I MET WAYNE BARRETT when I was assigned to work as one of his interns in January of 1994. I was in my last semester of college, hoping to become a reporter, and by the time the internship ended four months later, I realized I’d just gone to journalism school for free. He had three or four or five interns at a time assigned to work with him in his office: a cramped room on the third floor of the Village Voice, with three desks, three landline phones, and stacks of newspapers covering the floor. Wayne would usually work from home, and every morning about 10 a.m., the call would come in to the interns with a list of dozens of things we were supposed to get done before the day ended. A typical task involved trekking to a courthouse or a municipal building to try to get one document or another—which really meant trying to cajole some grumpy clerk into helping you, since you were still in college and had no idea what you were doing. And all the interns knew that if we didn’t get all the tasks done by five p.m., Wayne would start screaming.
That’s how I got started as a reporter, and though I did not end up covering politics like he did, the lessons I learned from him when I was twenty-two have fueled my entire career. There were lessons about how to sound authoritative on the phone when leaving a message with someone twice your age (leave your first and last names); how to follow the city’s news (read every local newspaper every day); how to use New York’s Freedom of Information Law to get documents from a government agency (send FOIL letters often—and follow up with frequent calls). Many years after I had finished my internship, I ended up interviewing Wayne. It was November 9, 2016—the morning after Donald Trump had won the presidential election—and, like every intern before and after me, I knew about Wayne’s history with Trump.
That morning, reporters everywhere were trying to make sense of Trump’s victory, and I found Wayne at home, in his bed at 10 a.m., propped up on pillows, a telephone beside him. Calls were coming in from journalists eager to hear his insights—the Washington Post, a radio station—and he was answering every call, despite being sick with lung disease and too weak to make it to the front door. Wayne’s persistence and tenacity—his determination to do whatever it took to get the story—had made him one of the greatest investigative reporters of his generation. And now, beside his bed, I saw two reporting pads. Though he was confined to his bed, he was still chasing stories: making calls, taking notes, reporting out every lead he got. He had just published two stories related to Trump, and, he said, he was working on two more. He was 71 and would live only two more months, and though I did not realize it at the time, that visit with him would leave me with perhaps the most important reporting lesson of all: never, ever give up.
Jennifer Gonnerman is a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine and the author of Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett. She was a Wayne Barrett intern in 1994.