The Kicker: Recent Episodes
Columbia Journalism Review
Columbia Journalism Review's mission is to encourage excellence in journalism in the service of a free society.
A friend recently posted a photo on Instagram of a giant zucchini harvested from her backyard in Chicago, with a caption that she needed recipes that use a ton of zucchini. I knew exactly where to send her. The best food blog on the internet, Smitten Kitchen, has thirty-seven zucchini recipes in its archives, ranging from quesadillas to latkes to chocolate bread. I sent my friend the link to a zucchini butter spaghetti recipe from five years ago—an internet classic.
This summer, Smitten Kitchen celebrates its twentieth anniversary. Since Deb Perelman started the site, in 2006, she’s weathered wave after wave of changes to how food writing on the internet works. A former art therapist and (briefly) tech reporter, she started writing online before Instagram or TikTok existed, and before Twitter and YouTube were part of the job. She was part of an ecosystem of home-cooking blogs, all of which would link to one another, and most of which faded away years ago. SEO boomed, then crashed as a result of Google algorithm changes. Now many people get their recipes from ChatGPT. Yet Smitten Kitchen keeps going, with Perelman still doing almost everything herself.
I learned to cook from Smitten Kitchen, so I was thrilled to talk to Perelman about what’s changed and what hasn’t during her twenty years in food blogging. (Her passionate monologue about the rise of AI in internet writing is an all-timer.) Listen below, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Show notes:
About Smitten Kitchen, Deb Perelman, Smitten Kitchen.
Frequently asked questions, Deb Perelman, Smitten Kitchen.
Spring panzanella, Deb Perelman, Smitten Kitchen.
Zucchini butter spaghetti, Deb Perelman, Smitten Kitchen.
Credits:
Host: Megan Greenwell
Producer: Amanda Darrach
When The Barbed Wire debuted, in 2024, it promised “something different: a site that combines the best of savvy, new-model online journalism with Texas’s deep—and very old—association with progressive ideas.” Its goal, Olivia Messer, the editor in chief, wrote at the time, was to reach the millions of Texans who weren’t reading their local newspaper or any statewide news outlet, and to do it in a way that created a new hybrid for-profit/nonprofit revenue model for journalism.
The Barbed Wire lasted for a little under two years, publishing 725 stories. This spring, it ran out of money. All five journalists on staff lost their jobs. (Two occasional newsletters remain, written by freelancers.) The hybrid business model, it turned out, had made it more difficult to bring in philanthropy money; the roster of paid subscribers never grew big enough to keep the operation afloat.
It’s easier, and more fun, to focus on what’s working in journalism: new startups, growing newsrooms, initiatives at major outlets. But I also think it’s important to dissect what hasn’t worked. In our conversation, Messer was admirably candid about what factors brought down The Barbed Wire. Listen below, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Show notes:
Goodbye for Now, Olivia Messer, Bluesky.
Our Independent Newsroom Was Built on a Ferocious, Delusional Sense of Hope. Help Us Keep It Going, Olivia Messer, The Barbed Wire.
Are You There, Texas? It’s Me, Olivia, Olivia Messer, The Barbed Wire.
‘Gods in the Building’: How the Texas Senate Buries Sexual Harassment Complaints and Enables Bad Actors, Olivia Messer and Cara Kelly, Texas Monthly.
‘This Is Not Hazing. This Is Rape’: Inside a Texas Town’s Football Nightmare, Olivia Messer, Daily Beast.
Credits:
Host: Megan Greenwell
Producer: Amanda Darrach
Since last year’s uber-competitive New York City mayoral primary, my favorite election night activity has been watching Hell Gate’s live broadcasts. CNN it is not. The Hell Gate show is available only on YouTube; correspondents hold tiny mics with a card bearing the company logo; the set includes a disco ball. During the most recent stream, during the state’s congressional primary last month, Nick Pinto, a Hell Gate reporter, delivered coverage from his bike while commuting between candidate watch parties. The effect is delightful, as the team has managed to turn one of the most staid forms of news into something lively and fun that also offers some of the smartest political coverage in the city.
In just over four years, lively, fun, and smart have become the Hell Gate brand. The site, which is worker-owned and subscription-powered, boasts ambitious investigations—such as this year’s Courts of Contempt project, about the city’s broken process for selecting judges—as well as coverage of the goofy and absurd. The team also hosts events, makes memes, and generally offers something entirely different from any other local news outlet around.
I talked to Max Rivlin-Nadler, a co-owner and copublisher of Hell Gate, about professionalizing the livestreams without sacrificing personality; how reporting on Zohran Mamdani is different from covering his predecessor, Eric Adams; and the site’s coming expansion of its cultural coverage. Listen below, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Show notes:
Courts of Contempt, Hell Gate and Type Investigations.
2026 Primary Election — LIVE with HellGate, Hell Gate.
The Hell Gate NYC 2025 Primary Night Livestream, Hell Gate.
HellGate election graphics, Hell Gate.
Tall Ships. TALL SHIIIIIIIPS, Hell Gate.
HellGate 2025 Annual Report, Hell Gate.One Hellish Night, Lauren Watson, CJR Credits:
Host: Megan Greenwell
Producer: Amanda Darrach
Generations of local journalists mostly took for granted their ability to access elected officials. Talking to the local newspaper or TV station was one of the only ways to get the word out, so politicians didn’t have much choice—even if they were mad at the coverage.
It’s not quite so simple these days. A mayor can talk directly to constituents through social media, or through influencers friendly to their politics. Anti-press sentiment is rampant across the political spectrum, leading some politicians to boycott reporters altogether. As Kyle Paoletta reported in a feature for CJR’s recent Access Issue, elected officials across the political spectrum seem less likely than ever to talk to journalists.
Brandon Johnson, the mayor of Chicago, is one of those press-shy elected officials. Melody Mercado, a staff writer for Block Club Chicago, is one of those journalists often looking for answers. As part of a special event tied to the release of the Access Issue, I interviewed Mercado about the ever-changing relationship between Johnson and the press, why access matters for local journalism, and how she does her job without it. “It’s never good, whenever you see a line that says XYZ did not respond to questions,” as she put it. Listen below or wherever you get your podcasts.
Show notes:
City Paying Well More Than Typical Rent for Migrant Shelter Buildings—and Keeping Details Secret, Mick Dumke and Melody Mercado, Block Club Chicago
Johnson’s ex–communications director faced misconduct complaints before firing, Mitchell Armentrout, Chicago Sun-Times
Go Pound Sand!**, Kyle Paoletta, CJR
Credits:
Host: Megan Greenwell
Producer: Amanda Darrach
Audio engineer: Fernando Fermino
Video technician: Alex Hamm**
For a certain type of tech executive, and a certain type of fan of tech executives, the point of technology journalism is to cheerfully show off the cool new toys Silicon Valley creates.
For the staff of Wired, the point of technology journalism is to hold the most powerful companies and people in our society accountable for the decisions they make. That has made the magazine remarkably unpopular with many people in the tech world (including newly minted trillionaire Elon Musk) and more popular than ever with everyone else: the magazine added more than two hundred thousand subscribers in the past year.
Tim Marchman, Wired’s senior director of science, politics, and security, loves accountability journalism and has a particular fondness for scoops showing the tight ties between our government and Bay Area tech leaders. With his colleague Leah Feiger, the senior politics editor at Wired, Marchman dramatically expanded the magazine’s politics staff and oversaw its award-winning coverage of how Musk and a group of teenagers ran a buzzsaw through the federal government, and what havoc they wreaked in the name of “efficiency.”
Earlier this month, I interviewed Marchman at Jimmy’s Corner during an event to celebrate the release of CJR’s new special issue, about what access means in journalism today. Listen below to hear him discuss why going hard on politics was a natural choice for a tech magazine, explain how his team got so many scoops about DOGE, and respond to the haters.
Show Notes:
A 25-Year-Old with Elon Musk Ties Has Direct Access to the Federal Payment System, Vittoria Elliott, Dhruv Mehrotra, Leah Feiger, and Tim Marchman, Wired.
The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk’s Government Takeover, Vittoria Elliott, Wired.
Inside Elon Musk’s ‘Digital Coup,’ Makena Kelly, David Gilbert, Vittoria Elliott, Kate Knibbs, Dhruv Mehrotra, Dell Cameron, Tim Marchman, Leah Feiger, Zoë Schiffer, Wired.
Credits:
Host: Megan Greenwell
Producer: Amanda Darrach
Audio engineer: Fernando Fermino
Video technician: Alex Hamm
One of the most fascinating sports business stories of the moment is the explosive growth of the WNBA. TV viewership is up dramatically, multiple teams sell out regularly, and stars like Caitlin Clark and A’ja Wilson have become household names. This year, the players’ union won a groundbreaking new contract, including their first-ever revenue share and a 4x jump in minimum salaries.
The league’s recent surge in popularity has also brought new questions of access. The WNBA was the only major pro league that didn’t reopen its locker rooms to reporters after COVID closures, and many media outlets have clamored for a way to talk to players that doesn’t require going through team PR. The Indiana Fever stripped a press credential from a longtime beat writer after disagreeing with his framing of a Clark injury. For years, women’s basketball was enough of a backwater that journalists had more or less free rein; now everyone is trying to figure out what meaningful coverage looks like in a transformed world.
Last week, as part of a special daylong event tied to the release of CJR’s new Access Issue, Sports Illustrated staff writer Emma Baccellieri—one of the best reporters out there focusing on women’s sports—stopped by to talk about how covering the league has changed. I interviewed her about how her job has evolved, why it’s more difficult than ever to ask questions of WNBA players, and what’s happening with college players getting paid through name, image, and likeness (NIL) deals. Listen below—or wherever you get your podcasts.
Show notes:
For Veterans Like Alysha Clark, This New WNBA Era Just Means More, Emma Baccellieri, Sports Illustrated
Should We Be Worried About Caitlin Clark and the Fever? Clare Brennan, Dan Falkenheim, Blake Silverman, Emma Baccellieri, Sports Illustrated
Expect Officiating to Be a Recurring Storyline During This WNBA Season, Emma Baccellieri, Sports Illustrated
Fever reporter claims credential revoked over Clark reporting, Michael Voepel, ESPNMegan Greenwell, host
Amanda Darrach, producer
Fernando Fermino, audio engineer
Alex Hamm, video technician
Some of the most interesting journalism experiments aren’t taking place on the websites of publications. Instead, they’re happening on Facebook and WhatsApp and Reddit and WeChat and even Nextdoor, which I didn’t realize was anything other than a place for Karens to complain about loitering.
Documented, an eight-year-old digital outlet that covers and serves immigrants in New York City and beyond, is behind many of these experiments—from producing a Chinese-language newsletter on WeChat to starting conversations on Nextdoor with Haitian Creole speakers in Flatbush, Brooklyn. In her first eighteen months at Documented, Ethar El-Katatney, the editor in chief, has elevated the publication’s investigative work and begun an expansion into video, but she refuses to lose sight of the mission: to give immigrants the information they need on the platforms they use.
I interviewed El-Katatney about the common threads between Documented’s guides to city living and its long investigations, how differently her reporters work depending on what community they serve, and why Documented is expanding its ambitions to help other newsrooms.
