Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Maureen Dowd of The New York Times and Ashley Parker of The Washington Post spoke about navigating the journalism industry and growing as writers at the Kelly Writers House on Monday.
Dowd is a longtime columnist for the Times and a mentor to Parker, who is a senior national political correspondent for the Washington Post. Penn English professor Paul Hendrickson — a former Washington Post reporter who taught Parker when she studied at Penn — hosted the conversation in front of an audience of around 100 attendees.
Parker graduated with an English and communications degree from Penn, where she was also a reporter for The Daily Pennsylvanian and a features editor for 34th Street Magazine. She then worked as Dowd’s research assistant before pursuing her own career, later winning a Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Dowd became an opinion columnist for the Times in 1995 and earned the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1999. Hendrickson introduced her as “the most feared voice in all of American commentary journalism” and someone who can make “grown men and women shiver in their boots.”
Dowd described how her upbringing in her hometown of Washington, D.C. influenced her identity as a writer. She attributed her fearlessness both to her father, who was a police officer on Capitol Hill, and to her mother, who always tried to find a way to write despite being discouraged by men in the journalism industry.
Dowd said that two of the secrets of her success are never forgetting where she came from and channeling her mother’s "Irish humor."
“My mother once told me that I’m much funnier in print than in person,” Dowd said.
She added that the circumstances surrounding her upbringing also heavily shaped her writing. “I grew up in a very male world, one of police and the Catholic Church,” she said. “Maybe that’s where I learned how to tweak people in power.”
During the event, Parker read to the crowd one of Dowd's recent columns on the need to modernize the Catholic Church.
Parker grew up near D.C. in the Bethesda area and attended Walt Whitman High School. She said that she loved writing in general from a young age, but particularly enjoyed journalism as the stories she wrote already had plots.
Upon graduating from Penn, Parker worked as Dowd’s assistant for five years, which she said is an unusually long period of time to be an assistant in the journalism field.
Dowd said that she tried to have Parker promoted and constantly highlighted her talents to leadership. However, male editors and bosses refused to “do a favor for a girl friend” in the male-dominated journalism industry at the time, according to Dowd. She added that she witnessed discriminatory treatment from her own bosses, including in the form of a $60,000 raise given to one of her male counterparts simply because “he was married and had kids.”
After experiencing the treatment of women in the industry, Dowd said that she took pride in becoming a mentor to aspiring female journalists.
Parker emphasized that Dowd taught her to always make sure “every single word is gripping,” in order to “grab the reader by the neck.” She also referenced Dowd’s ability to notice even the most trivial details, whether about a pet or the color of their shoes, which would often make for insightful contributions as opposed to rehashing a “boring line about [a politician's] policy.”
When asked about her own secrets to successful writing, Dowd told the audience to “dare to be trivial.”
Among the audience members were 1978 College graduate Eliot Kaplan and 1979 College graduate Stephen Fried. The two alumni co-founded the Norah Magid Mentorship Prize, which awards $5,000 to a Penn senior each year for their reporting and nonfiction writing. Parker won the prize when she was a senior at Penn, and the co-founders said that they still remember her talent from her days as a student and came to see her speak almost two decades later.
Parker provided advice to the audience on working in the highly competitive environment of the news industry.
“You have to be incredibly relentless and incredibly persistent,” she said. “You can’t get discouraged easily, because if you do, then you shouldn't do journalism.”
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