This is the weekend edition of Culture Study — the newsletter from Anne Helen Petersen, which you can read about here. If you like it and want more like it in your inbox, consider subscribing. I started this newsletter all the way back in 2016, and in those early days, I often used it to give additional context on my reporting process, or even just as a space for some of what ended up on the cutting room floor. It’s been awhile since I’ve done that sort of process piece, and my recent reporting has led me down some twisty roads, so I thought I’d share some of the process.
thank you for sharing this detailed view of your process! i finished my PhD last year, and i've been genuinely curious about how your research and writing process compares to the type of research one does in graduate school.
Awesome read! Love the process pieces and all of the thinking on childcare.
Cars: Peter Norton, author of “Fighting Traffic” on how the automobile industry stole our streets. Planner Jarrett Walker who consults for cities on public transit; Jeff Speck, same and also author of “Walkable City” that has some car history in it. Everyone at Rail~Volution (a transit advocacy organization), starting maybe with Jeff Woods who does the Talking Headways podcast and will know just the right people to speak with.
Not all of this is directly related to what you’re looking for necessarily but all of these people are deeply informed about everything around our car-centric world.
You may already know about this, but just in case: Journalist & author Michelene Maynard has a website called "Curbing Cars" at http://www.curbingcars.com/ It sounds like a good resource for your cars piece!
Loved this deep dive into your process! Here's a follow-up. You put a lot of hours into the interviews for the piece before you started writing. Do you only ever do that when you know you have an assignment lined up (like you did at Vox)? Or do you sometimes go down a rabbit hole without clear knowledge that you will/can get a story out of it and what it will be?
Thanks for sharing this view into your process. I found the article really interesting as well. As a parent of a toddler who is currently paying A LOT per month on childcare, I appreciated seeing solutions for how caregivers can receive better wages and how the system in general can be improved. However, it would be have been great to include the answer to the question you posed, "where is the money going?" If the caregivers are receiving such a low salary, why is my daycare center, which is on the lower end where I live, so expensive?
As a non-parent, I suspect my views are regarded as irrelevant but anyway... why is childcare regarded by virtually all parents as a job for women only? How many parents would be willing to leave their tiny offspring in the hands of a childcare that employed only men? Is there a gender issue here that has yet to be explored? Child care as a job will never achieve the status and conditions it deserves until it's being done by men as much as by women, and I suspect that day is a long way off, in large part because few mothers trust men around their children.
So deliciously insightful. I quit the journo beat abour 10 years ago but the process you described brought the excitement flooding back of being a proper writer. Thank you.
I'm curious about how you like being on substack and how this compares to something like Patreon, which I'm more familiar with due to YouTube. How, now that the era of blogs is over, does Substack compare to something like blogs? I've found a few voices I like on Substack (you, Heather Richardson, the Tangle, etc). I don't like that I can't lump them together easily (or at least haven't found a way yet), like I could see a feed on Patreon. What are your thoughts?
thank you for sharing this detailed view of your process! i finished my PhD last year, and i've been genuinely curious about how your research and writing process compares to the type of research one does in graduate school.
Awesome read! Love the process pieces and all of the thinking on childcare.
Cars: Peter Norton, author of “Fighting Traffic” on how the automobile industry stole our streets. Planner Jarrett Walker who consults for cities on public transit; Jeff Speck, same and also author of “Walkable City” that has some car history in it. Everyone at Rail~Volution (a transit advocacy organization), starting maybe with Jeff Woods who does the Talking Headways podcast and will know just the right people to speak with.
Not all of this is directly related to what you’re looking for necessarily but all of these people are deeply informed about everything around our car-centric world.
You may already know about this, but just in case: Journalist & author Michelene Maynard has a website called "Curbing Cars" at http://www.curbingcars.com/ It sounds like a good resource for your cars piece!
Loved this deep dive into your process! Here's a follow-up. You put a lot of hours into the interviews for the piece before you started writing. Do you only ever do that when you know you have an assignment lined up (like you did at Vox)? Or do you sometimes go down a rabbit hole without clear knowledge that you will/can get a story out of it and what it will be?
Thanks for sharing this view into your process. I found the article really interesting as well. As a parent of a toddler who is currently paying A LOT per month on childcare, I appreciated seeing solutions for how caregivers can receive better wages and how the system in general can be improved. However, it would be have been great to include the answer to the question you posed, "where is the money going?" If the caregivers are receiving such a low salary, why is my daycare center, which is on the lower end where I live, so expensive?
As a non-parent, I suspect my views are regarded as irrelevant but anyway... why is childcare regarded by virtually all parents as a job for women only? How many parents would be willing to leave their tiny offspring in the hands of a childcare that employed only men? Is there a gender issue here that has yet to be explored? Child care as a job will never achieve the status and conditions it deserves until it's being done by men as much as by women, and I suspect that day is a long way off, in large part because few mothers trust men around their children.
Very nice you sharing the topic. Beautiful written you post. Very helpful information. I like.
So deliciously insightful. I quit the journo beat abour 10 years ago but the process you described brought the excitement flooding back of being a proper writer. Thank you.
I'm curious about how you like being on substack and how this compares to something like Patreon, which I'm more familiar with due to YouTube. How, now that the era of blogs is over, does Substack compare to something like blogs? I've found a few voices I like on Substack (you, Heather Richardson, the Tangle, etc). I don't like that I can't lump them together easily (or at least haven't found a way yet), like I could see a feed on Patreon. What are your thoughts?