Show notes:
Documented Gears Up for Trump, Lauren Watson, CJR
The Lost Prisoners of Chinatown’s Gang Era, April Xu, Documented
Fake Immigration Courts Take Advantage of Immigrants Desperate for Answers, Rommel H. Ojeda, Documented.
Guide of Resources for Immigrants, Nicolás Ríos, Documented
Megan Greenwell, host
Amanda Darrach, producer
When Ronald Reagan won the presidency, in 1980, it was a victory long in the making. For almost half a century, conservatives had plotted ways to cut taxes and undo workers’ rights. Their playbook for political influence went something like this: create a think tank, publish reputable reports, build relationships with journalists and politicians, and disseminate free-market ideas to the public, creating a new common sense.
Today, the art of political influence is rather different. Think tanks no longer claim the power they once did and, since the rise of social media, newspapers and traditional journalists have lost their grip on public opinion. Perhaps this new state of affairs was best captured by Elon Musk when, shortly after taking over Twitter, in 2023, he declared that all press inquiries would receive an automated reply with the poop emoji. That is not the move of someone who believes the press is an essential tool in influencing public opinion.
In this episode of the Journalism 2050 podcast, cohosts Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin are joined by two guests: Kim Phillips-Fein is a renowned historian of American conservatism and capitalism and the author of Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan, among other books. Samuel Earle is the author of Tory Nation: The Dark Legacy of the World’s Most Successful Political Party and a PhD candidate at Columbia Journalism School. Together, they ask: How has the nature of political influence changed? What are the implications for journalism? And what, if anything, can the left learn from the right’s success?
Producer: Amanda DarrachResearch: Samuel Earle
Production Assistant: Riddhi Setty
Art Director: Katie Kosma
Illustrator: Aaron Fernandez
Music: Henry Crooks
“WHOA. Ohhhh. Freaking huge,” one of my favorite recent news videos opens. Emily Sweeney, a Boston Globe reporter, stands in the Museum of Fine Arts, gazing up at a thirteen-foot-tall, thirteen-thousand-pound Roman sculpture. Sweeney can’t hide her awe at seeing the statue the museum calls Juno, but that Sweeney knows from her teenage years as Gloria.
Until a month ago, Sweeney was a rank-and-file breaking news reporter and the author of three books about Boston, her hometown. On March 31, though, her video about a dramatic home invasion at an estate north of the city made her a bona fide viral star. Dressed in a navy Adidas track jacket, with spiky platinum-blond hair and two silver hoops in each ear, she looks and sounds like the Platonic ideal of a native Bostonian, dropping R’s like they’re poisonous. Nearly three thousand people, including Ava DuVernay, the director, chimed in on Instagram, many of them saying they wanted more Sweeney videos. More than ninety-six thousand liked the video on TikTok. The Globe listened: Sweeney is now a regular on the paper’s social platforms—always in a different track jacket, always reading the news in that thick Boston accent.
I talked to Sweeney about thinking she couldn’t be on camera because she doesn’t have the right look, her obsession with the weirdest parts of her hometown’s history, and what she’s learned about building relationships with readers. Listen below, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Show notes:
“What’s the story behind this statue at the MFA?” Emily Sweeney, Boston Globe, Instagram video
“What we know about the mysterious Beverly mansion robbery.” Emily Sweeney, Boston Globe, Instagram video
Dropkick Murphy: A Legendary Life. **Emily Sweeney.
Megan Greenwell, host**
Amanda Darrach, producer
Before Elon Musk, there was Henry Ford: an attention-seeking car manufacturer, newspaper owner, and media celebrity who pushed reactionary views on the public and transformed society around his business interests. “Fordism” was more than a mode of production, it was a way of organizing society, involving large factories, nuclear families, stable employment, and affordable cars, refrigerators, and televisions.
In a new book, Muskism, Ben Tarnoff, a technology writer, and Quinn Slobodian, a historian at Boston University, analyze Musk in similar terms, as a maverick businessman who stands for a new type of society and a new social contract. They find that “Muskism” provides a far more dystopian package than Fordism’s offering. It is a world of strict and unforgiving hierarchies where governments exist in symbiotic relationship with Silicon Valley, social welfare erodes, and Musk is a self-appointed “techno-king.” Want safety or stability? Buy a Cybertruck.
In this episode of the Journalism 2050 podcast, Tarnoff and Slobodian join cohosts Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin to discuss Muskism’s vision of society, where it came from, and what the implications for journalism are. What does Muskism offer the public besides dystopia? How did Musk’s purchase of Twitter fit into his plans? What does journalism free from Muskism look like?
Producer: Amanda Darrach
Production Coordinator: Hana Joy
Research: Samuel Earle
Art Director: Katie Kosma
Illustrator: Aaron Fernandez
Music: Henry Crooks
I have a galaxy-brained theory that the most effective fundraisers in the country aren’t politicians or the heads of major foundations, but a pair of Atlanta-based college football bloggers.
Two decades ago, Spencer Hall—best known as the creator of Every Day Should Be Saturday, a site covering college football with a mix of analytical skills and many inside jokes—decided to raise money for refugees in the Atlanta area. Hall had worked for a refugee services organization before pivoting to writing, so he put out the call to his readers and raised a few thousand dollars. After a couple of years of this, he and Holly Anderson, his fellow blogger, had an idea: Why not use college football rivalries to raise even more money? There’s nothing fans love more than destroying their most hated opponent, they figured, so they’d make the fundraiser a competition. Fans began donating in honor of their favorite team, often choosing the amount based on a significant number, like the score of a big game. The Charitbundi Bowl was born. The fundraiser continued after Vox Media bought Every Day Should Be Saturday, and after Hall and Anderson left the company, in 2020.
To say their plan worked would be a comic understatement. Last year, Hall and Anderson—who now run a subscription-based college football site called Channel 6—raised more than 1.3 million dollars for New American Pathways, becoming its largest nongovernmental source of funds. The 2026 event, which runs through this weekend, crossed the million-dollar mark Wednesday evening. (You can donate to support your favorite team—real or fictional—here and see the leaderboard here.)
I talked to Hall about his career from independent blogger to SB Nation editorial director and back again, being dismissed by Vox Media as “too niche,” and what it takes for a publication’s readership to become a real community. Listen below, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Show notes:
How we got here. Spencer Hall, Channel 6
EDSBS Charity Bowl FAQ
New American Pathways
2026 EDSBS Charity Bowl Bluesky Feed
Megan Greenwell, host
Amanda Darrach, producer
I’ve spent my entire professional career in journalism, but student publications are still my favorite news outlets. I broke the biggest story of my life for my high school newspaper, and I find something so infectious about the energy of students who aren’t yet jaded about the industry or the job market, who just want to write about topics that matter to their peers. Us pros can learn a lot from them.
Eric Gustafson is one of the few people I’ve ever spoken to whose passion for student journalism rivals my own. A longtime journalist, he took over the journalism program at Lowell High, a prestigious San Francisco public school, in 2017. Last year, after a couple of controversial stories about student drug use, teacher sexual harassment, and AI grading—including one that the student paper, The Lowell, never even published—he was removed from the role. California, Gustafson knew, has one of the strongest laws in the country protecting the independence of student journalists and their advisers. He sued his employer, and he won: his reassignment was illegal, a state superior court found.
In this episode, I talk to Gustafson about The Lowell’s steady stream of major stories, his decision to sue, the backlash from his colleagues, and why student journalism matters. Listen below—or wherever you get your podcasts.
Show notes:
Obtainable and addictive. Isadore Diamond and Clarabelle Fields, The Lowell
Invasive and inappropriate. Ramona Jacobson, Serena Miller, and Dakota Colussi, The Lowell
Know your student press rights. The Student Press Law Center
Final judgment, Eric Gustafson v. San Francisco Unified School District. Superior Court for California for the County of San Francisco
Judge rules that Lowell High School journalism teacher’s reassignment was illegal. Jill Tucker, San Francisco Chronicle
Lowell students open up about experiences with math teacher Tom Chan. Milena Garrone and Amálie Cimala, The Lowell
Megan Greenwell, host
Amanda Darrach, producer
I must confess that initially I was a bit skeptical of the concept. The New York Times was promoting a Q&A with two technology reporters, Mike Isaac and Sheera Frankel, and their editor, Pui-Wing Tam. The headline, in 2014 BuzzFeed style, was “Reporters Seek Comment. What Happens Next May Surprise You.” Over the course of several hundred words, Isaac, Frankel, and Tam explained how they ask sources for answers, especially those who might not be inclined to respond. Who is this for? I wondered. Who is this going to convince?
So I called up Mike Abrams, the Times’ deputy trust editor, who conducted that Q&A, part of a series that runs under the “Times Insider” vertical. I wanted to know why he thinks trust in media is so low and why, after twenty-two years at the Times, this was the problem he wanted to work on. We talked about how all those front-facing videos that reporters are doing relate to trust, and how his role differs from that of the outlet’s PR staff biting back at criticism on X and Bluesky. And we got into the critiques of specific storylines: Trump, Gaza, trans medical care. Listen here—or wherever you get your podcasts.
Show notes:
- Reporters seek comment. What happens next may surprise you. Mike Abrams, New York Times
- Trust in Media at New Low of 28% in U.S. Megan Brenan, Gallup
- Seen but not heard: The New York Times failed to quote trans people in two-thirds of stories on anti-trans legislation in a one-year period. Vesper Henry and Ari Drennan, Media Matters and GLAAD
Megan Greenwell, host
Amanda Darrach, producer
When I took over the Kicker host chair, one of the things I was most excited to do was to interview early-career journalists, who see the changes to our industry from an entirely different perspective from those of us who’ve been around since the days when Twitter was king, or before social media existed. I’ve always loved working with young people—among my many freelance gigs, I help run a program for high school journalists—because I feel like I get smarter (and hopefully even marginally more relevant?) every time I talk to them.
For going on seven years now, Sofia Barnett has been one of my favorite young journalists to talk to. From the first time I met her, when she was a high school junior outside Dallas, she’s been uncommonly driven: toward a career in journalism, toward telling the stories of Indigenous Americans like herself, toward seeing the world and writing about all of it. Now, at twenty-three, she’s covered more big stories than many people do in a full career. She wound up at the Minnesota Star Tribune fresh out of college, moving to Minneapolis just in time for perhaps the newsiest year in the city’s history. As an intern, she was the first reporter on the scene of the Annunciation Catholic Church school shooting last August. Then, while formally assigned to cover the suburbs, she was named to the five-person team covering the Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids on the city.
In this episode, Barnett and I talk about all of that, plus about how she thinks about a career in this tumultuous time for journalism. Listen below—or wherever you get your podcasts.
Show notes:
- He couldn’t run. So they covered him instead. Sofia Barnett, Minnesota Star Tribune
- ‘Just another Native’: Minneapolis Indigenous women demand emergency response to violence. Sofia Barnett, Minnesota Star Tribune
- Texas ranks almost dead last in the nation for women’s health care, research shows. Sofia Barnett, Dallas Morning News
- The Princeton Summer Journalism Program
Megan Greenwell, host
Amanda Darrach, producer
Since October 7, 2023, Miriam Berger has been on assignment in Jerusalem, covering Israel, Palestine, and war. A few weeks ago, she learned she and hundreds of colleagues were being laid off.
