Marin Cogan—standing your ground & developing range

How do you handle yourself as a reporter in a world where reporters are pretty widely hated and mistrusted? And how do you start in one genre of reporting and broaden into others? This week, Jason interviews Marin Cogan, contributing editor with New York magazine. Marin used to cover Capitol Hill for Politico and since then she has branched out to report on sports, crime, and justice for the likes of ESPN, GQ, and New York. In this conversation she talks about her wide-ranging career; covering the Tea Party revolution in 2010; debating the death penalty with the Benghazi Guy, Trey Gowdy; what it’s like to be a young woman reporter in Washington dealing with sexual harassment; tactics used by Senators to avoid reporters (hiding in elevators, the “cell-phone fake”); what it’s like to be screamed at by a member of Congress for reporting true facts; and how she finds and reports the complicated backstories of newspaper crime stories that go viral and then disappear. Marin also helps run a summer journalism boot camp at Princeton for low-income high school students who are academic stars at their schools, and she explains how tough it is to convince these kids to stay in journalism, and the surprising bravery of student reporters.