into the world, you know, graduated and went and worked there for, I guess, about six years. And in 2008, kind of right when things were starting to
00:11:44
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Take a turn for the worse. That's when I started someone emailed me and was like, oh There's this new blog system called tumblr like you're always writing me these really long emails all day like you should start a tumblr and That's kind of how it all started from that point on those next few years just involved me writing a lot more I lived in New York City then so I met a ton of writers I happened to
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Geographically, I just happened to live like Caddy Corner from this bar called Tom and Jerry's. That was like a big congregating point for a lot of New York new media blog people. They were people whose work I had been reading since I was in college and stuff. So it was really exciting for me to tap into that scene a little bit. And it just increasingly made me want to do something other than what I was doing.
Rise of Baker's Freelance Career
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When did your Tumblr blog start gaining a certain amount of traction that validated that enterprise and side hustle that you had? I had no concept of like how many people were reading or like page views or anything like that. It was more about like, oh my gosh, Alex Balkh, like he liked my posts and, you know, to just see that the writers who I
00:13:04
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admired myself and who were cool and who were, you know, kind of engaged in this really interesting, creative, weird, insidery scene. So that was kind of a big part of it. And just meeting a lot of those people, IRL cemented that, but I'd say I started, I would have to go back and look. I mean, it was probably when I started kind of like writing for Deadspin and Gawker.
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and doing some freelance work that, you know, I felt like I was starting to like, you know, this is something I can do and get paid for. And so that was probably like in, I would say late, like it, 2010, maybe a little earlier, maybe like late 09 by then. So at what point does Bill Simmons reach out to you and start to essentially poach you from where you were to, to go to Grantland?
00:14:02
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The Simmons history is kind of funny because when I was, my first year after graduating from college, I had a friend who was still in college and he called me and said, I'm coming to New York city. Bill Simmons is doing a book signing. I think at the Riverside cafe down in the village, you know, let's, let's come meet me. Let's go out for dinner and then let's go to the book signing. And this was his book.
00:14:27
Speaker
It would have been his first book, Now I Can Die in Peace. And we went and the line wrapped all the way around the block, like once or twice. And we stood in line and it was great. We caught up and got to the front of the line, took a picture with him. It's actually kind of funny because Chuck Klosterman, I guess, was like probably sitting with him and visiting him while he was signing books. So he's like in the background of the photo. So it's just me and my friend.
00:14:52
Speaker
Brian and Bill Simmons, and that was in probably like 2005, 2006. And then, you know, I'd say five years later, Bill wrote his second book. And he was doing a, you know, kind of media tour for the book. And he did a Q&A on this website called Mediaite that at the time had recently launched and was, I think, the first website to actually pay me to write. I remember they paid me
00:15:22
Speaker
What was it? If I wrote, I think it was, if I wrote eight articles, they would pay me $500. So once I wrote like article number eight, I would get $500 checks. That was my first, that was my first contract, you know, and I was still working at Goldman at the time. So probably the only person at media that was covering sports in any way. So he noticed my writing Ben, and I think he reached out to the editor just to say like, why,
00:15:49
Speaker
How come she writes so infrequently? And he explained why and I think it piqued his interest. And we ended up emailing then and I told him, you know, I was a fan and that was probably the first correspondence. And then over the course of the next like year, year and a half, when he was starting to kind of launch Grantland or, you know, or at least talk about Grantland at ESPN behind the scenes, he reached out and said, this might be happening.
00:16:15
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And at that point, it was perfect timing to leave and start something new. What did you learn from probably reading Bill's work for years beforehand? And then as you worked for his baby, Grantland, what did you learn essentially being an employee of him? And how did your writing change and bloom from that?
