Story behind the story: Jason Zinoman
By its second day online, Jason Zinoman’s piece on Patton Oswalt dealing with the death of his wife was the top story on the New York Times.
It beat out every article on Donald Trump and the 2016 elections. It jumped to the top of the paper’s Facebook and Reddit analytics. The story wasn’t breaking news — Oswalt’s wife, Michelle McNamara, had died suddenly nearly six months before Zinoman pursued the story, and the subject had been widely and frequently covered. But in Zinoman’s article, largely the result of a vulnerable, one-on-one interview with Oswalt, he does what previous reports could not, or at least not as well: make it feel human.
Zinoman has worked for the Times for over ten years, coming to the paper in 2003 after spending some time as a freelancer. In 2011 he became the paper’s comedy critic and reporter, covering stand up shows as well as the comedians themselves. Since then he has written two books, one on Kindle about comedian Dave Chappelle and another detailing the evolution of horror movies since the 1960s.
As a comedy beat reporter, Zinoman had wanted to write about Oswalt for a while. The comedian was a significant figure in the world of stand up and alternative comedy, and one of the few larger figures Zinoman hadn’t yet written about. After McNamara died, he was immediately curious, specifically about why no reports stated the cause of death, and how the tragedy would affect Oswalt and his work.
“On one level (the story) was incredibly universal and relatable in the sense that everyone has lost a loved one, and at the same time the way it happened was so incredibly shocking and unusual … I think that’s why it spoke to people,” Zinoman said.
When preparing for the interview itself, Zinoman mapped two lines of questions, one that focused on Oswalt’s career, particularly about his influence on alternate comedy and his recent Emmy win, and another that focused largely on McNamara. The planning was more than a list of questions, Zinoman said. He worked out how he wanted to approach certain subjects, about how he tried to show vulnerability to Oswalt to make him more comfortable. Once in the room, Zinoman played off of Oswalt’s reactions, letting him ramble in moments and focus in others.
“All the details are blow by blow of what happened on the day of her death. That’s just on a human level. What I found was in a weird way, asking very specific questions about the details, the mundane details of that day, were really vivid in his mind and easier to talk about than broad stroke questions about his wife. I think that really grounded the piece,” he said.
When writing, Zinoman narrowed in on those details, using them to place the reader into Oswalt’s positions and feeling. The story he wanted to tell was of the universal reality of grief that many people face, as well as the specificity of Oswalt’s experience moving through it, particularly in relation to his comedy. Zinoman said that he didn’t want the piece to be exploitive or maudlin, but to speak for itself.
Even two decades into his career, Zinoman said he is still learning as an interviewer.
“There’s no secret sauce for journalism,” he said. “It’s not like being someone who has to fix a car, and know how the car works. You need to be able to write and you need to be curious. When it comes to being a good interviewer you need a lot of the same skills that a gossip has and you need a lot of the same skills that an empathetic friend has, which is to say you need to be able to try and see the world through other people’s eyes. When you’re trying to figure out how to talk about something that’s really dark, or open up about something, it’s really just the same. You need to think about what it’s like to be in that person’s position.”
