This story originally appeared in La Fronde’s July 30 issue.
One of my favorite parts of these Maxed Out interviews is hearing how people ended up in their current jobs. Most of the people I’ve talked to got into media in some unconventional way, and it’s actually pretty rare to find someone who’s done the straight only-media path. Amy Farley was working in the book publishing business before transitioning into the high-flying world of magazines, where she’s now an executive editor for Fast Company. For this week’s Maxed Out, I chatted with Amy about how she made the career pivot and what she looks for when hiring writers. She also came through with some top-tier book recommendations.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You were at Travel + Leisure before this role. How did you end up at Fast Company, and are there lessons from that first job you still carry with you?
My entrance into media was sort of through the back door. I studied English literature and religious studies, worked in book publishing briefly, and really thought I wanted to end up somewhere like The New Yorker, working with authors. But I realized that's a hard road, and I picked up a copy of Travel + Leisure and discovered Joan Didion had written for them — and thought, oh, you don't have to go to The New Yorker to work with writers like that. Back then Travel + Leisure and Condé Nast Traveler were the two bibles of travel — huge advertiser budgets, incredibly authoritative, which meant they could attract extraordinary writers, because everyone wants to go on a trip and write about it. My original boss there, Nathan Lump, who's now at National Geographic, used to describe travel writing as an act of contortion — it reads like a travel narrative, but underneath it's deeply reported, built around a real thesis. We had Richard Holbrooke writing for us through the lens of geopolitics. It was an incredible time — big budgets, beautiful art, incredible writers.
Then Instagram came along and the whole business model shifted with the rise of the influencer. I'd moved toward covering the business side of travel by then — Airbnb, the disruptive startups — and after a while I wanted a new challenge. Going to Fast Company felt like drinking from a fire hose those first few months. I knew travel inside and out, but travel is one small slice of everything Fast Company covers. I was overseeing the front of the book — a dozen stories an issue. We had to cover Hollywood, beauty, retail and obviously what social media giants were doing. It was extremely difficult, but also extremely rewarding because every time I went to work on a new story, I sort of had to familiarize myself with that industry, become conversant enough to direct a reporter, but also be humble enough to let them be the expert.
I had two small kids at the time, and I felt like every night I just was sitting there reading absolutely everything I could about every industry and just trying to absorb information. But I came out the other side, and it's fantastic.
Looking back at everything you've published, what's the story that sticks with you most?
We did a piece back in 2018 on Juul. They'd actually applied to be part of our Most Innovative Companies program, and we didn't include them, because we understood the addictive nature of the product and how teen-focused the marketing was. But it was fascinating that they saw themselves as this innovative company, so we dug in — and there was this whole story underneath about the founder being a smoker who set out to build a smoking-cessation product. It started from real tech optimism and turned into something much darker, and we still see the implications of that today. To me that's a paradigm Fast Company story — approach a company skeptically and critically, but also genuinely ask them to tell you their founding story, because it's usually more interesting than you'd expect.
Two more recent ones: Carvell Wallace, an incredible writer, did a piece on Ryan Coogler's studio, Proximity Media — looking at how ‘Sinners’ had this outsized success, and going inside the studio to understand how they build these big cultural moments around very specific, culturally rooted stories. They've got a great podcast, incredible soundtrack work with their composer, and they use tech like IMAX to create these outsized theatrical moments. And then Mark Wilson — who's since left to go work at an AI startup — wrote a feature on Chili's and its unlikely emergence as basically the hottest restaurant chain in America, all the cheese-pull videos and mukbang creators. He went inside and looked at what he called the hundred small decisions that got them there. That's classic Fast Company to me — something breaks through in the culture, and we go under the hood to understand the mechanics of how it actually happened.
I remember reading that Chili’s story. Didn’t realize it had that big of a cult following, but I respect the culture, as someone who grew up on it in the Midwest. When you’re hiring writers, what qualities do you look for?