Influence of Bill Simmons
00:16:41
Speaker
Yeah so I guess first of all from reading him I mean kind of same as anyone that came across him you know early on just it was such a different kind of writing with such voice and just opinion and it's hard now because there's so it's so kind of baseline to for someone to write that way but it was
00:17:04
Speaker
to have the pop culture references and that sort of thing. I sound like a fuddy-duddy putting it that way. But that stuff was just fun and funny. And it was the kind of stuff you would find on news groups, which I was definitely really into at the time. So I guess just the importance of voice was probably something that sticks out to me from that. And then in terms of working for him,
00:17:32
Speaker
It's just incredible to me how much energy and motivation and enthusiasm he has all day, every day, 24-7. I mean, it just exhausts me to even think about what his day must be like. And yet, at the same time,
00:17:50
Speaker
If I send him an, like if you send him an email, he writes back and like within the hour and I just don't understand it. Um, and you know, so, and then, you know, just the way he really like wants to find and promote talent is something that, you know, I personally have obviously been part of. And, um, he really, he enjoys kind of finding and, you know, people when they're young and kind of unknown and,
00:18:18
Speaker
I think he's done that below the ground at The Ringer. And what did hard work as a writer start to manifest itself to you? And I say that in a sense that it's some people equate it to hours in the chair or word count or just interviews and everything setting up things and I wonder how you
00:18:42
Speaker
how maybe witnessing how he went about his work and maybe some of your peers at this sort of high level of writing and journalism, what did hard work start to look for you and maybe how did that redefine itself so you were able to apply that kind of rigor to your own work? I guess this is sort of not answering your question, but setting up a little is just one thing that was important at Grantland and that is definitely kind of always
00:19:12
Speaker
you know, I always remind myself of The Ringer is how much of it is based on just people's weird random enthusiasms and about how it's they encouraged us to write like 10 articles about one thing if that one thing is the most important thing in the world to you and you can do some kind of obsessive deep dive, you know, so I think just I
00:19:40
Speaker
finding those things and seeing the way other people kind of claimed them and owned them and cultivated them is something that sticks out to me. I mean, that's less about the actual like writing, but just a broader point. So, and then writing wise, I think it's just, honestly, just seeing how much work. We have such an amazing editorial staff from our, you know, kind of
00:20:09
Speaker
bigger picture editors down to the copy editors and fact checkers that we extremely, thankfully have and encourage. Seeing just how much work they do and how tirelessly they work is always motivation for me to try to envision just how much is on their plate and to try to make working with them that much easier.
00:20:39
Speaker
And some that I've noticed with your work for a while is that a lot of the profiles you've done are these very singularly obsessed individuals, whether it's a Mike Keenan or Mike Breen, Alex Rodriguez, Anna Kasorenstam, a vetchkin. So you get these super laser-focused people. And I wonder if that, like, what is the draw for you when profiling people of that nature?
Athlete Profiles and Reporting Techniques
00:21:09
Speaker
I always have kind of empathy for things like, I don't think people often think enough about what it really means for a professional athlete to have gotten to that point and just what their lives, you know,
00:21:27
Speaker
there's obviously always exceptions, but what their lives have looked like and how distorted their lives have probably been, whether they're a superstar or just kind of a run-of-the-mill player. And then the true superstar is obviously, like, people are all different, but it's interesting. I mean, someone like Anna Kasorinstam, she can't even really, you know, she can't really even, like, explain her greatness, but you can kind of, like,
00:21:53
Speaker
circle your way to approaching it, but you're never gonna, like she, how, cause how could she? Like it's just, it's her life and it's like who she is, you know? And then, but, but then I love anyone that's just like Mike Breen is just so passionate and his love for listening to the radio kind of launched him into now the voice of the NBA and put it every step of the way. He was just like a broadcasting nerd. And so,
00:22:22
Speaker
kind of stripping back the layers of who he is today. And it's not like he's changed much. I mean, he's still the same incredible, kind, smart, funny guy. But stripping it back and talking about that guy when he was a kid in New York is always fun to do. Not every subject is going to sit through that or is going to want to.
00:22:52
Speaker
but when you can have a subject like him or someone like Ovechkin who I've never sat down with one on one, but there's just such a rich tapestry of threads to pull when it comes to him and doing research like that is always fun for me.
