Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.
No day is dull on the National desk. We arrive at work which now means striding a few steps from our beds to our laptops and the barrage begins. Will it be a raging wildfire today that occupies us? Or another grim police shooting? Will coronavirus cases surge in a new part of America? Or will cars line up by the scores, their occupants in search of food? Reporting on all this, and making sense of it, is what we do.
Nobody who covers national news in 2020 is at a loss for meaning in the work. It overwhelms us all, coming by morning, by noon and by night. Earlier in the year, before we left the newsroom for our homes amid the coronavirus outbreak, we gathered as a staff to put our mission into words, part of an effort to focus our resources on what matters most.
How do you get a team of 45 busy journalists scattered around the country who do a wide range of jobs breaking news, telling deep narrative stories, building ambitious visual articles, tracking coronavirus cases to agree on a unified mission statement? In our roles as national editor and the desks director of operations, we held a few brainstorms with our colleagues in New York, Miami, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Boston, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston and Albuquerque, asking both serious and icebreaker questions:
- What voice or tone should the National desk speak to you in?
- What role could the National desk play in your family/friends lives?
- What would be on the National desk tombstone? (Dont worry, were not going anywhere.)
Then we sifted through the answers to come up with some key themes that define us. Our mission statement, we believe, captures the essential work that Mike Baker is doing in the Pacific Northwest. He covered the virus outbreak at nursing homes in Seattle and then traveled to Portland, Ore., to cover the protests against police abuse.read more