For a publication our size, where we cover basically everything, we're looking for team players. People who can pop up on a podcast, show up at events, help judge Most Innovative Companies and also go do a long, deep feature — because we're still plotting a print magazine, literally assigning winter issue stories that won't run until December. That takes a very particular kind of forward planning, especially now, when everything shifts so fast with AI.
At the same time, we're in the Substack era, dealing with the Google traffic decline everyone's facing, so people who have their own community they're cultivating matter a lot too. It's hard to find someone who's genuinely both: a team player and a singular voice with their own following. It's a sliding scale; you don't need to be great at both. But that's the skill set a lot of publications are still looking for — people who'll roll up their sleeves where needed, but who also know their own voice and can connect with a community when their stories come out.
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Let’s get into your media recommendations! To start, in Maxed Out tradition, we like to ask people how much time they’re spending on their phone. What’s your count these days?
I checked yesterday, actually. I was on vacation for two weeks, so I got it down to around three hours a day, which still felt high for a vacation — though some of that was checking in on stories at work. Normally, I'd guess it's closer to five hours a day, with an asterisk, because a lot of that is Spotify while I'm editing.
Three hours might be a new record! The average is usually around eight or nine hours.
Wow, really? Didn’t realize it was that high for most people!
Where online are you spending your time? Also curious to hear your book recs too, since you used to be so deep in that world.
These probably won't surprise anyone in tech media, but Hard Fork is great, and Decoder with Nilay Patel — he's a phenomenal interviewer, even on a company I only have a passing interest in, he finds a way to make the strategy conversation interesting. I also love TBPN — I listen to their 30-minute version at 1.5x in the morning, and it's like drinking a Mountain Dew for breakfast. Not particularly healthy, but it gets my mind turning and somehow makes me more able to absorb everything else for the day.
For newsletters, I still think Dave Pell's NextDraft is phenomenal — the man can attach a pun to a headline like nobody else, and he's got a great eye for the best stories of the day and who's covering them best. I also read Ryan Broderick's Garbage Day and Casey Lewis's After School fairly regularly. One thing I do is subscribe to a lot of newsletters, and then when I'm working on a story about a particular company or industry, I'll search my inbox for old references to it — I don't know if that's a normal hack, but it's sort of my mysterious relationship with newsletters.
And then books — I studied literature and worked in book publishing and always thought I'd land back in that world somehow. That didn't happen, but a few years ago I made a commitment to reignite my relationship with books. I read paper books but have also gotten into audiobooks, which helps when I'm cleaning or cooking. Right now I'm listening to Andrew Sean Greer's Villa Coco — set in Italy in the '90s, light but delightful, makes me want to go eat my way through the country. Also The Wayfinder by Adam Johnson, set in the South Pacific — I'd have to double check the era, but it's transporting. You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, which tells Cortés's first encounter with Mexico from the Mexican perspective — it's dreamy, psychedelic, extraordinary, though a little tough as an audiobook because of all the Aztec names, which are hard to track without seeing them written out. And Angel Down by Daniel Kraus, this extraordinary WWI novel written as a single sentence — dizzying, totally gory, but I loved it.
On paper, I'm part of a book club with two friends where we only read international literature — we just finished Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah, a Tanzanian author, completely captivating. And I just read Last Night in Brooklyn by Xochitl Gonzalez, which is sort of a Gatsby retelling set in Fort Greene in the 2000s. It’s super fun. I lived in Williamsburg back then and thought it was the center of the universe, so I was a little disappointed none of my old bars and restaurants made it into the book — but it brought me back to Brooklyn two decades ago.
I feel like a lot of the newsletters I read I associate purely with work, so books are how I cleanse my palate. And this might make me seem old, but I'd be remiss not to mention it — I close out most nights listening to the PBS NewsHour podcast. Very old school, and I usually don't get through the whole broadcast, but there's something centering about it, brushing my teeth listening to the day's news through that staid, authoritative PBS voice. Twitter batters you around; PBS feels calmer, more like reading the news the next day in a newspaper, with some distance. Judy Woodruff's voice got me through the pandemic, honestly.
Correction: An earlier version of this story stated that Travel + Leisure published David Halberstam. The author was Richard Holbrooke.