Faith Hill, Ideas editorial fellow @ The Atlantic

Each year, Atlantic Media hires around 40 recent graduates for its fellowship program. Fellows are placed in editorial or business positions across Atlantic Media’s four brands: The Atlantic, National Journal, Government Executive, and Quartz.

Tell us about what you do.

I’m the fellow for the new Ideas section. Its focus is argument, analysis, and commentary pieces. Instead of just straightforward reporting, people are arguing a point. A lot of what I do is producing pieces: I get the word documents sent to me, and then I will put them in our CMS program, think of a headline and a subtitle, put in an image, write a tweet. I also do copy editing and fact checking. I manage our pitch inbox. I do a lot of reading people’s submissions and responding to them. I run the Facebook and Twitter for the section. I keep track of what upcoming pieces we have scheduled. Besides that, I keep track of freelance writers and how much we’re paying them, and how much people on contract are writing. And I look through books to see if there are excerpts we can publish as articles.

Can you explain a bit more about the Ideas section and what its goal is?

For a long time, The Atlantic has had a lot of pieces that people have referred to as “the well-reasoned argument,” and those pieces had just been in whatever section they have related to topic-wise. The thought is that these pieces could actually have their own section, because there are always a lot of hot issues that people are really debating. We want to provide a platform for people to discuss different viewpoints in a thoughtful way. We have writers disagreeing about all sorts of things, and you can read their arguments and agree or disagree with them, but leave with a better understanding of why people feel the way they do.

What were you working on right before this?

I was reading a book by Janet Napolitano, who was the Secretary of Homeland Security 2009–2013; my manager gave it to me to look for an excerpt to see if we could publish something from it on the site. I was thoughtfully skimming, taking notes, and then writing him an email about what we could do for an excerpt.

What’s your favorite thing that you’ve worked on or the thing that you’re most proud of since the fellowship started?

We published a piece by someone named John Lawrence, who was a senior aide for Nancy Pelosi at the time of the 2008 financial crash. While the crash was happening, there were all these emergency meetings going on, and he was there and taking notes. It was pretty juicy inside material, and he published a piece for us using those notes from the time, including quotes from people like Pelosi and Boehner.

I went with that author to the Library of Congress where they’re keeping his notes on lock, and we went through and checked all of the quotes from the story, which was more than 6,000 words. He had multiple boxes of notebooks. I also did a lot more fact-checking for that piece outside of that, so that was a big project.

When it finally went up, it didn’t get that much attention, which was a little sad, but when I said that to my boss, Yoni Appelbaum, he said I shouldn’t feel bad that it wasn’t super popular, because he thinks the point of it was more that it will actually be referenced now as a historical document and a piece of context that people will turn to when they are talking or writing about the crash.

Can you tell us about your path and how you got here?

I’ve had kind of a funky path to get here. I majored in cognitive science, and I had always done journalism on the side — both of my parents have done work that involves journalism — but I think I was trying not to become them, so I was going a totally different route. During summers in college I did research internships and was going towards that track.

By the time I got to my senior year, I realized that I preferred the work I was doing outside of class to the work specifically in my major. When I did those internships I thought the questions were so interesting, but in terms of the actual things I was doing day to day, I would have rather been writing than thinking of controlled study designs. So I applied for a bunch of jobs, both research and journalism related, and I ended up taking a job as an editorial assistant for a new magazine called Idea, coincidentally. It was founded by Leon Wieseltier, but then it was shut down after he was “Me Too’d.”

We lost our funding, it folded, and I had moved to Washington for this job. So then, I got a job as a job as a barista in DC, and applied for jobs including this one. I actually applied for the science/tech/health fellowship here, and I didn’t even know the Ideas section existed; it hadn’t officially launched. Then a few weeks before the fellowship started I got an email from Yoni telling me he was excited to work with me on the “Ideas section!” And now, I’m here!

What is the best advice someone has ever given you?

I think I’m someone who feels like I should be really intense about a career path, and I’ve always thought it should be something that really defines my identity. For that reason, I’ve had a ton of stress about it, and it’s always felt very existential and really high stakes. I’ve lost a lot of sleep over it.

I did research for a woman who was older than me, but still pretty young, she was a PhD student. She told me to remember that I have life outside of a job. Worst case scenario, your career doesn’t end up being everything you want it to be, and it probably won’t. Best case scenario, it’s interesting to you and you’re still not going to wake up every day, thinking “I’m so excited to go to work.” But you have all of these things that make your life meaningful outside of work that still matter.

What’s something you learned in non-media job that’s applicable to what you’re doing now?

When I was doing research, it felt like I was using similar parts of my brain in terms of asking interesting questions. Research and journalism are both about thinking about what the interesting questions are and the questions that haven’t already been answered, and then collecting information, whether that’s doing studies or talking to people, in order to make a narrative about that to answer it.

What is your dream job?

I feel like it would be within magazine journalism. I’m not sure I’m someone who could do breaking news reporting, but I love writing. I think I would want to be a staff writer somewhere, or writing and editing for a magazine.

Do you have any advice for people looking for entry level jobs in media?

It sounds cheesy to say “you’re not alone in feeling anxious about these things” but I actually think it’s super normal to not have a clear idea of what you want to do even though people ask you all the time. When you think that you know people who know exactly what they want to do, if you dig a little deeper, you realize that they don’t actually know, and that’s okay. Just follow what you’re interested in and what you’re curious about.