Q&A With Kaylen Jackson
Kaylen Jackson is a reporter, multimedia journalist, and content creator pursuing her M.A. in Magazine & Digital Storytelling at NYU, with bylines in The Athletic (The New York Times), Bronx Times, CT Mirror, and PoliticsNY. She covers culture, politics, sports, and human interest stories.
A: I actually live on the block where Blazer opened. In November I went outside to cheer on runners in the New York City Marathon and I kept noticing this construction happening on my corner. I could see one of the owners, Debeny, literally out there painting the fence herself. And during the race they were handing out bagels and they finally put their sign up, and I just stood there thinking, wow there's a women's sports bar, on my block, in Brooklyn. That's incredible. Then I did the research and found out it would be Brooklyn's first. And I genuinely couldn't believe that. Brooklyn is so progressive and so into sports, why has this never existed here? That's when I found out women's sports bars are actually a really new phenomenon, basically post-COVID. There were basically none before. And there's this whole separate issue of male sports bars just not playing women's games. So what started as me noticing construction on my corner turned into this much bigger story about community, entrepreneurship, and why women's sports are finally getting their own space.
Q: How did the pitching process go for you?
A: I actually work at The Athletic. The Athletic is owned by The New York Times Company. We have a women's sports editor there, Emily Olson, and there had actually been a piece done ranking the best women's sports cities in the U.S. New York ranked lower than expected, partly because at the time, Brooklyn didn't have a women's sports bar. It was mentioned almost as a gap. So I reached out to Emily and said, hey, that gap is literally being filled on my block right now. I have interviews lined up with the owners. There's a story here. And she said yes. It was really that simple once I had the news peg and the access.
Q: What did you learn during the editing process?
So much. This was my first time being edited by a major outlet at that level and it was genuinely humbling in the best way. I had written way too much! I had so much to say about the bar, but also about the history of women's sports bars nationally, the streaming rights issues, the pay gap, entrepreneurship. And the edit really forced me to kill my darlings. Sentences I loved, gone. Whole sections I thought were beautiful, restructured. The thing I was most protective of was my opener, which was Debeny telling me about going to a sports bar and waiting for a Liberty game that never came on, and telling the owner Liberty would be the team to win something for NYC one day and deciding in that moment she wanted to open her own place. I was glad the editor agreed that should be the lead and that stayed. But the order changed completely. They moved the description of the bar earlier, let the reader be in the space before getting into the bigger context. When I read the final version I thought, that was so much better, although I initially thought context should come first. The biggest lesson was just to trust your editor. They see things you can't see when you're too close to it.
Q: What advice would you give to journalists trying to get published?
A: Stop waiting until it's perfect. I used to think I needed a finished draft, every interview done, everything figured out before I could pitch. But editors don't want your finished draft, they want your idea. You might just have one interview set up and a strong instinct that there's a story there. Pitch it. The editor is there to help you shape it. Also — time matters more than perfection. Being fast and responsive to a news peg will get you further than spending six months on something Pulitzer-worthy. Know the publication before you pitch. Have they covered this before? Is there a gap? I could see that The Athletic had written about women's sports cities but never about women's sports bars specifically. I was filling a gap they already knew existed. Make the pitch short — two or three paragraphs, a news peg, what interviews you have, how fast you can turn it around. That's it.
