Max Nestorak

He's a staff writer for The New Yorker, and he recently wrote about Nick Shirley, the 23-year-old citizen journalist who knocked on daycare doors in the Twin Cities and claimed to have uncovered empty buildings.

Jay, what is Nick Shirley's style?

What do his videos look like?

On one hand, it kind of looks like the, you know, like Action News at 5 live investigation that you probably grew up watching on your local news where, like, a reporter will go into a business and they'll say... Will you stop payment to the contractors that are under investigation?

And then the business owner will kind of respond.

And the whole drama is watching the business owner respond, right?

That type of like gotcha moment is the core, I think, of what he's doing.

But he's also melding a lot of things that are more native to the internet, which is sort of this man on street reporting that was popularized by streamers like Sneeko or whoever, where they go out and they say like,

What would you rate this girl on a scale of 1 to 10?

Like it sort of like runs a gamut of innocuous to kind of toxic.

So he was doing a little bit of that, right?

Like a man on the street going to people.

And then I think a little part of it formally was also sort of a descendant of Michael Moore, right?

His film Roger and Me.

What do you think about General Motors closing up this factory?

We're not outsiders.

We're all from Flint.

And I found the similarities to be so interesting where a lot of, you know, Roger May takes place in the wintertime in a Midwestern city and it's about like exposing corruption, right?

My mission was a simple one.

To convince Roger Smith to spend a day with me in Flint and meet some of the people who were losing their jobs.