A Talk With Dan Barry

“When I hang out with my college buddies, what do my friends want to do?” New York Times columnist Dan Barry asks a room full of New York University journalism students. “They want to hear what I did, not talk about their jobs at General Electric or Ernst & Young.”

Barry, 48, is a former ditch-digger turned columnist who graduated NYU with a master’s degree in journalism. He has been writing for the Times since 1995, and his “About New York” column has appeared in each Wednesday and Saturday’s paper since 2003. In his column, Barry tends to focus on the stories that capture a moment in the city, seemingly small moments that often serve as microcosms to explain New York as a whole. And even though he has written about the tragedies of September 11 and Hurricane Katrina, you only see tears in his eyes when he talks about the actress who serves wine and cheese dressed as the Statue of Liberty, at the Marriott in Queens; or when he tells the story of a man who saved a stranger’s life, pulling him out of the water to safety in Coney Island and hugging surrounding New Yorkers after the danger had passed. Barry remembers every intimate detail so well that you believe the tale could be his own.

“The only thing worse than a story poorly told,” Barry says, “is a story untold. If you get inside the skin of a person, you can open up the world.”

Look around Barry’s office, and you will see assorted framed certificates on the walls – among them a George Polk Award, a Pulitzer Prize, an American Society of Newspaper Editors Award for deadline reporting. But one day Barry opened his mail to find a 5th place certificate for “Dan Berry,” with a $150 check enclosed, from the Bowling Writers of America for a feature story that he did not even know had been submitted to any contest. The certificate and the check were promptly framed and added to the wall.

“I like to write about funny moments,” Barry says. “I’ve written so much about tragedy and loss that I look forward to those stories.”