New York City can get weird. Precious Fondren takes us along for the ride.
The arts and culture reporter discusses how she goes with the flow of New York City for her beat.
It started with an obsession.
Growing up in Minneapolis, Precious Fondren filed through the piles of magazines that arrived on her mother’s doorstep. Her mother did not have any subscriptions, but copies kept appearing. Fondren’s large magazine collection underscored her interest in pop culture: “I always loved music,” she said. There had to be a way, she mused, to combine that passion with news.
She was able to name that aspiration after enrolling in a Journalism 101 course at the University of Minnesota. The 26-year-old has since had a fellowship with The New York Times, bylines in GQ, and is now a staff reporter for Gothamist at WNYC. When she is not jamming to alternative R&B artists Frank Ocean and Kelela, she spends her days hard at work as an arts and culture reporter managing the “millions of tabs open on my computer,” Fondren says.
That macédoine of information is the rhythm of reporting on New York City, Fondren said. Over the phone on Super Bowl Sunday, Fondren was joined by her dog, Liloh, while we discussed our Midwestern and Southern backgrounds, the strange and grainy fabric of New York City, objectivity in journalism, and more.
I know that you grew up and attended college in Minnesota. How was reporting there different from reporting in New York City?
There’s a lot more happening in New York (laughs). I worked at The Blade for a little bit and I found it difficult to find stories. My entire job was to try and find the exciting part–and there’s no shortage of that here in New York. That’s the major difference: there’s always something going on in New York. Whether or not it’s a story, that’s what you have to figure out.
Coming from a small town in Georgia, I get that. But we all have lived experiences that inform our work. How do you bring your roots to the city and your writing?
I don’t know if I bring my own ‘Midwestern flavor’ to New York (laughs). I still read the Star Tribune and NPR to see if there’s an angle they took with a story and if there’s something similar happening in New York. Like, they wrote about Taylor Swift and her album dropping, but they focused the story on a record store in Minneapolis. So [I try to] take a national thing like that but make it local, because at Gothamist and WNYC, we are local news and radio.
Can we please get into the “Rat Daddy” piece? Tell me all about finding that story, going on the journey with Rat Daddy, and seeing New York City in that light.
“Rat Daddy” was actually my editor’s pitch: sometimes I pitch stories, and sometimes she finds them. That was one that she had wanted someone to cover. My colleague said no because she had a phobia of rats, and I was like, ‘Well I don’t like rats either!’ But the story had to get done. We have to write two stories a week and I needed something else. So I reached out to Kenny (“Rat Daddy”), and he responded immediately. We talked on the phone first, and then I met him at Grand Central and took the Rat Tour. Before I met him, I tested out what the angle was, what we were looking for, and what the purpose of the story was with my editor. As that progressed, I had to talk to a couple more people, [including] a rat exterminator. I write for the news website and the radio, so I had to capture sound on my recorder. I went on [the tour] by myself–I wish there were more people, because that would have made for a better sound. There’s still some good reaction from Kenny because he’s just like an upbeat guy. But in writing for the eye and for the ear, I have to capture color with my words and set the scene for people, but on the radio side, there has to be some sort of sound that’s going on, so we have to think about those things beforehand. I’m always trying to find that moment that I could possibly open the story with.
Is that the strangest piece you’ve covered?
I think the Donald Glover thing was pretty weird, just because we didn’t really know what was going on. New York is just weird.
You’ve covered topics ranging from Black fashion to Narcan training at a popular bookstore. Often, these stories are accompanied by an underlying “issue” in the news. The media is rethinking how bias fits into reporting–from my perspective, even choosing a beat reflects bias. How do you navigate that inherent subjectivity?
That’s a great question. A friend in journalism school asked me about the word “objectivity” and how often this comes up in conversations at work. Nobody is ever explicitly saying that word, but for that bookstore piece, me and my editor literally had the same thought: we read a piece in Curbed and one in the New York Post. They are very different. The New York Post only [quoted] people who hated the bookstore, and in the Curbed piece there is no critique. When I pitched this, it was very clear that I love to talk to people on both sides. I kept telling people throughout the reporting that ‘I’m not here to give an opinion, I’m here to contextualize what’s happening.’ I don’t think that I’ve had a story so far that has been difficult to report at Gothamist. Of course, you’re always going to have your feelings about things, but I don’t think so far that I’ve put my personal feelings into the work. I try to make sure that I’m aware of that.
On a separate note, LinkedIn is anthropological–I saw on there that you worked at a Wendy’s back home. I felt heard, as I worked at a barbecue joint in high school. Did the younger person in you imagine that she would be reporting at The New York Times and later WNYC?
I think she always hoped that she would. When I worked at Wendy’s, I just wanted to live in New York. That was the goal. I didn’t necessarily know when I worked at Wendy’s that I wanted to be a journalist just yet.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
