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Picking 13 New Voices From 20,000 Applicants

Lindsey Underwood, the editor of The Edit.Credit...Earl Wilson/The New York Times

Times Insider delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how news, features and opinion come together at The New York Times.

The idea sounded simple enough. The Edit, a New York Times newsletter for college students and recent graduates, needed a reboot. The newsletter had been around for two years, and up until that point it was a curated collection of Times stories that students might be interested in. It was fine. Several people around the building, including myself, thought we could do more with it.

After some brainstorming, the “simple” idea came up. What if we found college students and recent graduates to write stories for the newsletter about the things on their minds? Who better to write about what they’re going through than the people going through it?

So in January we posted a job opening announcement saying that The Times was looking for new voices for The Edit. Within an hour of the post going up, I had a feeling this wasn’t going to be so simple after all.

[Sign up for The Edit newsletter here.]

Applications began flooding my inbox faster than I could read them. The announcement was going viral on social media. By the deadline two weeks later, 20,000 people from around the world had sent in applications. It was really exciting that so many people were interested in writing for this little-known newsletter. Then we had to figure out how to go through them all.

Yes, all of them. It wasn’t so long ago that I was in the same position a lot of the applicants were in. I graduated from the University of Missouri in 2010 and have been at The Times off and on for three years. I remember applying for so many jobs when I was graduating and thinking that nobody on the other end was even reading the applications I’d spent a lot of time on. It was important to me to read them all so that everyone could have as fair a shot as possible. A team of more than 30 people from around the newsroom came to the rescue.

Over several months, we worked our way through the pile. Applicants were initially asked to respond to one of three prompts. It’s hard to say specifically what we were looking for, but we knew we wanted the newsletter to reflect a range of experiences and that we needed writers with unique ideas. Many of the applicants wrote about the same themes, particularly in response to one prompt that asked what frustrated them about how people write about their generation. I can’t tell you how many people wrote about avocado toast or argued that people their age aren’t lazy. Both are fair and valid answers, but people who took on something different had a better chance of standing out.

We narrowed the pool to a group of about 80 finalists. That group was asked to respond to a second prompt, then we narrowed that group to about 25. I held video interviews with each of them to get a better sense of who they were and what they would contribute to The Edit. Seeing their faces and hearing their stories in some ways made it more difficult to decide. When you’re dealing with 20,000 applications, sometimes you can forget that there are real people on the other side.

Ultimately, we selected 13 writers to work with this school year. I’m so excited about the group. We wanted to be able to tell the widest range of stories possible, so we looked for people from a variety of backgrounds. For example, it was important to reflect geographic diversity, so we have writers from California, Alabama, Berlin, Brazil and elsewhere. We also didn’t want all of them to come from elite schools, because that doesn’t reflect reality for many students. They’ve really all taken different paths — one of them is a pastor in a small town in Illinois and another is a cellist in Seattle.

This week, we published the first edition of the relaunched newsletter with an essay by a University of Oklahoma student who is conflicted about supporting his school’s football team because of the problems with the sport. In future weeks, a writer might take on something in the news, the challenge of looking for a job or just growing up!

My goals for The Edit go back to that original, simple idea: to give students and recent graduates the space to talk about the issues that are on their minds. Maybe it’s not that complicated after all.

Keep up with Times Insider stories on Twitter, via the Reader Center: @ReaderCenter.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: 20,000 Applicants, 13 New Voices. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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