00:23:09
Speaker
What I love about those, the people of that nature, and I've had this conversation with, on the podcast about, baseball coach has written a couple books that I think apply to the arts as well as hitting. And he was always saying, this kind of goes back to the rigor question I was talking about earlier, and it was,
00:23:29
Speaker
He was like, all right, you've gotten to this point, and you're, you know, you're pretty good. You think you're working hard, and then you take a step up in class, and you realize you really haven't been working hard at all. And that levels levels you up. And, and so that's what, what I love reading about, you know, a lot of these profiles you do, you realize that even Rodriguez, who was a prodigy, and then you realize the degree of work that he was doing to maintain it, take the PDs out of he still has to work his ass off.
00:23:59
Speaker
Yeah, it's a you get a sense and seeing how he how that Turns into him being like, you know calling his broadcasting partners every night and asking them for feedback and they're like go away Go call JLo, but that's the same kind of obsessiveness I mean the leveling up thing is interesting because I will say one thing I love about reporting and about you know be going and being on scene is like
00:24:30
Speaker
You really do just see how dogged and how good at their jobs like some of the beat reporters are or the national NBA reporters or whoever it is. It's kind of crazy when you see how hard they're working and how they're constantly doing something and how they're always looking for an angle. It's a tough environment.
00:24:55
Speaker
some people get super competitive about it. There's definitely moments where those things play in, but my mandate at those events is always so different than someone who's in those positions that there's not a lot of overlap. But at the same time, it is inspiring and motivating to watch the real pros operate
00:25:16
Speaker
Yeah, what kind of, do you have any specific takeaways that come to mind where you see that degree of hustle and then how you can apply that to some of your work that kind of comes after the headlines hit? Yeah, so one thing I learned relatively early on just kind of by observing is I would just notice that a lot of times some reporters would wait in the locker room for so long and, you know,
00:25:47
Speaker
walk-room reporting is its whole own topic, but that's how it is right now, and it's awkward. It's inherently awkward to be in someone else's space, and I always just feel really dorky kind of standing in the middle of a walk-room while trying not to make eye contact with anyone, but also trying to look like I'm working, but also some of that work just involves kind of standing around. But I just noticed that people would
00:26:17
Speaker
just linger and linger and stay and the room would be empty and they would stay and I never really understood what they were doing and then I kind of just started hanging around and kind of realized that I guess you know the way the rules are it's like every athlete has to technically be present at some point but what some people do is they
00:26:39
Speaker
they shower for an hour and a half and then kind of sneak out. But just a lot of times you could really catch people and a lot of times it was kind of major people. Just by waiting around you could catch an interaction where the owner comes in and talks to the player and you're kind of standing right there. So that was definitely like one tangible thing that I saw and that now I kind of try to do.
00:27:04
Speaker
I'm not on any sort of like tight deadline, which I'm usually not. It's just kind of hang around and you have to, or I at least have to go against all my instincts of being done and not feeling awkward, but it often can yield some cool stuff. And then other stuff, just like being at the Olympics was probably a big one. Just seeing, I mean, people just are working their asses off 24 hours a day.
00:27:32
Speaker
And then there's the athletes, you know, and it's just seeing people like Bonnie Ford, you know, how she takes an event and turns it into a, like a beautiful column and, um, just the way she, without even necessarily needing some sort of special access. I mean, a lot of times it's just her in, in the media scrum, just, you know, asking a thoughtful question. And so those are, those are probably environments where I've kind of started to learn from the,
00:28:02
Speaker
from the real pros. And working remotely, how have you honed your capacity to do a reported piece but over the phone? Yeah, I've just kind of had to. I mean, a lot of times that's what they offer anyway. It's not ideal. I think what I've started to try to do, and this goes for in person too, but just generally is
00:28:30
Speaker
to do so much prep work and read so many interviews that whoever I'm talking to has already done, that I'm not wasting the first seven minutes of a 10 minute conversation on, you know, because I mean, the worst thing that happens is when someone tells some great story and you're like, Oh, like, this is great. This is going to be my lead.
