Lindsay Crouse
Lindsay Crouse is an editor, journalist, and producer at The New York Times whose main job is curating a short documentary series Op-Docs for which she's won three Emmys, two Peabodys, and three Oscar nominations.
Tell us a bit about you and your work.
I write and produce a lot of work on athletes — I've been fascinated for years by the rise of American female distance runners at all levels. At some point I realized following the stories of the women I cover were fueling my own athletic success, and I got much faster than I'd ever expected.
That in turn helped fuel professional success; last year I spent a lot of time covering the challenges that women and girls face in sports as well, which led to congressional inquiries, protests, and policy changes. (I was also trying to qualify for the Olympic Marathon Trials, and landed with a 2:53.)
What was your educational background? And how/when did you first know you wanted to pursue writing as a career?
I studied history at Harvard — where I also ran cross country & track — and it was accidentally the best introduction to the kind of work I do now. They didn't have journalism so I made my major -- history -- into journalism.
I got a grant from the college and for my thesis drove around wine farms in south Africa interviewing the workers about the roots and consequences of what's led there to the highest levels of alcoholism in the world. Studying history -- which like journalism, is pretty open ended if you think about it, it's just finding out what happened -- wound up informing a lot of how I've done my reporting.
You realize if you're a female athlete that a lot of what you're told about sports wasn't reported by people who see things the way you do -- they're rarely athletes themselves (and they're usually not women). Last year, I realized that like a lot of women, I'd let that limit my own perception of my potential -- I'd never thought I could be a sports reporter, I barely even thought of myself as an athlete -- but why was that?
And I realized that obviously, this parallels the rest of the world, and a lot of women's experience in it, including my own. Instead of teaching us information, college taught me to question who wrote the history in the first place, and whether it was really "the truth". (And of course, like most history, even the truth, or at least how you frame it, can be subjective). The same thing applies to reporting, especially when it comes to sports. But it makes sense that the person to do a lot of the stuff that I did last year wouldn't have done it in a full time reporters role -- because that role didn't exist.
What were your first jobs after college, and how did those eventually lead you to your current role at NYT?
After graduating I made sure to have a "main job" to support myself but I wanted more. So for six years I worked on the side for writers/reporters researching and fact checking their books. I got the first job for a reporter off a Craigslist ad when I moved to NYC without a job after graduation and he'd give me $700 every few months when I'd transcribe his interviews, then he handed me off to someone else, etc. It was ok money on the side, and I helped them out on nights and weekends.
Then the last one was Jodi Kantor (who later helped launch the #Metoo movement with her Pulitzer-prize winning reporting on Harvey Weinstein). After I researched her first book she connected me to an entry level "secretary" job in 2011 in NYT opinion, where there was no path to promotion, and I felt too old to start over again so I had to create one.
And then I kind of kept doing the same entrepreneurial thing at the Times where I pursued my own interests outside my formal roles, including the sports reporting I did last year, to the point where I effectively had two full time jobs, one real and one I assigned myself and did after work.
The one I assigned myself for after work was around sports. I just cared about it so much. There have never been roles to apply to that reflect the full extent of my interests so I decided to stop waiting and create my own (which is why my career has been unconventional.)
Tell us about your current role at NYT. What are you working on right now, and what's an average day like for you?
Right now it's really hard—I had so much ambition for this year and like everyone else, all my plans have been derailed. It's harder to pursue your own ideas when everything's cancelled. But everything's changing so quickly that I imagine there will be silver linings — the good thing about having worked for awhile is that you realize progress is rarely linear, and setbacks often lead to gains you couldn't have anticipated (if you're patient and, hopefully, resilient).
But you can't force that. So meanwhile, I'm just doing my job — watching pitches from independent filmmakers, trying to come up with good culture stories, and hopefully helping to expand our report in new, creative ways. I'm especially interested in trying to see if the NYT can be a good resource for elevating new talent that's trying to breakout during this period, so I'm keeping my eye on the internet for anyone creative who catches my attention.
What's your best advice for writers today?
Don't get discouraged by early no's, but also learn from them. It's not that you should blindly believe in yourself — a lot of early work is necessarily not going to be your best, which is sort of ideal, because otherwise, where would you go from there? So trust the process and keep showing up and learn from your early failures.
Don't take the "no this particular thing doesn't work" to mean "nothing you do will ever succeed so you should go try something else." That doesn't mean you need to Embrace Failure -- I can't stand when people say that.
Failure is brutal, it hurts. But you can and should use it to fuel your ultimate success. It's a long game and if you go too fast at the start you'll probably struggle when it matters most.
