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Katherine Rosman is always on the hunt for singular stories about New York, but she’s been at it long enough now that, frequently, the ideas come to her.
“People reach out and say, ‘That’s such a Katie Rosman story,’” she said in an interview. “And they’re often right.”
Ms. Rosman, 53, began her career at The Wall Street Journal, covering culture and technology. She joined The New York Times in 2014 to edit for the Styles section, where she eventually became a reporter.
In 2023, she moved to The Times’s Metro desk, where she has carved out a niche profiling interesting New Yorkers, whether they are power players or everyday civilians.
“The only through line is some connection to New York or New York City,” she said. “It’s such a broad purview — it’s fabulous.”
Her recent coverage includes articles about James Dolan, the owner of Madison Square Garden and the Knicks; a documentary about a woman who camps out in subway stations with a portable card table, dispensing grammar advice; and a TikTok user accused of faking a cancer diagnosis.
On occasion, she will also write about powerful people outside New York; recently, for example, she covered the relationship between the former New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, 73, and Jordon Hudson, 24.
In an interview, Ms. Rosman shared how she gained the trust of sources and her advice for young journalists. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Where do you find story ideas?
I sometimes find larger stories based on daily news I cover. For instance, I was working a breaking news shift on New Year’s Day this year; a couple of colleagues and I wrote an article about a man who was pushed in front of the subway and survived. That initial article led me to writing a longer profile, which came about a month later.
How many stories do you typically work on at a time?
I’ll have two or three stories at different places in development. One story will be in the foreground, but I’ll do preliminary conversations for what I think my next story may be. If someone wants to share a story idea, I have a hard time saying “I’m too busy.”
You wrote an article about Jordon Hudson, who is dating Bill Belichick, now the head coach for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It’s what’s known in journalism as a write-around, meaning you didn’t get to talk to her. How did you find sources?
I found someone who knew her, and I wrote a very personal letter to Jordon asking her to talk to me, making my case why she should. That person passed it along, but Jordon never responded.
I still had a story to deliver, so I spent five days reporting on the ground. I went to the town where she grew up in Maine, then the town where she and her family moved to on Cape Cod. I went to her high school; I spent two days at her college; I went to the gym where she practiced at as a cheerleader. I went to the beauty pageant she competed in. Knocking on doors was my No. 1 strategy.
I reached out to everyone who she had tagged or who had tagged her on Instagram. I used every detail she’d shared publicly to further my reporting.
How do you build trust with sources?
I’m genuinely interested in other people and what they have to say. I spend a lot of time on the phone with people — I rarely rush sources off. If I’m patient and take in all they want to share, even if it’s not necessarily newsworthy, it often leads to surprising results.
You also recently wrote about a TikTok influencer, Sydney Towle, who was accused of faking a cancer diagnosis. The reader doesn’t learn until well into the story whether or not she has cancer. Why did you decide to write it that way?
That idea came from my editor, Felice Belman. She had the conviction that we needed to build suspense, but that was stressful for me because I didn’t want to be unfair to Sydney. I knew unequivocally that she had cancer by the time I wrote the story, and I felt concerned about doing anything that could further create disinformation. I was worried that people wouldn’t stick with a long story that was so complicated — and about what would happen if they stopped reading.
But then another editor said something that really convinced me, which was, “If people think she’s faking cancer, they’re definitely going to continue reading.”
Journalism has always been hard to break into, but especially so now, when many of the traditional pathways in local newsrooms have disappeared. What would you tell young journalists?
My son is in journalism school, so we have these conversations a lot. No matter what’s happening in the journalism business, we live in an information economy. So understanding how to collect information, and how to be critical of that information, is an incredibly valuable set of skills that’s going to be required whether you’re working at a newspaper or another sort of job we can’t conceive of yet.
Sarah Bahr writes about culture and style for The Times.
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