One perk of hosting an interview podcast is having the opportunity to talk to journalists whose work I’ve admired for years but might never have met otherwise. Miriam Berger is one such journalist. She’s written some of the best articles I’ve read from Israel and Palestine: rich, textured narratives that tell stories of complicated human realities. A Philadelphia native, she’s spent a significant chunk of her career in the Middle East, working in both Arabic and Hebrew and becoming a go-to authority on the war.
Though it was a thrill to get to speak with Berger, the peg for our conversation was a brutal one: She was one of three hundred–plus journalists who learned early this month that they would be laid off by the Washington Post, a dismantling that all but eliminated the publication’s international desk. Berger was on leave when the cuts were announced, working on a book about Israel’s starvation of Gaza. In this week’s episode of The Kicker, she and I talked about how media coverage of the region has evolved since October 7, 2023; how she reported stories from Gaza despite Israel banning reporters from entering; and the outdated distinctions Western media outlets draw between journalists sent from HQ and “local reporters” like the Palestinians she worked with. Listen below—or wherever you get your podcasts.
Show notes:
Palestinian paramedics said Israel gave them safe passage to save a 6-year-old girl in Gaza. They were all killed. Meg Kelly, Hajar Harb, Louisa Loveluck, Miriam Berger, and Cate Brown, Washington Post
Thousands of Gazans have gone missing. No one is accounting for them. Miriam Berger and Hajar Harb, Washington Post
Support for Washington Post international employees, GoFundMe
Megan Greenwell, host
Amanda Darrach, producer
While the newspaper industry continues to contract, nonprofit news outlets have proliferated over the past decade. But dismissing profitable models for journalism is premature.
How can journalism survive? Perhaps the question would once have sounded unduly panicked, but it has only grown more pressing over the past twenty years. Between 2004 and 2019, newspapers lost an astonishing 77 percent of their jobs—more than any other industry on record, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In early February, the industry suffered another historic blow, as the Washington Post announced it was laying off nearly half its staff. When even a legacy media outlet like the Post struggles—when even ownership by Jeff Bezos, who has a net worth of two hundred and fifty billion dollars, cannot guarantee stability—it is easy to wonder what hope there is. Is journalism slowly, or not so slowly, going kaput?
Not so fast.
In this episode of Journalism 2050, we’re joined by two guests who show—in different yet equally promising ways—what the future of journalism can look like. Vanan Murugesan is the executive director of Sahan Journal, a widely acclaimed local news organization in Minneapolis that was set up in 2019 to cover immigrants and people of color. Joshi Herrmann is the founder of Mill Media, which launched in Manchester in 2020 and now provides high-quality local journalism across six different cities in the UK.
Sahan Journal is one of a growing number of nonprofit news organizations that rely on philanthropic grants. (The Institute for Nonprofit News now counts over four hundred members.) Mill Media’s success is based on subscriptions. Both are thriving, and both provide models that others can follow. What are the risks and rewards of each approach? Have we been too quick to accept that journalism cannot be profitable in the digital age? And what changes when, with rising authoritarianism, the pressures confronting a free press become political as well as economic?
Suggested Reading:
- “Straight to your inbox: meet the journalists shaking up local UK news,” The Guardian, July 2024
- “Sahan Journal Is Built for When the National Media Leaves,” CJR, December 2025
Hosts: Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin
Producer: Amanda Darrach
Production Coordinator: Hana Joy
Research: Samuel Earle
Art Director: Katie Kosma
Illustrator: Aaron Fernandez
Music: Henry Crooks
Experts discuss the risks posed to journalism as the courts test the limits of press freedom law.
If I recall correctly, the original news peg for a live Kicker recording about threats to the free press was a raid on the home of Hannah Natanson, a Washington Post reporter. By the time Amanda Darrach, TheKicker’s producer, and I were finalizing logistics for the event, which took place in CJR’s office, two independent journalists—Don Lemon and Georgia Fort—had been arrested for covering a protest in Minneapolis. A few days before we recorded, the Posteliminated three hundred–plus jobs. Suffice it to say, I had plenty to talk about.
I also had dream guests with whom to talk about it all. David Enrich, a deputy investigations editor at the New York Times, wrote the excellent 2025 book Murder the Truth about efforts to overturn the media law precedent set by New York Times v. Sullivan in 1964. Jameel Jaffer, the executive director of Columbia’s Knight First Amendment Institute, has been involved in litigating dozens of crucial cases on press freedom. In wrapping up the interview, I said I had about seven hundred more questions for them; in retrospect, that may have been an undercount.
Recording live also meant the rare chance to take questions from other smart people, including Fabio Bertoni, the general counsel for TheNew Yorker, and Tsehai Alfred, the editor in chief of the Columbia Daily Spectator.
SHOW NOTESQ&A: David Enrich on the Right-Wing Plot to ‘Murder’ Libel Protections, Jon Allsop, CJR
Barnard suspends WKCR and Spectator reporters who covered Butler Library protest, Isha Banerjee, Columbia SpectatorCan the Media’s Right to Pursue the Powerful Survive Trump’s Second Term? David Enrich, the New York Times Magazine
Megan Greenwell, host
Amanda Darrach, producer
Jim Bittel, assistant dean of broadcast and multimedia technology, adjunct professor, and multimedia facility consultant
A.J. Mangone, assistant director, broadcast and multimedia technology
Pedro Florentin, videographer
Jamal Jones, videographer
Katie Kosma, art director
In 2016, Sarah Alvarez, a former civil-rights lawyer and reporter, reimagined what journalism could be. Rather than break news or publish stories on a website, her project, Outlier Media, promised to provide the people of Detroit with information on any property they wanted, via text message—all they had to do was ask. Alvarez hoped that with vetted information, locals could hold landlords to account and avoid property scams in an increasingly hostile housing market. It was to be the first of many such services that Outlier would provide, all centered around making important information more accessible, in line with people’s needs. “I was not satisfied with covering low-income communities for a higher-income audience,” she said in 2018. “I wanted to cover issues for and with low-income news consumers.”
Outlier Media now stands as an example of an innovative local media landscape defying the darkest prophecies of journalism’s future. Outlier has pioneered a new journalistic approach—highly interactive, collaborative, responsive, practical, community-focused—to old goals: holding the powerful to account. Its text message system exists alongside original investigative reporting, which is targeted “on issues where better information alone can’t make a difference,” as its site explains. Outlier’s radical mission is journalism that serves not people’s curiosity but their material needs.
**In this episode of the Journalism 2050 Podcast, Alvarez and Candice Fortman join Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin to discuss community-focused news, how the media landscape has changed over the last decade, and what the future holds. Alvarez is the James B. Steele Chair in Journalism Innovation at Temple University’s Klein College of Media and Communication. Fortman is a media consultant who served as Outlier Media’s Executive Editor between 2019 and 2024.
Suggested Reading/Listening:*How Outlier is helping Detroiters get millions of dollars back from Wayne County, Nieman Lab*, April 2025
Candice Fortman, Commencement address for the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism Class of 2025*, May 2025Civic Guides: How to solve everyday issues in Detroit, influence local decision-making and make the city work for you — written for Detroiters by Detroiters*, Outlier Media (series)
Producer: Amanda Darrach
Production Coordinator: Hana Joy
Research: Samuel Earle
Art Director: Katie Kosma
Illustrator: Aaron Fernandez
Music: Henry Crooks
At first, January 7 felt to Bob Batz Jr. like a triumphant day. The U.S. Supreme Court had declined to consider an appeal from Batz’s longtime employer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the latest in a long string of legal victories for the paper’s union. After more than three years on strike, Batz and twenty-four colleagues returned to work in late November. Now, the P-G was legally obligated to reinstate the workers’ previous health plan, plus reimburse costs accrued when management failed to bargain in good faith.
A few hours after rejoicing over the Supreme Court news, though, elation turned to mourning. Citing 350 million dollars in losses over twenty years, the P-G’s owner, Block Communications, announced it would shut down the paper — one of the oldest in the country — effective May 3. The company took no questions from its employees.
The three weeks since have brought a flurry of activity designed to save some version of the Post-Gazette. Batz and his colleagues have been meeting multiple times a week — sometimes with potential funders, sometimes alone — to figure out the best path forward. This morning, a group of them announced the launch of the Pittsburgh Alliance for People-Empowered Reporting (PAPER), which is raising money to research “worker-owned and non-profit models as well as the potential for a truly independent Post-Gazette.” Forty-nine of their coworkers who didn’t strike, meanwhile, are working to overthrow union leadership in hopes of negotiating with Block Communications. Seemingly everyone in Pittsburgh’s large philanthropic world seems to be chattering about the potential for a nonprofit model.
For this week’s episode of The Kicker, I talked to Batz about the highs and lows of his thirty-plus years at the P-G and his three years on strike, from his job editing the strikers’ award-winning newspaper, to the friendships that ended as a result of the battle, to the efforts to build something new.
SHOW NOTES
Pittsburgh Alliance for People-Empowered Reporting (PAPER)
Pittsburgh Union Progress
Host: Megan Greenwell
Producer: Amanda Darrach
In 2007, Valleywag, Gawker’s gossip column devoted to Silicon Valley, published a short piece about a then-little-known venture capitalist and tech founder, under the headline “Peter Thiel is totally gay, people.” Thiel’s sexuality wasn’t a secret, nor was the piece mocking. “Peter Thiel, the smartest VC in the world, is gay,” it read. “More power to him.” But it was the first time this information was made public, and Thiel didn’t welcome the attention. He vowed privately to get revenge on Valleywag, which he described as “the Silicon Valley equivalent of al Qaeda,” a “Manhattan-based terrorist organization” that was apparently terrifying tech bros into conformity. It took him almost a decade for his quest to succeed. In March 2016, a lawsuit against Gawker brought by Hulk Hogan over the publication of a leaked sex tape resulted in its bankruptcy. Hogan, like everyone else, only discovered the identity of his mysterious and dedicated benefactor after the trial.
The Gawker trial was a turning point, both for Thiel personally and for perceptions about the tech industry. His friends would say that, without the Gawker trial, Thiel’s early endorsement of Donald Trump that same year was unthinkable. To others, Thiel’s readiness to simply shut down an online publication that he did not like revealed, perhaps more than any other event up to that point, the authoritarian tendencies of the tech industry and how hollow its commitments to “free information” were. The outlook for digital journalism was ominous.
What are the lessons from the Gawker trial, ten years later? What is its political legacy? And how can digital journalism build a safe future in the face of such severe threats? In this episode of Journalism 2050, Emily Bell is joined by three guests. Maria Bustillos is a journalist, editor, and self-described “information activist” who reported from the courtroom during the Gawker trial. Samuel Earle is the author of Tory Nation: The Dark Legacy of the World’s Most Successful Political Party and a PhD candidate at Columbia Journalism School. Marine Doux is the cofounder and editorial director of Médianes and a research fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School.
