Q+A: Kevin Nguyen, Features Editor at The Verge

On what Nguyen looks for in a pitch, bringing racial diversity to newsrooms, and why the most exciting stories he commissions have nothing to do with tech.

Since Kevin Nguyen left GQ for The Verge in November 2018, the site has become an essential destination for stories on the changing nature of technology. Last year, he worked with Casey Newton to uncover the ugly world of Facebook moderation, Josh Dzieza to follow Amazon nomads crossing America on wild trips to find rare soap, and Mia Sato to detail how the Hmong American diaspora uses conference call tech to maintain their culture.

Beyond helping craft features at The Verge, Nguyen also released his debut novel, New Waves, earlier this month. It’s a thriller about a heist gone wrong at an NYC tech start-up full of sharp insights on race and mass surveillance.

As he prepared for the release of the novel, we sat down for a video call to talk about what he looks for in a good pitch, nagging his way into bringing racial diversity to newsrooms, and why the most exciting stories he commissioned have nothing to do with tech.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Study Hall: What was the biggest change going from GQ to The Verge, besides The Verge’s tech focus?

Kevin Nguyen: GQ was super disorganized — deliberately so, in a lot of ways. People like the idea of being creative types and would have these long, meandering meetings. I was always trying to get people to enter things in the spreadsheet. l was the organized one. At The Verge, I’m the super disorganized one. Everyone is super on top of it, all the time. I feel like I’m the meandering, creative type that’s always trying to push people to think a little bit bigger, which I’m sure drives people insane.

SH: What jumps out at you as a good pitch from someone who’s a freelance writer?

KN: I think a pitch should do three things. It should, right off the bat, show me you can write. I think the best pitches, the first graf could be your lead graf. It should also show me what the story is, but also the most ambitious version of it. I want to imagine the biggest version of a story even if the reporting doesn’t get there; I want to know what the ceiling on the story is. And then third, I like to [see] the rough idea of a reporting plan. I want a writer to have confidence in what this thing is. Is this a feature? Is it a profile? We can have a conversation if we have different visions, but I want the writer to have a vision. [Ed. note: on April 3, Nguyen clarified that The Verge is taking pitches during the COVID-19 pandemic, but he is at capacity: “Our budget is not exactly frozen, but at the moment, there’s a lot of extra scrutiny around how we’re spending that money. But actually more urgently, I am not taking on any freelance pitches at the moment just because things are so busy right now.”]

SH: What was one of the more surprising things that you’ve learned being at The Verge?

KN: When I worked at GQ, I was the culture editor, and I was working a lot on celebrity profiles. I love a good profile, but it’s also contained. You get two hours with Michael B. Jordan and that’s it. You have to do as much as you can. The kind of reporting that we do here [at The Verge], a lot of it being about labor, you can keep doing that story forever. A freelancer definitely needs to know when to stop, because then it stops being economically viable for them.

SH: What kind of relationship does The Verge have with freelancers?

KN: At The Verge, we have a full team of staff writers, so we’re not relying on freelancers for the day-to-day stuff. But for every place that I want to expand outside our usual coverage zone, I can go out and find the perfect freelancer for that story. We have a transportation desk, but no one that writes about aviation specifically. So when I worked on a story about Boeing, I went and found someone that knew a shit ton about aviation.

For big features, I’m reading a lot of freelance pitches and accepting only a handful of them. We’re very reliant on freelancers to do the kind of story that we’re not capable of doing on staff. That’s always very exciting too, because I think part of my job is to expand the scope and breadth of what The Verge is.

SH: A lot of people might think of the site as just hard tech news, and not think about it as a place where people are telling really interesting stories that intertwine with tech.

KN: The newsroom is very tech-focused, of course, but when I came in for my interview with Nilay [Patel], the editor-in-chief, he was like, what’s a story you really want to do? I was pretty honest. I had this story that I couldn’t get off the ground at GQ about Ramsey Orta, who was the guy that filmed the killing of Eric Garner, and I was working with a freelancer on it. The editor-and-chief [at GQ] thought it was too bleak. I actually don’t think he was wrong; it’s very bleak. So I told Nilay this pitch, and I was like, “I don’t really know the tech angle,” and Nilay was like, “Uh, there’s a phone involved.” I think people [at The Verge] were kind of confused and maybe scared of it because it was a kind of thing they’d never done here before, but it did super well.

SH: One of the topics your new book, New Waves, focuses on is race. What can you say to writers of color or minority writers who might feel disadvantaged in newsrooms?

KN: It can be dispiriting. At GQ, one of the earliest conversations we had at an editorial retreat was about diversity, and you just look around the room and it’s all white guys. And we talked about the diversity of writers, diversity of editors. In 2020, you don’t have to convince anyone that diversity is good. Everyone is on board. You just have to be this nagging presence to make sure it keeps happening. At GQ, I literally did a survey and kept a tally of how many writers of color we used, how many women we were using as writers. It was an eternal thing. You just have to keep reminding people because everyone likes it in a meeting, and then in practice, they forget.

Vox Media is generally pretty thoughtful about this stuff. What’s interesting about The Verge is gender diversity is pretty much down the middle, which is impressive for a tech site. I don’t know many other tech sites like that. I think our racial diversity is pretty lacking. We have an editor-in-chief who is a person of color, we have me, and then in every other meeting, usually everyone else is a white person. We’re working on that, but we just have to keep nagging.

SH: So many of the themes in the book — tech, humanity, racism — overlap with what you are doing as a features editor at The Verge. Did writing the book help you in your work at The Verge?

KN: A lot of ideas in the book preceded my job at The Verge and probably encouraged me to take this job. But a lot of it started as notes. I started writing it when I was working in tech before I was in journalism — I was at a startup called Oyster at the time, which would later get acquired by Google, where I also worked. It started with a bunch of things that I wanted to express but didn’t think I could through journalism. The kind of racism that exists in the book is this pretty minute, day-to-day racism. For a lot of people of a certain privilege — me and all of my friends of color in New York — we are of a kind of middle class. Our lives aren’t threatened every day, but we are bothered. I guess the word is microaggressions, right? A lot of the book is about living with that and how you deal with it, but it’s never life-threatening.

SH: For journalists who might mostly do celebrity profiles, how do they pivot into these bigger features that can feel kind of overwhelming?

KN: It should feel urgent to them. That feels so important to me because it gives me confidence that the writer really cares about this story, and more importantly, the people that this story is about. They’re not just sources to them. You see it in places like The Intercept. They do a lot of good work, but a source is a source and they’re just constantly burning them because they just aren’t careful enough. They just want that newsy scoop, and that comes at the expense of the people they’re supposed to be representing and protecting. So that’s a big part of it.

SH: One of the features you’ve commissioned was about Ramsey Orta and the other was about Hmong Americans using conference calls to stay connected. I think people get tripped up over tech reporting and tech journalism; they think it has to be about Google and Microsoft. Could you speak more about these stories?

KN: Yeah, I think that’s a really good point, and it’s true. A lot of the pitches are just too tech-focused. It doesn’t have to be about tech and the way we think about it. It’s so easy to make something interact with technology, even tangentially. That’s totally fine. If I get a great story and I don’t see the tech angle immediately, I’ll just finagle it later.

Honestly, the reality is [that] the further away from tech a story is, the more excited I get about it.

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