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David Segal

I’m an all-purpose feature writer, which means I jump from topic to topic, generally taking deep dives of between 2,000 to 5,000 words. I’ve written about the chess cheating scandal, music streaming fraud, the world’s most valuable fine art photograph, a cleaning paste beloved on TikTok, a village in England struggling to keep its last pub open — and so on. I once spent most of the year writing about the business of law school. Another year I wrote a bunch of stories about the business of drug rehab. Is there a through line to all these stories? I hope so. I’m trying to write yarns that involve intriguing people. That’s the goal, at least.

I was raised in the Rhode Island suburbs and in a small town in Vermont. I realized that I wanted to be a reporter in my mid-20s, when I lived with a journalist in a group house in Washington, D.C. I watched him work and thought, “That seems like a good job.” I wrote a bunch of stories for the Washington City Paper, then landed a two-year stint at the Washington Monthly magazine. From there, I got an editing gig at the Washington Post, which became a writing job in the Business section. A few years later, I made an odd leap — to the Style section, where I worked for five years as the pop music critic. From there I went to the paper’s New York City bureau, where I started writing about all sorts of oddities, personalities and trends. In 2009, I started at The Times. For six years — starting 2017 and ending in the summer of 2023 — I was stationed in London and reported from 23 different countries.

The highest ethical standards are embedded in the DNA of The Times. That means abiding by a long list of rules that are second nature. Promises made — about whether a conversation is off the record, for example — are promises kept. When it comes to fact-checking, I tend to be overly cautious. Maybe annoyingly so. All reporters have a passion for accuracy and I’m no different. If you have shared a bunch of facts and details with me, I will confirm them all until you’re a little tired of hearing from me. We reporters tend also to be eager to hear all sides of the story. This is not just about fairness, although that is a huge part of it. A story informed by all sides is always more interesting. Always.

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