When did you start planning?
I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, and this summer in particular has been a turbulent year. One election unfolded, and then another. It was quite draining. We are now seriously planning what we are going to do almost every day.
It’s been a very turbulent year. How has your approach to reporting changed?
We had to completely rethink the way we organize. It was one structure under the current president and the previous president, but it has become completely different.
Right now, we have a great editor named Manny Fernandez overseeing the Trump reporter, and another, Zach Jonk, overseeing the Harris reporter. He also brought in several talented reporters from the White House team, including Erica Greene and Katie Rogers, both of whom have covered Ms. Harris.
Two reporters have been added to report on the atmosphere surrounding Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris in detail, so to speak, in charge of color work. Sean McLeish has written a feature on the Trump campaign, and Rebecca Davis O’Brien has taken a similar approach to the Harris campaign. When it was Trump vs. Biden, the mood of the entire campaign and the voters was very different, and Biden in particular did not have the opportunity to have such a conversation. But the mood on the Democratic side, and across much of the political landscape, has brightened considerably with Harris’ arrival. That’s what we wanted to reflect in our coverage.
Will that make it more difficult to cover the campaign?
That’s not true. One way to speed up work is to have more people working on something quickly. For example, we had a lot of people from all over the newsroom come together to write a story about the election of Tim Walz, and it happened very quickly. In a typical two-year presidential campaign, the veep stakes can last for months. This was very compressed.