SHOW NOTES:
“Hulk Hogan is the Donald Trump of ‘sports entertainment,’” Maria Bustillos, Popula
Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue**, Ryan Holiday
“*Editorial Independence Means Technological Independence,” Owen Huchon, CJR*
Médianes Studio—A European Partner for Independent Media
Producer: Amanda Darrach
Production Coordinator: Hana Joy
Research: Samuel Earle
Art Director: Katie Kosma
Illustrator:
Annual reports are generally pretty boring documents, bogged down with numbers taken out of context and marketing-speak about “thriving in the face of unprecedented challenges.”
Not Jasper Wang’s. At the end of 2025, the cofounder and vice president of revenue and operations at Defector—the pioneering worker-owned sports site that grew from the ashes of Deadspin—managed to reinvent the genre, writing a riveting six-thousand-something first-person words containing not only full transparency on the company’s revenue and costs, but also a meditation on the past, present, and future of worker-owned co-ops. “When Defector staffers speak to journalists interested in starting their own publications, with some frequency we sense that they are naively imagining worker ownership as a panacea to the ills of their previous workplaces, and treating meaningful subscription revenue as a foregone conclusion,” he wrote. “But the truth is that launching your own business is hard, and much harder today than it was five years ago.”
As I started thinking about what The Kicker could sound like with me in the host chair, I knew immediately that I wanted to interview Jasper first. Narratives about exciting new business models like worker ownership often get flattened; rooting for them to thrive can sometimes mean talking less than honestly about the challenges as well as the triumphs. Despite Defector’s innumerable triumphs, Jasper never falls into that trap. Listen to his wisdom wherever you get your podcasts.
SHOW NOTES
Defector Annual Report, September 2024–August 2025
Host: Megan Greenwell
Producer: Amanda Darrach
The Kicker returns with our former host, Josh Hersh, and our new one, Megan Greenwell, in conversation.
Between President Trump’s legal battles against news outlets, the defunding of public media, the rise of creator journalism, wave after wave of layoffs, and at least twelve hundred more things I’ve forgotten, Josh Hersh hosted this podcast during an eventful time for the journalism industry. Then he left!
Now you have me. I’m an author and magazine features writer, and a longtime writer and editor at publications including ESPN the Magazine (RIP), Deadspin (RIP), GOOD magazine (RIP), and even some that still exist (the Washington Post, Wired, etc.). I’m very excited to be taking over from Josh, who—as you will learn in this episode—was one of the first journalists I really admired.
Going through the archive of Kicker episodes from Josh’s run, one thing that sticks out is how many of the stories he covered are still relevant now. And a thousand new ones seem to pop up every day, so I don’t think my run is likely to be any less exciting than his. I wanted to have Josh on as my very first guest to talk about what he learned from hosting this show and what advice he has for me. We talked about journalists’ ongoing battle for relevance in the age of streamers and why journalists should never marry journalists. He even persuaded me to pay more attention to TV news.
I hope to make The Kicker feel approachable and warm, like listening in on conversations at the dive bar around the corner from the newsroom. Mostly, I’m excited to talk to a whole bunch of smart people in the only industry I’ve ever worked in and call it a (part time) job. I’d love to hear from you about what you think I should cover on The Kicker and who you think I should have on. Let’s get going.
Show Notes
Ex-Reporter Relies on the Book, Not the Pen, Joshua Hersh, Columbia Spectator
Alex Jones Says Trump Is Just The Start, Michael Moynihan, VICE News
‘I Try to Find the Question That People Cannot Squirm Out Of’: Nashville’s Phil Williams on local investigative reporting, Josh Hersh, The Kicker
Host: Megan Greenwell
Producer: Amanda Darrach
In 2006, Jay Rosen, the media scholar, published his influential article “The People Formerly Known as the Audience.” His medium was as important as his message. Although the essay would later appear in media-studies textbooks, it was first published on his blog, a form invented in the late 1990s that seemed, in Rosen’s words, to give everyone their own printing press. Armed with such technologies, he said, the public would no longer simply consume journalism as passive spectators. They now owned the means of media production. A beautiful democracy and a newly accountable press were sure to flourish.
As Rosen knows as well as anyone, the world did not quite pan out that way. What was initially understood to be a technology of liberation became, increasingly, a mechanism of control: a means of surveilling the public, selling ads, and generating enormous profits for a small number of companies. Journalism and democracy both entered periods of sustained crisis from which they have yet to recover. The internet has even begun to abandon participation as part of its core ethos. As a recent analysis by the Financial Times shows, “social media has become less social”: partly because of these platforms’ algorithms, people are interacting with one another less and returning to the passive media consumption that the internet was supposed to disrupt. In this context, it seems that the people formerly known as the audience are… once again the audience.
In this episode of Journalism 2050, Rosen joins Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin to discuss where it all went wrong and what journalists can do to fight back. Were the assumptions that the internet would help democracy and journalism simply naive? What did commentators fail to see at the time? What should we make of the return to blogging culture via platforms like Substack and Medium?
Further Reading:
“The People Formerly Known as the Audience,” Jay Rosen, Press Think, June 2006
“Have we passed peak social media?” John Burn-Murdoch, Financial Times, October 2025
“Winter is coming: prospects for the American press under Trump,” Jay Rosen, Press Think, December 2016
Hosts: Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin
Producer: Amanda Darrach
Editor: Emily Russell
Production Coordinator: Hana Joy
Research: Samuel Earle
Art Director: Katie Kosma
Illustrator: Aaron Fernandez
Music: Henry Crooks
It has been called “the last good day on the internet”: on February 26, 2015, Americans flocked online to watch fugitive llamas in Arizona evade their captors on a live broadcast, shortly before an ambiguously colored dress—blue and black to some, white and gold to others—was uploaded online. At BuzzFeed, which sent the dress to unprecedented levels of global virality, Ben Smith watched it all unfold. He realized in that moment just how popular divisive content could be. In hindsight, it was a grim foreshadowing: social media created the perfect conditions for an exceedingly polarizing presidential candidate to thrive.
In this episode of Journalism 2050, Smith, the cofounder and editor in chief of Semafor, joins Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin to reflect on the thrill of being a journalist in the early years of social media, the internet’s evolution since then, and how AI has become the latest vehicle for techno-evangelism. Even as politics and the tech industry tack right, he insists upon his “core conviction” that good journalism will always find a way to survive.
Should we mourn journalism’s past? How worrying is the future of the news? If Ben Smith was starting out now, would he even be a journalist? Over twenty-five years, as a blogger, editor, and founder—from Politico and BuzzFeed News to the New York Times and, now, Semafor—Smith’s career has always been a revealing indicator of the state of the journalism industry, and where it’s going next.
Further Reading:
- “What Colors Are This Dress?”BuzzFeed, February 26, 2015
- “The Internet of the 2010s Ended Today,” by Charlie Warzel, April 2023, on how BuzzFeed News “defined an era.”
- “The New York Times’ success lays bare the media's disastrous state,” Emily Bell, The Guardian, February 2020
- “Why the Success of the New York Times May Be Bad News for Journalism,” Ben Smith, New York Times, March 2020
Hosts: Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin
Producer: Amanda Darrach
Production Coordinator: Hana Joy
Research: Samuel Earle
Art Director: Katie Kosma
Illustrator: Aaron Fernandez
Music: Henry Crooks
When Natalia Antelava cofounded Coda Story, in early 2016, to cover democratic backsliding around the globe, she wasn’t expecting the tech industry to be such a big part of the story. It wasn’t only that autocratic regimes were benefiting from compliant Silicon Valley companies. By launching a new media organization, Antelava also discovered how entangled journalism itself had become with some of the same companies, which proclaimed their commitment to a free press while quietly cozying up to their enemies.
In this episode of Journalism 2050, Antelava joins Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin to discuss the naïveté with which news organizations treated the likes of Google and Facebook in the early years of the internet, and some of the bizarre conferences, collaborations, and initiatives that resulted from it. To secure journalism’s future, Antelava warns, there must never be such innocence again. “We got into bed with the wrong guys, and we got ourselves in big trouble,” she says.
How responsible are journalists for the perilous state of their industry? Who are their “natural allies”? And as the authoritarian tendencies of the internet’s gatekeepers become clearer and clearer, what compromises might journalists make, and what redlines must they draw?
Further Reading:
Coda Story: An interview with Richard Gingras
The Guardian: Apple and Google Accused of Political Censorship Over Alexei Navalny App
Freedom House: The Uncertain Future of the Global Internet
Hosts: Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin
Producer: Amanda Darrach
Production Coordinator: Hana Joy
Research: Samuel Earle
Art Director: Katie Kosma
Illustrator: Aaron Fernandez
Music: Henry Crooks
Examining an ongoing crisis for press freedom—and how to manage security risks going forward.
For Journalism 2050’s inaugural live event, Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin are joined by Azmat Khan, the director of Columbia’s Simon and June Li Center for Global Journalism, and Anya Schiffrin, a professor at the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs, to discuss the consequences of the war on Gaza on journalism and what history can teach us about the role of the press in times of crisis.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, it took only ten weeks at the end of 2022 for Israel to kill more journalists in Gaza than had previously been killed in any one country over an entire year. The attacks have not relented in the three years since: while barring international journalists from entry, the Israeli military has treated journalists inside Gaza as acceptable collateral damage and even, at times, explicit targets. In September, Irene Khan, the UN special rapporteur, described it as “the deadliest conflict ever for journalists.”
These attacks on journalism, and the limp response from the US and other powerful countries, set a dangerous precedent for the future. How might journalists and media organizations take the defense of their principles and values into their own hands? What lessons can we learn from the past? What tools do journalists need to navigate this new world?
Further reading:
- Urgent Ideas for Defending Press Freedom in Gaza, Columbia Journalism Review, by Azmat Khan, Meghnad Bose, and Lauren Watson
- Global Muckraking: 100 Years of Investigative Journalism from Around the World, edited by Anya Schiffrin
Producer: Amanda Darrach
Production Coordinator: Hana Joy
Research: Samuel Earle
Art Director: Katie Kosma
Illustrator: Aaron Fernandez
Music: Henry Crooks
In 1992, a writer named Douglas Rushkoff signed a contract for Cyberia, his book about the internet subcultures of the West Coast. The next year, his publisher canceled it, according to Rushkoff’s recollection, on the grounds that “by the time the book came out the Internet was going to be over.” (He later found a different publisher, and the book came out in 1994.) Since then, Rushkoff has been one of the most entertaining and pointed futurists (though he prefers “presentist” these days) chronicling Silicon Valley’s effects on culture and communications. His books include Present Shock, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, and Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of Tech Billionaires. His Team Human podcast is required listening for skeptics of artificial intelligence.
Emily Bell, the founding director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, and Heather Chaplin, the director of the New School’s Journalism + Design Lab, ask Rushkoff about what lessons we can draw from the anarchic free spirited origins of web publishing that can be applied to our present moment of techno authoritarianism and the dominance of Silicon Valley.
As for what Rushkoff's outlook is for 2050, “the worst case is we will have ceased to be”—a bleak scenario. But the more optimistic case is that we will see a stratified media ecosystem emerge, with a number of large global players collaborating on complex stories, and a rich vibrant network of smaller local and niche players.