00:28:52
Speaker
Um, and then, you know, then you go to do your kind of research a few days later when you're writing the piece and you realize that's kind of their token story that they've already told to other people. So getting that out of the way first can at least make the phone conversations like more targeted, um, or, you know, at least trying to find like extra details that I can't find in a Google search. Um, but it's tough. I mean,
00:29:18
Speaker
One of the biggest positive changes was just this little, I bought like a better recorder. And then I bought this earpiece that just goes in your ear so I can talk on my cell phone and it records my cell phone just through the earpiece. Like it doesn't even plug into my phone, it plugs into the recorder. And so that thing has like changed everything. Cause I can go sit on a park bench and do the interview and you know, or I can be driving and obviously I'm doing it safely, but
Improving Interview Techniques
00:29:48
Speaker
I can,
00:29:48
Speaker
I can basically pull over, start talking, and then record everything. That's made it better so I'm not just sitting around all the time waiting by the phone. What is the name of that device? I used to use this thing that was this pen. It was so awesome. It was called, I think, the LiveScribe Echo Pen or something like that.
00:30:12
Speaker
And it was this pen and inside the pen was the microphone. And then you had special paper and as you wrote notes, it connected the notes to whatever audio was going on at the moment. So later on, you could just click on the notes with the pen and it would start, you know, you write down, you know, it talks about his childhood and it would start at the point where they were talking about their childhood. And I love that thing so much. And because it was a pen and I wasn't like using it in a sneaky undercover way, but,
00:30:41
Speaker
I think people would kind of forget that, you know, it wasn't like a giant recorder right in their face, but then they made all these like terrible updates to it and made it, turned it into like a wifi thing. And so I was really upset, but now I have kind of a pretty good setup where, okay, this, this earphone is called Olympus TP8 telephone pickup microphone. It's like $15 on Amazon. So use that to record things. I often send them, there's a transcribing website called, I guess,
00:31:10
Speaker
Temi, T-E-M-I, and it's just like a robot, and you send the files, and so the transcriptions are super rough, and if the sound quality is not good, you can pretty much forget it, but I just send it to that, and then it comes back with a digital website, and it's kind of the same thing where you can click on the words, and it goes exactly to that part of the audio. So you can kind of get the rough
00:31:37
Speaker
outline of what the conversation was. And then when you need the exact quotes, you need to listen back to that exact moment, it's easy. So that's kind of been my new process that's been working really well. And just trying to, you know, it lets you highlight quotes and stuff like that. But yeah, I mean, just I downloaded Scrivener once, because I've heard such good things about it. And I've
00:31:59
Speaker
I've still never used it and I want to be that person that's organized and uses it. I don't know if I ever can be, but I think I still have it on my computer somewhere.
00:32:10
Speaker
I said earlier you said that you have a usually some mixture of short and long stories going to keep you know the shorter pieces to keep you present on the website but the longer ones that are kind of simmering and I'd love to dig into your sort of how you keep maybe like a how you keep that stuff straight and maybe where you you know you said like coming up with ideas is something you kind of struggle with so maybe
00:32:38
Speaker
Do you have a like an idea file and something that you revisit and hone and you know, so that way you always have sort of a constant churn of stuff you're working on? Yeah, I'd say like, you know, especially when I came back from maternity leave, I kind of, you know, had kind of a big fresh group of ideas and stories. And then there's some that are just kind of, you know, the constant like white whales that, you know, will just never stop
00:33:07
Speaker
tried. Like, I mean, A-Rod, the A-Rod story I wrote was actually kind of one of those. I mean, I'd wanted to write about A-Rod for so long. Yeah, I have a file. My editor, Mallory Rubin, who's a genius and is unbelievable and is one of the people I'm mostly talking about when I, when I talk about just the, the tirelessness of the editorial staff. But, you know, she's good about kind of drawing that stuff out of me and
00:33:33
Speaker
especially when it comes to kind of the short term stuff of, you know, is there anything you want to do this week? And then the longer stuff, I mean, to me, I've kind of gotten to a place where I think it works to have a file of ideas. And then, you know, to sometimes you get to a point where you're done with a big idea piece, you're trying to figure out what's next. And you just have to kind of try to reach out to someone on every idea and see if anyone says yes.
