Catherine Rampell,
New York Times economics journalist and editor of the Economix blog on nytimes.com, kicked off the week by visiting Hill on Monday, October 25, 2010. Ms. Rampell was the second guest featured in the 2010-2011 Writers at Work series.
Ms. Rampell spent her day on campus giving presentations to Hill English classes, offering details about what her day as an Economix blog editor entails. She explained what kind of stories she posts and how her readers respond to the blog. Students interested in economics were shown charts and graphs featuring incorrect data; Ms. Rampell then demonstrated how the same set of numbers could be interpreted in nearly opposite ways.
She continued to discuss the art of an enterprise story; that is a story that is not directly connected to the news. Having had experience writing enterprise stories for the
Times front page, Ms. Rampell talked about the genesis, reporting, and writing of the story. Finally, Ms. Rampell discussed the public relations that go behind the scenes of a story.
Catherine Rampell currently writes about economics for
The New York Times and edits the Economix blog on nytimes.com. She graduated from Andover and Princeton,
summa cum laude. Before joining the
Times, she wrote for
The Washington Post editorial pages and financial section and for
The Chronicle of Higher Education. Her work has also appeared in
Slate, Smithsonian Magazine, The Village Voice, USA Today, NPR, msnbc.com,
The Miami Herald,
The Dallas Morning News and various other publications.