Further Reading and Listening:
“We Will Coup whoever We Want: the unbearable hubris of Musk and the billionaire tech bros”
Team Human podcast
John Perry Barlow : A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
Producer: Amanda Darrach
Production Coordinator: Hana Joy
Research: Samuel Earle
Art Director: Katie Kosma
Illustrator: Aaron Fernandez
Music: Henry Crooks
Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin speak with the smartest minds in media to discuss the roots of today's crisis in journalism, from democracy's decline to the rise of AI, and to explore the uncertain future of journalism in the digital age.
This series is brought to you by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism and Columbia Journalism Review, with help from the New School's Journalism + Design Lab.
Journalism 2050 is supported by the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation and available wherever you get your podcasts
This summer, Margaret Sullivan, the executive director of the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at Columbia Journalism School, and her colleague Julie Gerstein published a series of essays in CJR exploring what a new generation of journalism ethics might look like, as the media industry evolves.
“It is conventional wisdom among journalists that while the world around us changes, our ethics do not,” Sullivan wrote, in her introduction to the project. “Yet a fresh look at our standards and practices seems a worthwhile pursuit at this moment.”
Sullivan joins The Kicker to talk about what it means for journalism ethics to evolve with the times—and how she views critical questions around transparency, media bias, and whether the public editor role might make its return.
Read More:
*“A New Look at Journalism Ethics”—A special project from CJR
*“Is Objectivity Still Worth Pursuing?”
*“What Do Journalists Owe Their Sources—and Their Audiences?”
*“Can AI Tools Meet Journalistic Standards?”
On Thursday, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order barring federal agents from using riot control measures like tear gas to disperse journalists seeking to cover protests outside the Broadview ICE processing center, near Chicago.
The order was the result of a lawsuit filed earlier in the week by several Chicago news organizations and reporters who had been injured or detained while trying to cover ICE activity in the city.
Stephanie Lulay is the co–executive editor and cofounder of one of them, Block Club, a seven-year-old digital nonprofit that seems almost perfectly built for this moment. She and reporter Francia García Hernández join The Kicker to talk about what they’ve seen around Chicago recently, and about what it’s like reporting on a city under siege.
Read more:
The lawsuit filed by Block Club* and other Chicago-area news outlets.
Some of Francia’s coverage for Block Club.*
A September incident during which a Block Club* freelancer was shot by pepper balls while covering protests at Broadview.
Dave Levinthal for CJR on how ICE has been routinely ignoring FOIA requests from reporters—including one from Block Club*.
In 2017, Elle Reeve, then a correspondent for Vice News, became a household name when she reported from the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia—as neo-Nazis marched with burning torches and a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters.
Reeve has developed an expertise on what you might call the fringe beat, covering shadowy internet groups and right-wing political movements for CNN.
Those worlds collided when a very online man assassinated the right-wing political star Charlie Kirk in a meme-drenched attack that left much of the media world mystified. Reeve joins The Kicker to help make sense of it all.
Read More:
*Elle recently spoke about interviewing extreme figures with CNN’s Donie O'Sullivan
*Black Pill, Elle’s 2024 book on her journeys into the “darkest corners of the internet”
“Charlottesville: Race and Terror,” the 2017 Vice News* documentary
Last week, as DC reporters were patting themselves on the back for not falling for internet falsehoods claiming that Donald Trump had secretly died, Garrett Graff wrote an essay on his blog, Doomsday Scenario, saying, “It’s time to have a serious conversation about Trump’s health.”
Graff is an author and historian who’s spent more than two decades covering American politics—more recently he’s written a series of oral histories on major world events, and hosted a critically acclaimed podcast series about the early days of the internet and the culture of armed self-defense.
But today, Graff is worried that political journalists are failing to recognize the history they are already living through. He joins The Kicker to share his thoughts on what he sees as the fragile state of American democracy—and the need for DC reporters to dig a lot deeper.
Read More:
*Graff’s blog post on the need for more reporting on Trump’s health
*Graff on the increasingly blurry lines between democracy and authoritarianism
Breaking the Internet, season 4 of Graff’s acclaimed podcast series, The Long Shadow*
*Liam Scott in CJR on how the White House press handled the rumors of Trump’s death
Earlier this month, Hind Hassan, a decorated documentary news reporter who has covered everything from conflicts in Gaza, Lebanon, and Ukraine to the bizarre underworld of the global wellness industry, spoke at a graduation ceremony for students at Columbia Journalism School.
In her address, Hassan pointedly apologized for not doing more to make the job safer for the next generation—a reference to, as she explains in this week’s episode of The Kicker, the brutality of the war in Gaza.
“We're responsible for what our industry stands for,” she said. “I think it is the responsibility of the industry, of those who have the power, of heads of news organizations, to defend journalists when they come under attack, no matter where they are.”
Watch More:
“Starving Gaza”—Hind’s 2024 documentary for Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines*
*“Inside the Wellness Industry’s Controversial Supply Chains”—Hind’s 2022 film for Vice News
*“The Business of War”—Episode One of Hind’s new series for Al Jazeera
For the past few weeks, MAGA media and conservative podcasters have been torn apart over President Trump’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein saga.
Anna Merlan, a senior reporter at Mother Jones, joins The Kicker to talk about right-wing media’s efforts to change the subject—and whether their audiences will go along with it.
Read more:
Anna Merlan on* what happened the last time Trump’s team tried to satisfy right-wing media’s hunger for Epstein news**
Merlan on how Trump has constructed a* new state media machine at the White House**
Ben Mathis-Lilley in* Slate on Steve Bannon’s not-so-hidden hand in the Epstein narrative**
Charlie Warzel on* the “upside down” world of right-wing media supporting Trump (2017)**
Hosted by Josh Hersh
Produced by Amanda Darrach
Recent weeks have not been very comfortable for the BBC. A documentary about Gaza it refused to broadcast was aired instead by a competitor, to critical acclaim. A livestream of the Glastonbury Festival turned into a political nightmare, after a performer led the crowd in a chant of “Death to the IDF”—leading the network to ditch plans for future “high risk” live shows.
But Alan Rusbridger, who spent twenty years as the editor of TheGuardian and is now the editor of Prospect magazine, believes the BBC’s problems go much deeper—at a moment when it’s more needed than ever. “The BBC has never really recovered its nerve,” he says.
Read More:
Listen to* Media Confidential**, Rusbridger’s podcast on the media, cohosted with Lionel Barber
Rusbridger: “The BBC Claims Impartiality over Gaza but There Is a Conflict of Interest at Its Heart*” — July 2025
Rusbridger: “How the Government Captured the BBC*” — January 2024
The Gaza* documentary the BBC refused to broadcast**
*Controversy over an earlier Gaza documentary**
The David Kelly* saga**
Hosted by Josh Hersh
Produced by Amanda Darrach
Last year, Branko Brkic, the founder of the Daily Maverick, a South African news outlet, left his day job to launch an advocacy campaign in defense of journalism. Called Project Kontinuum, the organization aims to sound the alarm about the global threats facing the institution of journalism—and to begin to mount a defense.
In this conversation, Brkic speaks about the admittedly “bleak” picture that he paints, and why news outlets have to stop playing defense if they want to survive.
This podcast was recorded live at ZegFest 2025, in Tbilisi, Georgia.
Read more:
Brkic’s 2024* “Call to Arms” for journalism**
Brkic’s* farewell editorial to readers of Daily Maverick**
*Daily Maverick*reflects on the revelations* of its #GuptaLeaks project**
Audio producer: Levan Kurtskhalia
Audio recorder and editor: Zura Patsia
Produced by: Amanda Darrach
Hosted by: Josh Hersh
For nearly twenty years, Arwa Damon worked as a journalist covering conflict zones across the Middle East—much of it as a prominent correspondent for CNN.
But in 2015, amid the unending horrors of the Syrian civil war, Damon had enough. She left the network and founded Inara, a charity that helps provide treatment to children facing some of the most difficult medical conditions. Her new role has allowed her access to people and places she wouldn’t have seen as a journalist, including four visits to Gaza since October 7, 2023.
Damon joins The Kicker to talk about the transition from journalism to humanitarianism—why she reached her limit as a reporter, and how doing aid work draws on many of the same skills.
This podcast was recorded live on the sidelines at ZegFest 2025, in Tbilisi, Georgia.
Read more:
*Learn about Inara**, Damon’s charity
*Seize the Summit*: Damon’s* recent documentary about four young survivors of war attempting to climb Mount Kilimanjaro**
Audio recorder and editor: Zura Patsia
Produced by: Amanda Darrach
Hosted by: Josh Hersh
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad is an award-winning Iraqi journalist for The Guardian and the author of A Stranger in Your Own City (2023), a reported memoir of his life as an architect turned journalist during the American war in Iraq.
In this wide-ranging conversation, Abdul-Ahad shares his journey to becoming a reporter, what he was surprised to learn about his own country, and how he approaches depicting the intimate lives of the people caught up in war—from innocent bystanders to murderous warlords.
This podcast was recorded live at ZegFest 2025, in Tbilisi, Georgia.
Read more:
*Ghaith’s book*:* A Stranger in Your Own City**
*Mustafa’s story**: “The Reluctant Collaborator: Surviving Syria’s Brutal Civil War and Its Aftermath”
Ghaith’s* collected reporting for The Guardian**
Audio producer: Levan Kurtskhalia
Audio recorder and editor: Zura Patsia
Produced by: Amanda Darrach
Hosted by: Josh Hersh
David Fahrenthold won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2016 reporting on how Donald Trump’s lifetime of charitable giving was largely a mirage.
Nine years later, he’s still reporting on how Trumpworld’s claims about financial matters don’t always add up—this time, looking closely at the cost-cutting from DOGE for the New York Times.
But does this kind of facts-first reporting still land? With Trump doing so much grifting and personal enrichment out in the open, Fahrenthold joins The Kicker to give his answer about why digging up presidential secrets is still worth the effort.
Read more:
Fahrenthold’s* Pulitzer-winning reporting on Trump’s charitable giving**
Some* closer looks at DOGE’s so-called “*wall of receipts”*
Who* attended Trump’s crypto dinner at the White House?**
Hosted by Josh Hersh
Produced by Amanda Darrach
For more than thirty years, Phil Williams has been the steadying voice of investigative reporting at NewsChannel 5, in Nashville. His deep dives into toxic wastewater and lobbyist access to state politicians have earned him a slew of major journalism awards, including five Peabodys and five duPont-Columbia Awards.
But in recent years, his most viral moments have been his unflappable encounters with extremists and neo-Nazis, who have popped up brazenly in communities around Nashville—that is, until Williams shows up with receipts.
Read and watch more of Williams’s reporting:
*Confronting Hate – NewsChannel 5’s 2024 investigation into local extremist groups.
*Hate Comes to Main Street – An investigation into a local politician’s association with hate groups.
*Revealed – Williams’s deep dive into the special access lobbyists have to Tennessee politicians.
Last week, Donald Trump issued an executive order calling for the end of funding for NPR and PBS. It’s the latest attempt by conservatives to cut back on support for public media, and in particular target NPR, which they view as having a liberal bias.
Katherine Maher, NPR’s CEO, says that perception is deeply unfair—and notes that the vast majority of the funding for public media goes to local stations, which are widely trusted across the political spectrum.
But the battle to insulate NPR from political influence is not easy—and, as Maher explains, it’s facing its toughest challenge yet.
