Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.
“I thought it’d be kind of fun, writer to writer, to talk about what it’s like to write,” I told Usher as we shared a couch in Amsterdam.
He beamed.
“I like that!” he said. “Thank you.”
Our project about how Usher and his team constructed a commencement address for Emory University did not begin with ambitions of an interview in Europe or a digital presentation filled with so many of The New York Times’s tools. It started when an editor wondered about the challenge of writing a commencement address at a complex moment in American higher education.
After I heard that Usher would speak at Emory on May 12, I asked if he would be game for an article focusing less on what he said and more on how he decided to say it.
The education beat’s celebrities are typically college presidents and Nobel Prize-winning professors. To my surprise, it took less than two days for Usher to send word that he would talk. He said he would also show us how he and his team built the speech.
Through his publicist and primary speechwriter, Lydia Kanuga, we saw drafts and text messages. We heard voice memos and sat in on a late-night brainstorming session after a show in London. There and in Amsterdam and Atlanta, we watched how Usher wrestled with his own story as my colleague Simbarashe Cha captured it all on photo and video.
At last, we heard the final speech and saw Usher receive his honorary degree.
But the scene at Emory was almost beside the point. The through line of the project was always about Usher’s process.
So we never talked much about his tour, his music or the day’s gossip. Instead, amid chatter about fatherhood and jet lag, we discussed our writing weaknesses and word choices, our muses and most essential editors. Then, as the speech approached, we saw his own writing and rewriting, each word a glimpse into how a musician’s mind worked before a star turn on a different stage.
Of course, his last-minute rewrites also meant I had to tear apart the article’s structure, which had been coming together in my own mind.
Fittingly, the most robust feedback we heard from readers came from English teachers. Many of them told us they would share the article in their classrooms to prove to skeptical students that even Usher goes through more than one draft.
Alan Blinder is a national correspondent for The Times, covering education.
The post Conversations With Usher, Writer to Writer appeared first on New York Times.
