In a new Sunday Long Read podcast episode, journalist Bradley Hope chats about his recent story for WIRED: a deep dive into the deadly sinking of the superyacht Bayesian, which sank off the coast of Italy during a storm last year, killing seven people — including the vessel’s billionaire owner, Michael Lynch.
The yacht’s tragic, and initially unexplained, sinking immediately became fodder for conspiracy theorists. This year, Hope painstakingly unraveled the full story for WIRED.
In a wide-ranging interview with the SLR, Hope gives behind-the-scenes details about the reporting of that story, and also weighs in on the value of writing across different mediums, the pros and cons of AI, and his hope for the future of narrative writing.
Hope is a journalist, a bestselling author, and a Pulitzer Prize finalist. He is also the co-founder of the production company Brazen.
The following are highlights from the SLR’s conversation with Hope.
The full version of this podcast episode is out now! You can listen to it on Spotify or Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
On what he tells acquaintances he does for a living, considering his many titles:
“That’s actually an interesting question. To some extent I might change it a little bit depending on the person, but the most common thing I say is that I’m a journalist. But I say I’m an independent journalist and I also help run a production company, and I’m operating in a lot of different mediums, whether it’s long-form — as books or magazine articles — but also as podcasts, documentaries, film and television. So it’s one of those things where you can keep going if you aren’t careful.”
On why he chose to write about billionaire Mike Lynch’s death and the sinking of his yacht for WIRED:
”When the accident happened, I was sort of mesmerized by it, just like probably everybody who was paying attention. But I didn’t do very much on it. And then I just had this experience with the editor at WIRED where we were talking about this, and it just suddenly struck me that there was still an extraordinary journalistic opportunity with this story. Because, you know, it was a classic story. It was caught up in the news cycle. There was lots of news coverage, and then there were a few enterprise, kind of investigative, stories, but none of them really tried to step back and figure out: What exactly is going on here? What’s the story of this? How do we make sense of this?”
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On writing about a topic wrapped up in conspiracy theories:
“I think in a way, I didn’t really even get too caught up in the conspiracy theories of it, and I found in the reporting that it was very easy to very quickly establish that none of those things have any basis whatsoever. There’s just not a single shred of any kind of evidence to suggest there was anything other than what it was — and I think it was really the result of more lazy [tabloid] journalism that [the conspiracy theories] even became a thing. As is often the case, even when a book comes out about a topic that you’ve already read about in the newspaper, your first thought is like, ‘Oh, I already know this story.’ But inevitably, if you pick up a book, if it’s well done you’re sort of blown away by how little you actually did know.”
On the value of writing stories that take longer to report in the digital age:
“You have to sort of signal to [readers] that there’s something new here. You know, saying that this is the definitive story of the thing that you’ve read fragments about in the past, or you’ve watched kind of like weird YouTube videos about. So, yeah, I do think it’s really important. And this is what I hope for with magazines, is that they can keep doing that. Because not everything deserves to be a book all the time, and books take years, whereas magazine stories take less time than that. So this is a really important part of the content life cycle.”
On the fluidity of journalism beats:
“I do believe in beats. I mean, I’ve had many beats over my career; I started off as a police reporter and I did crime [reporting], and I went through many phases and really embraced the beats. I just lived and breathed them. And I think that is really important to being able to find good stories. Because if you’re just sitting around and you’re looking for a good story, you won’t really know where to look. You have to have something guiding you, some sort of a path or some sort of a compass.
But I think by this point, for me, I’ve also just kept writing about different random things. So if I say to people that I just look for stories that I really like about people, in general at this point no one’s pushing back on me when I try to do that. But it is a little confusing, even for myself, about what I should be doing with my time, because I do find myself chasing many different trails all the time. There’s nothing I love to do more than report and I could just report all day, but at some point you have to kind of buckle down and get the job done.”
On how AI won’t be able to replace narrative writing:
“There’s something about narrative journalism that is very biased, ironically. And AI is really bad at being biased because by nature, by its engineering, it is very universal. And so if you try to write every story in a universal way, it always kind of falls flat; something about it feels like something’s missing from it.
If we’re talking about things we’re interested in, the types of stories we’re interested in — AI doesn’t have interests. Somebody has to tell it to be interested in something. And this concept of what you’re interested in is so nuanced and so specific, and has such a spectrum to it and a tinge to it, that it’s really hard to figure out how you could bestow that upon an alien intelligence. So there’s this feeling that I have that things that are authored are always going to be still in demand, because ultimately we’re writing for other people. AI is great at summarizing information and doing many amazing things, no doubt about it, but I don’t think it’s very good at this.”
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Compiled by Amanda Ulrich. Photo of yachts in Syracuse harbor by Ввласенко/Wikimedia Commons.