💥 AJ Willingham is full of surprises

AJ Willingham says she’s used to being misunderstood. She gets surprised looks when she reveals that she’s dabbled in taxidermy, that her dream job is to work in a water treatment plant or that she’s run in more than a dozen races at Disney World.

And, just like a lot of her other personal obsessions, she is definitely going to be writing about it.

Willingham is best known as the longtime writer of CNN’s most popular newsletter, 5 Things – a role she recently handed over to writer Alexandra Meeks. She’ll still be involved with the newsletter and will also continue to write The Good Stuff weekly newsletter, which she proudly calls “her baby.”

Willingham has always had a unique talent as a writer for connecting with her audience – and that’s probably why we’ve gotten a few requests in our Inside CNN inbox to profile her.

In a hat tip to her 5 Things role, here are five things she shared with us during a recent conversation, in her own words (edited for length):

Her favorite stories that she’s written:

There was a conversation about how will we cover the last season of "Game of Thrones" (in 2019) and I was like, “I want to write recaps.”

Some of my editors didn’t watch the show and were kind of like “meh” -- but I said, “I swear people will love it,” and they agreed.

The reason I think it worked is that – you can read a recap anywhere. (As a writer,) you have to think about how people watch a show like that, that they obsess over. They watch the episode and then they immediately want to know what other people think about it – they want to have that conversation, but not only that, they want to make jokes about it.

AJ Willingham in her Valkyrie costume at the CNN Center filing a story on Dragon Con.

Her work that she’s most proud of:

The interactive (story) we did in 2020 looking at how American police departments access nonlethal body armor and weapons, how they use them in protests and how the whole process is extremely unregulated.

It started with a question. Sarah-Grace Mankarious -- lead designer on this project -- is in London, and she was watching footage of the protests in the US (after George Floyd’s murder) and she and some friends from Europe had questions about what they were seeing. The way that US police geared up for this and used nonlethal munitions was unfamiliar to a European audience.

We were able to hit that mark where we were able to say, “Yes, this is important, yes, this is very difficult, but you are going to walk away from this (story) with more knowledge and a better understanding of this extremely complicated topic.”

(Willingham and Mankarious were part of a team that won an Emmy for outstanding interactive media for that interactive last fall)

How she got started as a writer:

I started as an intern for CNN in 2007, and then I got hired as a video journalist and I knew right from the beginning that I wanted to write. I got lucky enough to get placed on "Morning Express with Robin Meade" (on HLN TV).

When HLN started a new website, HLNTV.com, I was hired as a production assistant but very quickly started writing.

The creative spirit there was just incredible. It was the people at HLN who really taught me that respect for the audience and who taught me to meet people where they are.

Her advice to aspiring writers:

Find a way to very early on in your career identify your voice by finding the things that fascinate you and are important to you. How do you personally communicate and talk about and learn about things that you are passionate about. If you follow that path, you will find where your natural voice sits.

Never look at an experience and feel like you have nothing to relate to that. There is always something that you will be able to recognize in yourself. By doing that, you have created that connection with the reader that is going to resonate with them.

There was a story I wrote about the (2016) terror attack in Nice, France, where the guy drove a truck through a parade. I think it was one of the first stories where people started to take my writing seriously and saw what it meant to take a voice that most people would attribute to lighter stuff and see what it looks like telling a more serious story.

What she’s working on next:

I’m going to be doing more work in my original role as a senior writer with CNN Digital’s Culture team. I really like exploring different niches of culture that people may not be aware of – those pockets of little human obsessions that are just so fascinating and that really help us understand each other.