Q&A: Karim Doumar, 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.

What do you do?

I’m an editorial fellow at CityLab. I spend half my time doing audience engagement and the other half I’m covering architecture and design for our design section.

What do you do on a day to day basis?

Right now, I’m on the afternoon shift for audience. Between 2 and 6 I’m monitoring our social channels, putting stuff up, and working with the other social people to run our Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Then, in the mornings I’m reporting and writing. And the fellows do a bit of copy editing.

How did you get into writing about cities?

When I was in school, I was a geography major and was always interested in urban studies. I’ve always been interested in cities. Cities are cool, it’s fun to live in them. Before this I was covering local politics, and it’s different to cover cities than it is to cover a city, but there are a lot of things you learn from doing both about the other. When I was at Berkeley I was covering a lot of Berkeley city council, and if you’ve ever been to a city council meeting or engaged in local politics, you know there’s a lot of characters. There’s people who lived there forever, and this is their thing, to go to the meeting and make a ruckus, and it’s fun to see certain people that turn into trends. This is happening in lots of cities, there’s not just wild people in Berkeley. If you’re covering a local city, every city has transportation problems, but you can also cover transportation problems as their own thing.

What’s your favorite story that you’ve written?

There are a lot of vacant lots in Detroit and the city is doing an interesting thing by turning them into parks. I talked to a woman who lives next to one of the lots they’re turning into a park and she was so excited because the park just opened. I asked her if she’d been to the park, and she said, “Yeah! I was just there hula hooping all morning!” And I said, “what do you mean hula hooping?” And she was like “My dream is that one day everyone in the neighborhood will hula hoop there at the same time.” And then I published her quote in the city story and she emailed me back, saying “thank you for including my hula hooping dreams in there, I’ll send you a picture when we’re all out there hula hooping!”

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve gotten?

A CityLab editor told me that I should have a really clear idea of what I want — or at least a really clear soundbite of what I want — so that when people ask me, I can say “this is what I want to do.” Because she asked me, and I didn’t really know, and she was like “I can’t help you if don’t know!”

Have you thought of one?

Not yet, it’s still early on in the fellowship and a work in progress.