Jodi Kantor

Essentially, for six or seven years, I chased the question, who are Barack and Michelle Obama?

Going from late 2006, there's still this like

relatively everyday couple from Chicago, and then watching them become president and first lady of the United States and covering the White House.

And that was a thrill.

And listen, I mean, hats off to my colleagues who do political reporting, especially now.

But I think I had a craving to do journalism that could help people a

Around 2013, you began investigating gender and workplace systems, not just as topics, but as entry points into how power actually operates.

What did you start to see structurally that made those stories feel particularly urgent at that time?

Okay, so this was a time when the country was really, I think, on the cusp of a new gender discussion.

Hillary Clinton had ran for president.

She had failed.

The questions of why that hadn't worked and would we ever have a female president were top of mind.

There were publications like Jezebel, and it felt like we were in a more open period of talking about gender than we had been in a while.

My stance on this question was like, yeah, like I'm reading a lot of big feelings out there.

I'm reading a lot of people's personal essays.

That's not what I want to do.

I want to bring new facts to the table that are going to help make the gender discussion in this country better.

better.

So I did stories about the workplace, about Harvard Business School, with female characters, and there were a lot of fascinating things that emerged about gender, and that's also part of what led me to the Weinstein story eventually, because I had written a lot about women in the workplace by that point.

However, there was something that emerged that is very relevant now that I did not expect at the time, which is that