As a reporter for The New York Times, Dionne Searcey has, as she put it, covered “a gazillion different things.”
She has written about politics, environmental issues and economics and traveled to places like Romania; the Congo River; and Dakar, Senegal, where she served as the West and Central Africa bureau chief from 2015 to 2019. In 2020, she was also part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing Russia’s “shadow wars” across Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
In late 2024, Ms. Searcey joined The Times’s Metro desk to create a new beat, one unlike any other she had covered: wealth and power, primarily in New York City. The Times recognized that “it was important to have someone covering wealth in New York at this incredible time of inequality in the city,” she said, adding: “Writing about wealth can also be a lens through which to view poverty and inequality.”
For a recent article, Ms. Searcey reported on egg prices at grocery stores and what they reveal about an emerging power structure in New York City. She also shadowed a viral content creator as he shopped for watches. And last year, Ms. Searcey covered the internet’s reaction to the killing of the UnitedHealthcare chief executive.
In an interview, Ms. Searcey spoke about the challenges of her coverage and why some people are fascinated with reading about the wealthy in America. This interview has been condensed and edited.
How do you find the stories you write about?
By talking to people who aren’t wealthy, but are fascinated by this kind of wealth or who have come across people with this kind of wealth. In New York City, all you have to do is look up to see the wealth that exists — there are so many luxury towers. Everybody has a story about the way that they have intersected with wealth or power in the city.
For example, a photographer friend told me about a private restaurant with a Michelin-star chef at 432 Park Avenue. He said, “If there’s one, there’s probably more.” I did some digging and found 15 or so of them. I wrote a story about these restaurants, but it wasn’t about the lifestyles of the rich and famous. It was about a chef who worked in one of these restaurants. He was caught in a “gilded cage.”
He had risen to the height of his profession, but not many people were eating at the restaurant because it was private. It couldn’t even be reviewed. He didn’t know where he stood up against his peers. That became the focus of the story — not “Look, there’s this private restaurant,” but the humanity of someone caught up in that situation.
Why do you think the topic of wealth and power is of interest to readers?
Most people aren’t part of the upper slice of the 1 percent. They are curious about how the wealthy live. Robin Leach made a TV series about it. Some of that fascination in our culture has turned into more of a “hate-read” or “hate-watch.” What I’m trying to do is go a little bit deeper, to show not only how the other half lives but to lift the curtain on how the wealthy and powerful go about their lives, and how it’s shaping other people’s lives and the city as a whole.
Can you elaborate on the “hate-read” facet of your work?
There’s a whole genre of entertainment right now — “The White Lotus,” any recent Nicole Kidman TV mini-series, “Succession” — that shows the dark side of wealth and power. There are more billionaires running the country than ever before. It’s important to show what those circles look like and the people who run in them.
What are some of your reporting challenges?
You always want to write stories that are surprising. The challenge of any beat is approaching it with nuance. I wrote a story about deportation fears among Latino workers in the Hamptons and how that would affect some of the nation’s most vulnerable people and also some of the nation’s wealthiest. The story went beyond showing wealthy people as callous and uncaring but how they were trying to help, as well as how enmeshed the Latino population had become in the Hamptons.
What’s the most interesting thing you’ve learned so far on your beat?
There are many levels of wealth and layers of luxury that I hadn’t really thought about before. There are rich people in the arts and rich people in finance — which are really separate things. Those crowds run in separate circles. Their tastes are different. The things that are important to them are different.
Talking about the wealthy is one interesting way to look at poverty. Our society is very unequal at the moment. It’s important to explore both extremes.
The post A Reporter With a Wealth of Knowledge on the Wealthy appeared first on New York Times.