Read More:
NPR’s* coverage of Trump’s recent executive order**
CJR on how* local and tribal radio stations have the most to lose from a funding cut**
Uri Berliner, a former NPR editor,* launched a broadside against the network last year for having too much of a liberal bias**
Hosted by Josh Hersh
Produced by Amanda Darrach
A few years ago, El Salvador was one of the most violent nations in the world, with gang killings taking the lives of dozens of people every week.
Nayib Bukele, elected president in 2019, changed all that—today, violence is way down. But his brute-force approach to the problem has involved mass arrests, secret deals, and forced disappearances into a harsh prison system—which is apparently the envy of many in the Trump administration.
Filmmaker Neil Brandvold has covered much of El Salvador’s transition from dangerous gangland to authoritarian dreamworld, and he joins The Kicker to explain the methods Bukele used to construct his fragile peace.
Read/Watch more:
Neil’s 2024* Fault Lines documentary on El Salvador’s gang crackdown.**
Neil’s 2018* Economist video about a religious reform movement for gang members.**
Neil’s 2019* New York Times video including interview with Nayib Bukele.**
*El Faro*’s* 2020 investigative reporting on Bukele’s early deals with the MS-13 gang.**
Hosted by Josh Hersh
Produced by Amanda Darrach
Kai Ryssdal has been the host of Marketplace, a leading daily radio show and podcast about the economy, produced by American Public Media, since 2005.
He delivers the news—from the bitter latest on our 401(k)s to unexpected interviews about the modern-day resurgence of train robberies—with an affable, direct tone.
And when he has something he wants listeners to know—as he did all this week, while the policies of the Trump administration sent the stock market, and the global economy, into a tailspin—he’ll just come right out and say it.
This week on The Kicker, Ryssdal explains what, exactly, just happened with the economy, and why he feels it’s so important for Marketplace to call it like they see it.
Read and hear more:
Listen to Marketplace* here, or wherever you get your podcasts.
*“No, I do not.” A report on Ryssdal’s 2019 interview with Janet Yellen, on whether Donald Trump understands macroeconomics.
*“The institutions of this economy work in no small part because the institutions of this democracy work.” Ryssdal’s final comments on February 13.
Hosted by Josh Hersh
Produced by Amanda Darrach
Prosecutors weren’t notified in advance, witnesses are in shock—and Watson’s family celebrates his freedom.
On the day that Carlos Watson, the founder of the digital media company Ozy Media, was due to turn himself in to prison last week, to begin serving a nearly ten-year sentence for fraud and identity theft, he and his family received some unexpected good news: President Donald Trump was commuting his sentence.
Susie Banikarim, who attended nearly every day of the trial last year, and cohosted the CJR special podcast series “The Unraveling of Ozy Media,” returns to The Kicker to explain how this wild turn of events came to pass, and what Watson’s family, former employees—and even the prosecutors—have had to say so far.
Read more:
“The Unraveling of Ozy Media*”—a three-part podcast series from CJR, including a special presentation of evidence from the original trial
“The Sentencing of Carlos Watson*”—a report from Watson’s last day in court
Hosted by Josh Hersh
Produced by Amanda Darrach
If you thought “DOGE” only stood for the “Department of Government Efficiency”—well, you’re not alone. The world of crypto is full of double meanings and inside jokes, making the recent arrival of these alternative currency markets—and their attendant “crypto bros”—into the seat of power in Washington all the more mystifying.
Enter Molly White, a longtime crypto researcher (and skeptic) whose work has appeared in the New York Times as well as in her self-published newsletter, Citation Needed. On this week’s episode, Molly explains what journalists, and everyone else, need to know about meme coins (dogecoin, $TRUMP), crypto’s grifty culture, and what recent policy changes mean for the average consumer.
Read more:
Lauren Watson in CJR on* the lessons of crypto media**.
The* Times on how Trump’s meme coin made a few people very rich**—at the expense of most everyone else (with research by White).
White on* the strategic bitcoin reserve*, and how the crypto industry is* trying to shed itself of government oversight**.
Hosted by Josh Hersh
Produced by Amanda Darrach
Over the past several months, Donald Trump has mounted a series of legal attacks against the media, including a libel case against ABC, an FCC investigation into CBS, and a lawsuit accusing an Iowa pollster (and the newspaper that publishes her) of “election interference.”
The sometimes far-fetched claims in these cases notwithstanding, the maneuvers are having an effect. The parent company of ABC settled the libel case, over the objections of many news staffers, and CBS has turned over internal documents to the FCC.
And as Lynn Oberlander, this week’s guest and a longtime media lawyer, explains, the legal assault is already creating a chilling effect in many newsrooms.
Read More:
The lawsuit against Iowa pollster Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register*. Selzer’s attorneys have fought back.
*ABC pays $15 million to settle a libel lawsuit, over the objections of news staffers.
*CBS turns over raw transcripts in FCC probe.
FCC commissioner Brendan Carr described his aggressive strategy at a recent Semafor* media conference.
In January, the Baltimore Banner released an investigation into the star kicker of the Baltimore Ravens, in which multiple women accused him of sexually inappropriate behavior during massages, dating back years. (The player denies the accusations.)
It was an example of a rare kind of journalism these days: hard-hitting accountability reporting on sports. Over the past several years, numerous investigative sports outlets have folded, replaced largely by soft-focused content produced by players and teams themselves.
Small, community-based publications like the Banner face the highest toll for doing this kind of work—boxed out of access from teams, they risk losing a pivotal connection they have with subscribers. But Chris Korman, the paper’s sports editor, says it’s worth it anyway.
Read more:
The* Banner*’s* investigation into Ravens kicker Justin Tucker**
From* the CJR archives**: Can sports journalism survive in the era of the athlete? (2024)
Hosted by Josh Hersh
Produced by Amanda Darrach
András Pethő is a Hungarian journalist and a cofounder of Direkt36, an independent investigative news outlet.
Over the past decade, he’s watched as the government of Viktor Orbán—the world leader whom Steve Bannon once praised as “Trump before Trump”—has systematically eroded the freedom of the press in his country, in ways that may feel familiar to Americans watching corporate news leaders succumb to pressure from the administration.
Pethő joins The Kicker to explain why he believes journalists must accept the possibility that the worst is yet to come, while resisting the temptation to turn themselves into martyrs for democracy. “For a while, I thought, This would never happen here,” he said. “The biggest mistake that I made was the failure of imagination.”
Read More:
András’s* 2022 essay on the lessons he learned from experiencing Hungary’s crackdown on a free press**
*Direkt36*’s latest investigation:* a documentary about the secret wealth of Orbán and his allies (with English subtitles)**
The* New York Times on the fall of Origo**, a once-audacious newsmagazine (2018)
Jon Allsop writes and edits The Media Today, CJR’s daily newsletter. There, he’s closely watched as the American press has struggled to respond to, and cover, the barrage of news that pours out of Donald Trump.
As a frenetic new term begins, Jon joins The Kicker to share his thoughts on what the media gets wrong—and how the political press might begin to chart a new relationship with the presidency and the public.
Read More:
Jon’s* latest newsletter**, on Trump’s first week back in office
Jon’s 2020 essay on* how the media handled Trump’s first term**
Chris Hayes on attention, on Ezra Klein’s* podcast**
Susan Glasser on Trump’s* exhausting litany of outrages**
Sign up for The Media Today, CJR’s daily newsletter.
Natalia Antelava spent many years as a correspondent for the BBC, before starting her own media company, Coda Story, in 2016. She’s covered wars in the Middle East and the rise of authoritarianism across Eastern Europe and the Caucasus. For the past year, she was a Knight Fellow at Stanford, where she examined how journalism might survive in an era of AI and tech supremacy.
Antelava joins The Kicker to talk about Meta’s decision to do away with fact-checking, preparing for a second Trump administration, what mainstream reporters can learn from conservative podcasters—and why she’s still optimistic about what journalism can achieve in the year to come.
Read more:
“Noise Is the New Censorship” — Antelava on disinformation and authoritarianism
“Grieving California” — Coda’s 2018 essay on the Tubbs Fire
Hosted by Josh Hersh
Produced by Amanda Darrach
In the finale, Carlos Watson takes the stand—and the jury reaches a verdict.
“The Unraveling of Ozy Media” is a special three-part series of The Kicker, on the trial of Carlos Watson and the excesses of the digital media age, presented by the Columbia Journalism Review.
Hosted and coproduced by Josh Hersh and Susie Banikarim
Produced and edited by Amanda Darrach
**How inflating traffic data went mainstream in digital media—and a key witness takes the stand.
“The Unraveling of Ozy Media” is a special three-part series of The Kicker*, on the trial of Carlos Watson and the excesses of the digital media age, presented by the* Columbia Journalism Review**.
Hosted and coproduced by Josh Hersh and Susie Banikarim
Produced and edited by Amanda Darrach
Carlos Watson’s media startup arrives on the scene—and insiders reveal a dark reality under its glossy veneer.
“The Unraveling of Ozy Media” is a special three-part series of The Kicker, on the trial of Carlos Watson and the excesses of the digital media age, presented by the Columbia Journalism Review.
Hosted and coproduced by Josh Hersh and Susie Banikarim
Produced and edited by Amanda Darrach
Starting on December 9, the Columbia Journalism Review presents a special three-part series of The Kicker: “The Unraveling of Ozy Media,” on the dramatic rise and fall of Carlos Watson, the cofounder of the digital media company Ozy. In 2023, Watson was charged with fraud after it was revealed that one of his partners had masqueraded as a YouTube executive, during a call with potential investors.
But Ozy’s failure is about more than one man. It’s a story about an era of profligate growth and overpromises in digital media that have left many wondering whether there’s any business model that will work for journalism today.
Join hosts Josh Hersh and Susie Banikarim as they follow Watson’s trial and ask how much of digital media was built on a lie.
Nearly half of all Latino voters put their support behind former president Donald Trump this week, according to exit polls—a 14 percent increase from 2020.
Those results surprised many, but not Jack Herrera, who has been reporting on the shifting voting habits of Latino communities across the country for years.
Herrera joins The Kicker to talk about what he’s learned from his journalism in Pennsylvania, Iowa, and the border counties of Texas.
Read More:
Herrera’s article for CJR’s Election Issue on Lorena López, the editor of Iowa’s La Prensa
Herrera’s 2024 reporting on Latino voting in Pennsylvania, Texas, and Iowa
Martin Baron was the executive editor of the Washington Post from 2013 until his retirement, in 2021—which meant he was there for the arrival of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as owner and publisher of the paper.
He’s long praised Bezos for taking a firm line against any interference with the paper’s journalism, but Bezos’s sudden decision, announced last week, to torpedo the paper’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris was a bridge too far. In a post on X, Baron described the move as an act of “cowardice” and “spinelessness.”
Baron joins The Kicker to speak about his intense reaction to the decision, what he thinks has changed with Bezos—and whether it might be time for papers to retire the presidential endorsement anyway.