Pitching Stories Like Sales
00:34:02
Speaker
And, um,
00:34:05
Speaker
I've gotten a lot better at handling those rejections and realizing, I think it's a sales thing where they say, you try to get 10 no's a day or something like that. If you're getting 10 no's a day, you're probably at least getting one yes a day or two yes's a week or whatever it is. I try to think of inquiries and queries to
00:34:32
Speaker
potential subjects or to representatives in that same style. What did your career in finance teach you about the type of journalism you do? I guess to some extent, working outside of journalism before working in journalism generally can be just a useful thing in terms of seeing the way the world works or the company's work or how
00:35:02
Speaker
or how the how the media is covering your company and whether they're doing it well or poorly. So, you know, I guess beyond that just probably I've always been a research minded person. So, I mean, I used to approach my work the same way as I do my writing when I would be doing research for clients or writing presentations. So,
00:35:29
Speaker
And you know, even at my old job, I was often kind of the designated like proofreader and just because that was always something that was in my skill set. Do you have three to five like favorite books or articles that you routinely reread as a way to remind yourself how a certain type of storytelling is done?
Inspirations and Overcoming Procrastination
00:35:55
Speaker
I'm not someone who necessarily revisits the same
00:35:59
Speaker
I mean, there's definitely things I've read again and again, but actually, it just popped into my head. One thing that I do read again and again, because it's my reminder of just the joy of what a simple, perfect blog post should be, is I want to say Alex Heard wrote for Slate years ago about how
00:36:22
Speaker
And it was like, it was pegged to the masters, which I think was coming up that weekend in golf. And he just wrote this post about how golf is the perfect sport to nap to. And it was just this short little essay and I read it like every year when golf season begins again. And that to me was just the perfection of the internet and internet writing and just so influential to me kind of in the, you know, the mid 2000s. So.
00:36:50
Speaker
I wouldn't normally like start my list with that but since it was in my head and then you know in general writers that are you know my I literally say to myself when I'm working on a piece I think what would Brian Curtis do who's one of my colleagues at the ringer whose work is just so good and so
00:37:11
Speaker
vibrant, and I love his level of kind of detachment, yet engagement. Jessica Pressler is another one who I feel that way about. I always try to, when I'm getting really stuck in the weeds on something, I try to take a step back and say, okay, if Jessica Pressler was writing about this, how would she be doing it? And then, you know, kind of more broadly, I love, I've always loved kind of creative nonfiction writers. So
00:37:42
Speaker
Ian Frazier, John Jeremiah Sullivan, you know, the old, I don't think I've ever read any of David Foster Wallace's fiction, but I've read like all of his, his essays, his nonfiction essays. And so those are things just to remind myself of like that voice and about the fun of reading things when they're written well, because I often get very bogged down in just like feeling like I have to explain everything instead of just
00:38:11
Speaker
Skipping, you know moving the moving things forward. So those are probably some influences on me Yeah, that's that's outstanding. That's kind of reassuring I think I've been in that a similar boat where I in anything I'm doing I try to actually like I put on like the hat or the mask of someone I admire just like you're kind of saying and be like, all right, how would
00:38:35
Speaker
maybe how would they work their way through this and then it gets me past my own like my own like just like shitty view of my own work and like it allows me to get something that is at least semi competent and readable in front of me. Yeah, no, I mean, I have, I don't know where it is now because I've moved offices, but I have this like painting of an iceberg that I try to keep near my desk because it's a reminder for me that
00:39:04
Speaker
you know people just like see the tip of the iceberg like they don't see what's under the water like they don't take the duck swimming like they see the duck they're not seeing your legs working furiously so they don't care or they don't know whether you've
00:39:20
Speaker
you know, torn your hair out over something or whether you didn't care about it. They just are reading what's in front of them. And maybe that'll come through or not. So I'm just always kind of reminding myself like the reader's just reading this, like the reader doesn't have all these mental hangups that you have. And the reader hasn't seen all these drafts. The reader doesn't know that this sentence embarrassingly enough, given the sentence, you know, took you 45 minutes. So
00:39:46
Speaker
It is. It's good to reset that way sometimes to think, OK, what would a Brian Curtis thing would feel so light here? And my work right now feels so heavy. So how can I make it later?
