The Lone Journalist

I hated traveling in packs as a journalist, not because I'm a lone wolf but because it seemed unlikely to me that I'd get the best story with so many other reporters jostling for access. So I'd take a beat that was considered a bit of a cul-de-sac--poverty, for example, or "social services" as it was called at The Baltimore Sun--and play happily by myself. [The image of a pack of raucous reporters shouting questions at a key figure in a sensational crime story is not a good one.]

Laura Lippman, The New York Times Book Review, August 11, 2019