Read more:
Baron’s original statement on the Post’s decision
Bezos’s op-ed explaining why he pushed to deep-six the endorsement
A Post news team article investigating the ties Bezos’s companies have to the government—and to a potential second Trump administrationHosted by Josh Hersh
Produced by Amanda Darrach
The so-called Big Lie—that the 2020 election was stolen out from under Donald Trump—was more than just a series of individual false facts and misleading videos. It was a narrative, carefully constructed by people affiliated with the Trump campaign, and disseminated through friendly news outlets and social media channels.
Four years later, that story still convinces millions of Trump’s supporters. And as NBC’s Ryan Reilly has reported, it’s one that many people on the former president’s team are already laying the groundwork to repeat this time.
Reilly joins The Kicker to discuss how those stories spread, and why many in the media are better prepared to combat them—while others, including some prominent social media platforms, are poised to make things worse.
Read more:
Ryan’s NBC News article on the 2020 effort to “stop the vote” in Detroit
Ryan’s bookSedition Hunters: How January 6th Broke the Justice System
New York Magazine on the DC jail block run by convicted January 6 rioters
Politico on how Trump might try to claim victory no matter whatHosted by Josh Hersh
Produced by Amanda Darrach
Episode website
New York City is the media capital of the world, but the number of people and outlets covering the city locally has taken a hit recently. Over the past few years, the Wall Street Journal dropped its independent metro section, the New York Times announced it would stop endorsing local races, and the all-news radio station WCBS went off the air.
But a number of scrappy upstarts have started filling the void. The City, a digital news nonprofit, has led some of the best coverage of the ongoing scandals in the administration of Mayor Eric Adams. And Hell Gate, a year-old digital publication, is providing a fresh, voicey take on news and culture.
Today’s guest is Christopher Robbins, an editor and cofounder of Hell Gate, on the state of news in New York, the latest (at least as of our conversation) fallout from the Adams administration, and how he hopes to keep Hell Gate around for a while.
Read more:
The Eric Adams Table of Success
Hosted by Josh Hersh
Produced by Emily Russell
In March, the digital literary magazine Guernica published a personal essay by a British Israeli writer and translator, about her experiences in the aftermath of the October 7 Hamas terror attacks.
It was raw and honest and painful to read. The writer, Joanna Chen, had spent years before the attacks and subsequent war on Gaza volunteering for an organization that transported Palestinian children into Israeli territory for medical care; after October 7, she found it hard to connect with the work.
After the piece was initially published, in March, a number of Guernica staffers—all of them volunteers—expressed outrage that the magazine had published an essay centered on the internal moral agonies of an Israeli, at a time when Palestinians were being brutally killed.
The publisher of Guernica pulled the essay; within a month, Jina Moore Ngarambe, the editor in chief, resigned.
Today on The Kicker: a conversation with Jina about what she learned from the experience, and why she believes so strongly in journalism’s responsibility to present uncomfortable perspectives.
Read more:
Joanna Chen’s essay, “From the edges of a broken world” (as republished by Washington Monthly)
Guernica founder Michael Archer’s explanation for why the essay was taken down
Jina’s interview with Semafor
Hosted by Josh Hersh
Produced by Amanda Darrach
Audio Mix by William Flynn
Episode website
In late May, Kyle Clark went viral after he moderated a debate featuring six Republican candidates for Colorado’s Fourth Congressional District, including Rep. Lauren Boebert.
He refused to allow the candidates to evade his direct questions with waffling, rambly answers, instead repeatedly cutting them off: “You didn’t make any attempt to answer the actual question,” he said at one point.
Over the next few weeks, his management of the debate was hailed by everyone from the Poynter Institute to Jimmy Kimmel, who told his national audience, “That’s how you run a debate, right there, like a drill sergeant!”
A few months on, Clark has mixed feelings about all the social media fanfare—but he’s happy that his no-nonsense approach to interviewing politicians has caught on.
He joins The Kicker ahead of the upcoming presidential debate, between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, to talk about the importance of the media calling out falsehoods, and why local news is central to restoring public trust in the media.
Watch the full 9News debate, from May, here.
Hosted by Josh Hersh
Produced by Amanda Darrach
Research by Kevin Lind
Episode Website
In early 2023, Patrick Lohmann, a reporter for the nonprofit Source NM, moved to the small town of Las Vegas, New Mexico, to learn how residents were coping with the aftermath of the largest wildfire in state history.
What he learned there was that the destruction brought on by wildfires doesn’t end when the fire itself goes out. It can take years for people to extract benefits from the federal bureaucracy, and for communities to fully recover—if they ever do. Wildfires leave behind debris that can be swept up in devastating flash floods, and in many parts of the country, the “fire season” encompasses most of the year.
Pat spoke to The Kicker about the new reality of wildfires, and why all reporters living in fire-prone areas may eventually find themselves covering wildfires.
Read more of Patrick Lohmann’s reporting at Source NM
Patrick moved to Las Vegas, New Mexico to cover the aftermath of the Hermit's Peak/Calf Canyon Fire
How wildfires led to flash flooding in Ruidoso (NYT)
Hosted by Josh Hersh
Produced by Amanda Darrach
Research by Kevin Lind
Episode Website
The Democrats are gathering in Chicago next week, and the sitting president has dropped out of the race. But as the guests on today’s podcast remind us, that doesn’t mean history is repeating itself.
In 1968, Ted Koppel was just back from a tour covering the war in Vietnam, and assigned to the comparatively tame—if, as he reminds us, not without its moments—presidential campaign of Republican Richard Nixon.
Over on the Democratic side, as historian Heather Hendershot writes in her recent book, When the News Broke: 1968 and the Polarizing of America, the media were about to get a rough introduction to how much audience appetites for news were shifting.
For more reminiscences on the politics of ‘68—and its present-day lessons for the news media—in CJR’s special report, reported by Kevin Lind.
Hosted by Josh Hersh
Produced by Amanda Darrach
Research by Kevin Lind
Episode Website
Eugene Daniels is a White House reporter for Politico, with a special focus on Kamala Harris. That’s put him front and center for a month of news that few people in politics saw coming.
On this episode of The Kicker, Daniels shares what he’s learned from nearly four years of covering the vice president, how her relationship with the press will differ from the president’s, and why you can’t blame the media for Biden’s decision to drop out of the race.
Produced by Emily Russell
Hosted by Josh Hersh
Lorena Lopez came to the United States from her home country of Nicaragua, where she was an investigative reporter, in 1992. But it wasn’t until 2016 that she managed to return to her passion, as the founding editor of La Prensa, a Spanish-language newspaper serving Western Iowa.
On this week’s Kicker, Lopez talks about her long journey back to journalism, why reliable, trusted information available for Spanish-speaking Americans is so hard to come by—and why so many of her readers are leaning towards voting for Donald Trump.
You can read more about Lopez’s work in Jack Herrera’s profile, which was part of CJR’s Election Issue. (A Spanish-language version of the article is available here.)
Hosted by Josh Hersh
Produced by Amanda Darrach
Research by Kevin Lind
Episode Website
Alex Thompson, a national political correspondent for Axios, first reported that President Biden had started wearing special sneakers, in part to reduce the risk of tripping, last fall.
But until the debate last week, he was still one of a small handful of reporters who was aggressively pursuing direct evidence that Biden’s age – regular fodder for political talk shows – was actually having an impact.
He joins the Kicker to talk about what it’s like to do that kind of journalism, how the White House pushed back, and why so many people had a hard time accepting what was happening in front of their eyes.
Read Alex’s report from last fall about concerns inside the White House about Biden losing his footing.
And his coverage after the debate, when he revealed why the White House limited Biden’s public engagements before 10am and after 4pm.
The Wall Street Journal’s months-long investigation into signs of Biden’s mental decline, from early June, is here.
Hosted by Josh Hersh
Produced by Amanda Darrach
Research by Kevin Lind
Episode Website
Paul Farhi was a media reporter for the Washington Post until the end of last year. But instead of retiring, he’s been busier than ever, chronicling the seemingly endless stream of bad news stories about the media business, for outlets like The Atlantic and here at CJR.
He joins The Kicker to talk about traditional journalism’s struggles to stay relevant amid the boundless other means companies and high-profile individuals have to communicate with the public—and the growing number of people who say they avoid the news entirely.
You can read more about journalism’s apathy problem in CJR’s Election Issue here.
And read Farhi’s reporting on how some companies no longer feel the need to give any comment to a reporter, even when they think the story is wrong.Hosted by Josh Hersh
Produced by Amanda Darrach
Research by Kevin Lind
Steve Herman was the White House correspondent for Voice of America during the Trump administration. He joins The Kicker to talk about his new book on what it was like to cover a deeply unpredictable president—and why he believes it’s essential, even under extreme circumstances, for reporters to stay out of the political fray.
This podcast is part of “Covering the Election,” CJR’s spring special issue on news and politics in 2024. Read the whole issue here.
You can find Herman’s Behind the White House Curtain here.
Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Trump term, includes a chapter on remaking VOA.Hosted by Josh Hersh
Produced by Amanda Darrach
Research by Kevin Lind
Haaretz is one of Israel’s most respected newspapers. It’s also one of the few willing to openly criticize the government for its treatment of Palestinians. The Kicker speaks with Hagar Shezaf and Omer Benjakob, two journalists with the paper, about what it’s like to do accountability journalism in Israel these days—especially in the aftermath of the devastating Hamas attacks of October 7th.
Read more:
Hagar Shezaf on violence against Palestinians in the West Bank since October 7
And on the prison camp at Sde Teiman
Omer Benjakob on Israeli influence operations against Hamas and UNRWA
Jelani Cobb is the Dean of the Columbia Journalism School. He is also a staff writer at the New Yorker magazine. For much of the past few weeks, he has been enmeshed in Columbia University’s efforts to grapple with a protest movement on campus over the war in Gaza – one that culminated in the takeover of a building, and finally, on Tuesday, April 30th, a police raid.The Kicker talks to Cobb about the role the Journalism School played throughout the crisis, including facilitating press access to campus after a lockdown was imposed, and supporting the work of student journalists, who were the only ones left on campus to document the police raid as it unfolded.Read CJR on the work of the Columbia Spectator, the undergrad student newspaper: https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/interview_editors_columbia_spectator_campus_protest.php
This week, host Josh Hersh dives into the world of documentary news. Amel Guettatfi and Julia Steers just won the Polk Award for Inside Wagner, their hourlong Vice News documentary on the Wagner Group—Vladimir Putin’s private army of militiamen. They discuss their unprecedented access to a military training operation in the Central African Republic, the unique challenges of doing this kind of reporting on film, and why, sometimes, video is the only way to tell the story. Show NotesInside Wagner: The Rise of Russia's Notorious Mercenaries, Amel Guettatfi and Julia Steers, Vice Newsbit.ly/3UtURmh
In recent years, numerous beloved sports news institutions have been shut down, or dramatically reduced their operations, while digital shows hosted by professional sportspeople, current and retired, have become ubiquitous.Meanwhile, traditional sports journalism—particularly of the type that asks uncomfortable questions of what is, ultimately, a huge and powerful business—has been in decline. Last year, Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel, an HBO show that mixed softer features with hard-nosed investigative journalism, wrapped its final season after twenty-nine years on air. Josh Fine was an investigative producer at Real Sports for seventeen years. He has some ideas on how sports journalism can revive itself.Host: Josh HershProducer: Amanda DarrachShow Notes:Can sports journalism survive in the era of the athlete? by Josh Hersh for CJRhttps://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/sports-journalism-survival-foul-territory-mcafee-braun-mlb.php
News of stubborn inflation, increasing unemployment, and the housing crisis dominate headlines of late. Alissa Quart is trying to improve that reportage, in content and form. Quart is the executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, which challenges traditional narratives of economic class and issues through funding original reporting, done by independent journalists from diverse economic backgrounds. Quart explains to Kyle Pope, Columbia Journalism Review’s editor and publisher, how this helps dismantle the “American myth” of self-reliance — the subject of her latest book, Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream. In the interview, Quart and Pope discuss how the media’s reliance on this myth impacts electoral politics and what solutions exist. Quart suggests changing language standards, expanding recruiting criteria for newsrooms, and even reimagining news sections.