00:39:56
Speaker
A weakness I tend to have, especially with really long stuff, essays and even book length stuff is I have a tendency to be, to overwrite or to try to be too clever, too, too funny. And it's always something I have to reign back in. And I wonder for you, what might you struggle with in early drafts that you feel like, all right, all right, Katie Baker, I ring it back in like, you know, and what might some of those things be?
00:40:25
Speaker
It's unquestionably just doing too much research, like doing more research as a procrastination tool, essentially, which makes me feel like I'm being so productive and it makes me feel like I'm connecting all these synapses and I start to become like a beautiful mind, like, oh, I read a sentence here that
00:40:53
Speaker
reminds me of a sentence there and I can totally use that as a transition and like, this is going to be so brilliant. And, and then it's like, okay, how many words do you have zero or, you know, and, and then I sit there for two more hours trying to, you know, reverse engineer that brilliant transition into the piece, but it probably doesn't even need to be there in the beginning. So, so that's undoubtedly like, I mean, and I always know I'm doing it and sometimes it does yield.
00:41:23
Speaker
some cool information that makes the piece better. And I know it's kind of just part of my process at this point. So I, I kind of let myself go through that phase. But it's, I mean, that's always my, that's always my issue. So is it one of those things like, uh, sometimes I ask people like, when did they know they're done? And is it a deadline that tells you you're done or do you have a, do you finally have like a good clock to know? All right, finally I'm done with this piece.
00:41:51
Speaker
I mean, nine times out of ten, it's the deadline. But other than that, if I feel like I know, if I feel like I kind of know what the kicker is and what the last three sentences of the first section, or last three paragraphs of the first section or something, I'm feeling in a good place. I often have a hard time
00:42:20
Speaker
getting there. But yeah, a lot of times it's just the deadline or it's just it's like I said earlier, I've gotten a little bit better at kind of recognizing like, all right, you know what, you reach that point where you just need to send this in and then you can take a nap and then you're going to fix so many of these things in your next draft. So instead of trying to tinker with it endlessly at this point, which is not going to help like
00:42:47
Speaker
you got to let it go. And I've gotten better at realizing I'm at that stage.
Enthusiasm and Authenticity in Writing
00:42:53
Speaker
What do other writers, maybe younger or aspiring or even people your own age or older, what do they come to you with for advice wise or questions and asking for maybe a bit of wisdom given your experience with Granlin and the Ringer? Yeah, I mean, a lot of it's always just how I
00:43:15
Speaker
you know, got to the position and my answer is, you know, it's not really a traditional path, obviously, but I think it kind of speaks to just the fact that there's a lot out there to do and you can always kind of come back to writing. And I don't know, I think the other advice I often give is, I mean, since I've identified it at the Gralen and the Ringer, I always tell them how
00:43:41
Speaker
how important it is to cultivate your own enthusiasm because that'll come through in your work and it just always, you can just always tell when someone really cares and knows their stuff and then, you know, how to break in, how to be noticed, which is kind of the eternal question. In my case, it did kind of, you know, fit the advice of do good work and people will find it and
00:44:08
Speaker
Um, that's obviously not always the case. And I was lucky because I lived across the street from a certain bar in New York city and the year 2008, you know, and that was luck, but the, you know, work I did in the early days and the late nights, like that was the work part. So that's usually what they're asking. I mean, they are so much probably more like multimedia savvy than I am and have any hope to be so.
00:44:38
Speaker
there's so much more that's available to them and they can go in so many more directions. Whereas I feel like I, to some extent, and I don't feel like I only can do this, but I've sort of identified the type of work that I'm probably the best at and limited a little bit to that. But with that in mind, we'd love to branch out a little bit more.
