Q&A: Claire Tran, Editorial fellow @ CityLab

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 an editorial fellow at CityLab. My role has three duties — I’m on the audience engagement team, so I help write our posts, track to see how successful our articles are, and then I work with other publications to potentially partner with them. I also help research interesting urban studies to cover, pinpoint the most interesting parts of the studies, and help produce the stories in our CMS, copy edit, etc. And then the third is that I get to write and report my own stories. I usually write about transportation and equity.

What’s the coolest thing you’ve gotten to work on since the fellowship started?

In August I got to interview Mayor Ted Terry, who was on Queer Eye. That was really fun. It was obviously cool to interview him from a mayor standpoint — talking about policies he’s doing in his town, life as a politician being so young — but it was also fun to talk to him about being on Queer Eye behind the scenes and how he’s been keeping up with everything he’s learned from the show.

What were you working on right before you came up here?

I just came out of a meeting with the audience engagement team. We were going over our spreadsheet of data, tracking how successful our posts have been on all the different platforms. Which is really to cool to see.

Sometimes as a reporter you just send your story out there into the world and you don’t really know how well people receive it or how well it does. But on the audience engagement team, it’s all about feedback and learning from that feedback and trying to do better the next time. It’s been really cool to see us testing out different methods on our posts and seeing what works and what doesn’t.

What’s the best advice someone’s given you?

I think just putting yourself out there in literally every way possible — trying to combat imposter syndrome and just being confident in yourself and being like, “Yeah, I can apply for this position. Maybe I don’t hit all the requirements, but I can do it, I’ll get there.”

Also putting yourself out there if you want to grab coffee with someone that you admire. Don’t be afraid to ask questions.

Overall, just be confident. You can do it.

What’s something you learned in a previous non-media role that’s applicable to what you do now?

In college I was an event technician. Whenever there was an event on campus — a concert, a play, a conference — I helped out with all of the technical aspects. I’d set up the audio, so the mics and the speakers. If there were fancy lighting setups, I’d do that. So a lot different production and multimedia stuff.

That taught me a lot about working under pressure and always having a backup plan when things fall through. There were a lot of times where there was a really big event, tons of people in the crowd, and then suddenly the microphone fails or the light just goes out, and it’s all about trying to figure out how to fix everything in such a time crunch with lots of people watching. So I learned a lot about working under pressure.

What brought you to the fellowship?

I’ve always loved The Atlantic. I remember every semester I would go on their careers page to check to see if they had internships for college students. (They don’t.) But I would always check anyway, just in case they started one up.

I patiently waited until my senior year, and I was excited to finally apply for the fellowship. And then I almost didn’t. I remember the original due date was mid-January and I actually let it pass at first. I thought there was no way I was going to get it, I just won’t send in an application, it’s fine.

And then they extended the due date to late January. And I was like okay, I guess this is a sign — they’re extending it, I might as well send in my application, and here I am.

Did you always want to write about what you’re writing about now?

Yeah, I definitely specified CityLab in my application. In college I worked at this urban research center, so that introduced me to a lot of different topics in the space.

A lot of the hot topics that people talk about now, like affordable housing, accessible transportation, etc, those are all local problems that local or regional governments are mostly in charge of, so I think a publication that emphasizes the power of local governments is really important.

What’s your dream job?

I definitely love what I’m writing about now. So that’s a lot of equity stuff, whether that’s in health, transportation, or housing.

I think I would love to explore different mediums. I write a lot now, but in college I also did a lot of broadcast stuff. So I don’t know if I’d want to go back to that. I also did some radio stuff, and I think that’s interesting too. I have the entire rest of my career to try out different industries and see what I like best, but I definitely want to continue covering these topics.

What was your childhood dream job?

When I was in middle school, I really wanted to go into the music industry on the business side. I’m not creative enough to be a musician, but I really wanted to work for a record label. I wanted my job to be scouting out new artists to sign, so basically just listening to new music. I just thought it would be a fun, chill job. I was really into Fall Out Boy in middle school, so it was that sort of influence.

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

Use your network to your advantage. Whether that’s your school’s career center or your newspaper if it happens to have a strong alumni network. I’m also really involved in the Asian American Journalists Association, and that has provided me with lots of mentors and guidance. So just finding any way you can talk to more experienced folks is good.