Zolan Kanno-Youngs — Reporting on the White House
New York Times White House correspondent Zolan Kanno-Youngs on the realities of covering presidential power in a polarized media landscape.
Why we picked this
Kanno-Youngs covers the White House for the Times at one of the stranger moments in the relationship between the press and presidential power — his first-person account of what that access actually looks like is worth 90 minutes of anyone's time.
Zolan Kanno-Youngs has spent years navigating the briefing room, the stakeouts, and the off-record conversations that constitute the modern White House beat. As a correspondent for the New York Times, he has reported on immigration, national security, and the daily machinery of executive power through administrations with very different relationships to the press.
This ThoughtGallery conversation invites him to step back from the byline and speak candidly about the craft itself: how you report when sources are cautious, how you weigh access against independence, and what the job looks like from inside a press corps operating under unusually high political scrutiny.
The virtual format opens this conversation to anyone who wants to understand not just what happens in Washington, but how the people tasked with explaining it actually do their work.