Exploring New Media Avenues
00:45:02
Speaker
Yeah. And what is the work that you feel you're best at and what do you want to branch out and do more of just to piggyback on what you just said? I think I'm best at doing long-form work where I can take advantage of just like my eye for detail and my enthusiasm for like weird subjects or for just immersing myself in whatever culture does I'm writing about. And then I think I would,
00:45:32
Speaker
love to just figure out, I'd love to have the mindset of knowing what would be a good podcast or knowing, you know, this would actually be a really good YouTube video or something, this idea versus a written piece. And just trying to be more thoughtful about how to present an idea to the world, because there's so much stuff that my colleagues do that is so funny and so brilliant. And I'm like, I want to do that too. But
00:46:00
Speaker
It's just not my immediate instinct to think like a podcast producer. What excites you and drives you still? What about the work keeps bringing you back to the computer again and again?
00:46:19
Speaker
It's so funny because like if you asked me this yesterday when I was finishing up a deadline and I was so crazed and I was so uncertain of this piece I just wrote about the Sacramento Kings and I just, I felt like I, I wished I had, you know, one more day or one more week and I could make it so much better if I, if I could only do this or if I, um, anyway,
00:46:43
Speaker
And then today the piece is up and, you know, for the most part, people seem to like it. And some people have even remarked on the fact that they can tell I put a lot of work into it, which is a really nice thing to tell a writer, at least in this case. I mean, maybe some people wouldn't want to hear that. But so now I'm like, oh, well, it's great. You know, I learned about this.
00:47:05
Speaker
you know, I talked to people and I went to a fun place and I love my job. And yesterday I would have been like, I don't know how much longer I can do this.
Building Confidence Through Reporting
00:47:15
Speaker
I have no confidence. Um, so, you know, there's that roller coaster, but, um, I think in general, I just, when I take a step back and think about some of the places I've been able to go and people I've been able to talk to and, um, and just seeing my own personal confidence levels in my reporting and,
00:47:35
Speaker
kind of, I'm not naturally someone that likes to call someone on the phone unprovoked. And it's even part of what I didn't like about my old job. And yet here I am. But I've started to just realize like the way it can pay off, like to just make those phone calls. And yes, sometimes people are going to say no, or you're going to say something stupid in a, in a scrum and people will laugh and all those things have happened to me. But I also just like,
00:48:05
Speaker
when I can actually like see myself from the outside sometimes and I'm like, wow, you just like kind of went up to that person and asked that or you just asked this question or you just found this person's high school coach on the phone that no one else has and they told a funny story. So those are kind of the little moments that are
00:48:26
Speaker
you know, the, probably the dopamine triggers that keep me coming back. But, um, and just also always knowing that ever since I was a kid, like I love to write. So even when it doesn't feel that way, I just know that if I weren't doing it, I'd be doing it, you know. Right.
00:48:44
Speaker
Well, Katie, thank you so much for carving out the time to do this, and thank you for your work. And I'd ask you just one final thing. If people are not already familiar with you and your work, where can they find out more about you on the internet and get more familiar with you and your work? Sure. You can find my work as well as the work of
00:49:08
Speaker
my extremely brilliant colleagues at the ringer.com. Um, and I'm also on Twitter at Katie bakes. And yeah, if you're a sports fan, TV fan, tech politics, um, you know, really strange esoteric discussions, combining those things, then the ringer is your spot. So.
00:49:31
Speaker
That's where pretty much all my work is. Fantastic. Well, again, Katie, thanks so much for the time, and thanks for the work, and maybe we'll get to do this again sometime in the future. Yeah, thanks so much. This was fun. Awesome. Thanks so much, Katie.
00:49:53
Speaker
Hey, if you'd enjoyed the show, let me know. I'm at Brendan O'Mara and at cnfpod on Twitter. You can also email me with questions or concerns.
00:50:05
Speaker
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00:50:25
Speaker
Head over to BrendanOmera.com for show notes and to subscribe to my monthly reading list newsletter. Once a month, no spam. Can't beat it. Thanks for listening, CNFers. Goodbye.