Before Russia invaded her home country, Ukrainian journalist Svitlana Oslavska was reviewing books for Krytyka, a Ukrainian magazine, and writing nonfiction books. Now, she’s documenting war crimes committed by the Russians against Ukrainians for the Reckoning Project. Since joining the Project, Oslavska’s reporting serves two purposes — to provide detailed witness testimonies for court cases against the Russians and to publish accounts of the war in the international media. In this episode of the Kicker, Oslavska recounts the war crimes she documented for the Project and later published as a story in TIME.
The Columbia Journalism Review recently invited journalists, academics, and experts to convene at a conference called "FaultLines: Democracy." In this episode, taped at the FaultLines conference, Masha Gessen, of The New Yorker; Jodie Ginseberg, president of the Committee to Protect Journalists; and Sheila Coronel, an expert in global investigative journalism, discuss how authoritarian regimes are erasing traces of the past and recasting history in dangerous ways.
For decades, Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty have broadcast into countries all over, in dozens of languages. Yet in some places where the United States has invested the most soft power, authoritarianism has only gotten stronger—and journalists remain at risk. That may be especially true in Afghanistan since the Taliban’s takeover. For CJR's latest digital issue, Emily Russell reports on hearts and minds media in Afghanistan and beyond.Visit cjr.org to read the Authoritarianism Issue.
In 1982, about twenty Black journalists quit their jobs at American networks, banded together under the name Jacaranda Nigeria Limited, and flew to Nigeria, where they would work under the country’s newly elected president to revamp a state-funded journalism network. On today’s episode of the Kicker, Feven Merid, a Columbia Journalism Review staff writer, tells their story.She explains the many unforeseen challenges Jacaranda’s journalists faced — the Nigerian government’s interference in their reporting, the lack of proper training and resources, the confusion over their racial identity — and, ultimately, how the problems they went to Nigeria to escape never really disappeared.Read Feven's article at https://www.cjr.org/the_feature/black-american-journalists-nigeria.php.
Last week, the Columbia Journalism Review published a four-part investigation into the media’s fraught relationship with Donald Trump. In this episode of the Kicker, Jeff Gerth, who authored the report, talks to Kyle Pope, CJR’s editor and publisher, about the origin of the investigation and the intense responses to it, with which Gerth admits he is still “grappling.”On the podcast, Gerth says he considers his 24,000-word story an “anatomy,” reconstructing how the media covered Trump and Russia. In reporting the piece, Gerth interviewed Trump at – predictably – a golf course, and reached out to dozens of journalists who covered Trump-Russia, albeit with limited success. “Many of them are loath to want to discuss or/and engage with what they do,” Gerth says in the episode. “I find it perplexing.” For additional news on this story and on the media, subscribe to CJR’s daily newsletter at cjr.org/email
After two decades of attending Davos, Rana Foroohar, associate editor of the Financial Times, stayed home from the conference this year. In this week’s Kicker, Foroohar tells Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review, why the annual meet-up of elite global technocrats imparts “icky” feelings, and why the Davos crowd, including the journalists reporting from conference, might have an skewed outlook on the economy. Also joining Pope in conversation is Mercy Orengo, a CJR fellow. Orengo shares insights from her recent conversations with business reporters tasked with covering an uncertain economy.
At the start of January, Jon Allsop, chief writer of Columbia Journalism Review’s newsletter, The Media Today, tuned back into the news after a two-month hiatus. On this week’s Kicker, Allsop discusses what he found upon his return: a “ghostland” of a Twitter feed and a keen awareness of the “trivial” nature of the news cycle. In conversation with Kyle Pope, CJR’s editor and publisher, Allsop also talks about what media trends he’ll be monitoring in the new year. Other CJR staffers – Pesha Magid, a Delacorte fellow; Mathew Ingram, CJR’s chief digital writer; and Amanda Darrich, a contributing producer – discuss the media issues they’re watching in a round-robin discussion with Pope.
Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter has inspired news headlines once unimaginable (see New York Magazine's "Elon Musk is Selling Off Twitter’s Cafeteria and Furniture"). It has also created serious problems for journalists who rely on the platform for developing sources, finding stories, and driving readership. It’s not safe to do journalistic business on the platform anymore, Emily Bell, founding director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism told Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review, in this week’s episode of the Kicker. Together, Pope and Bell discuss how journalists should (or shouldn’t) cope with Musk’s Twitter, which Bell calls “an unstable substance,” and what might be lost if Twitter were to disintegrate completely.
Welcome to the weird, wild, scintillatingly stylish, and syntactically sound world of RED PEN—the grammar podcast that won't put you to sleep. Brought to you by the Columbia Journalism Review and hosted by old buds Ryan Davis and Mike Laws, RED PEN plucks examples from the news (as well as from novels, music, movies—wherever!) to answer all those questions you were too afraid to ask in English class. Digressions may include: Green Day's early work, the oppressive atmosphere of latter-day Batman movies, and, of course, cats. Lots of cats.
Writing for The Guardian last week, Washington bureau chief David Smith recalled that Donald Trump, announcing his run for presidency at Mar-a-Lago, appeared an “ousted dictator, drained of power and surrounded by a dwindling band of loyalists in his last redoubt.” Many in the media similarly reported a lackluster atmosphere and an uninspired Trump, whose splintered Republican base, deepened by mid–term losses and legal controversies, might be intensifying the nation’s “Trump fatigue.”
On this episode of the Kicker, Smith discusses how the media should continue covering the former president as he vies for another term. He suggests greater contextualization of Trump’s quotes, less coverage of his tweets, and more.
On today’s Kicker, what the media got right and wrong in the 2022 midterm election. Ross Barkan, a politics reporter for New York magazine, The Nation and more talks with CJR’s editor and publisher Kyle Pope about the media’s penchant for speculation in divisive elections.
Also in the discussion: how the media grapples with writing about a democracy in peril. On today’s Kicker, what the media got right and wrong in the 2022 midterm election. Ross Barkan, a politics reporter for New York magazine, The Nation and more talks with CJR’s editor and publisher Kyle Pope about why the media’s penchant for speculation in divisive elections.
Also in the discussion: how the media grapples with writing about a democracy in peril. “Is this the election that will determine the future of democracy?” Barkan questions. “Maybe, maybe not. But I have my own reservations about that kind of grandiose rhetoric.”
Reporting from Moscow in the final years of the Cold War, Bill Keller witnessed the Soviet Union “fall apart like Humpty Dumpty.” On this week’s Kicker, Keller says Vladimir Putin is trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again – evoking international anxieties from the past. Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review, asks Keller about these anxieties, and, alongside CJR staff, discusses how the media should approach nuclear speculation.
Also in this episode, Keller talks about his recent book, "What’s Prison For? "Keller shares lessons from reporting inside prisons in the U.S. and abroad, and contemplates the through line of his journalism career spanning criminal justice to the Cold War. In the end, Keller says, prisons and Russia belong to the same beat: freedom.
Just as Europeans prepare for winter amid rising gas prices – calling upon their old ties to gas-rich African countries – a colonial-era island off the coast of Senegal erodes into the rising sea. Both these stories, discussed on this week’s Kicker with Nic Haque, a reporter for Al Jazeera, underscore the urgency of the climate crises that journalists cover across the globe. Some of that work, including Haque’s, will be celebrated October 25 in “Burning Questions,” a broadcast on PBS’s World Channel showcasing the winners of the 2022 Covering Climate Now Journalism Awards.
Haque talks with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, on covering climate emergencies in West Africa, and how climate change has touched his life, personally and professionally.
On this week’s Kicker, Rebecca Traister, a writer-at-large for New York Magazine and the Cut, and the author of “Good and Mad,” a book about the history and political power of women’s anger, sits down with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR. They discuss why the press seemed only willing to cover “medically chilling” abortion stories, and how to protect sources as abortion’s legal loopholes disappear.
Should climate crisis coverage focus on the danger at hand, or on optimism and solutions at work? On what individuals can do, or industrial changes? As newsrooms struggle to reach a consensus, the Covering Climate Now Journalism Awards provide a model for impactful work.
Justin Worland, senior correspondent at TIME, was just named CCN’s 2022 Journalist of the Year. On this week’s Kicker, Worland sits down with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, to discuss his climate crisis coverage and The Uproot Project, his initiative to support environmental journalists of color.
Nina Totenberg has covered the Supreme Court for five decades. On this week’s Kicker, the NPR reporter sits down with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, to discuss a court she says is more conservative than it has been since the late 1920s and early 1930s, and what happens next in light of the leak of the Roe v Wade decision.
Nina Totenberg is NPR's legal affairs correspondent. She has a book coming out in September called "Dinners with Ruth: A memoir about The power of friendships," available for preorder now.
The Columbia Graduate School of Journalism announced today that Jelani Cobb will be its new dean. Cobb is a professor at the school, a staff writer at The New Yorker, an author, a documentary producer, and the director of the Ira A. Lipman Center For Journalism and Civil and Human Rights.
On this week’s Kicker, Cobb speaks with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, about the role of journalism at a politically fraught time, diversity efforts at the J-school and in journalism, and the high cost of degrees at institutions like Columbia.
Elena Kostyuchenko reported atrocities as they unfolded inside Ukraine until Russian censors forced Novaya Gazeta—her employer and Russia’s oldest independent newspaper—to halt publication. How did Kostyuchenko gain access to the country her homeland was invading? What did she see there? And how does she view Russia’s future?
On this week’s Kicker, guest host Keith Gessen, who is a professor at the J-School and a founding editor of n+1 and contributor to The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and the London Review of Books, welcomes Kostyuchenko to the latest in his Delacorte Lecture series.
Last week, after years of public speculation on the matter, the New York Times named Joe Kahn as Dean Baquet’s successor to the position of executive editor. How did that process play out behind closed doors? And, as the midterms draw near, how does Kahn plan to cover the threat to American democracy?
Baquet and Kahn sat down with Kyle Pope to discuss objectivity, the evolution of the paper from a news outlet to something we’ve never seen before, and—inevitably—Wordle.
Al Roker, weathercaster for the Today Show, is one of the best-known and trusted names in media. He has also led efforts to educate the American public on the ties between weather and the climate crisis.
On this week’s Kicker, Roker and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, discuss the evolution of weather coverage, from lighthearted entertainment to reporting on the frontlines of the biggest story of our time.
Over the past week, Ukrainians have used social media to document Russia’s attacks on civilians. Those efforts have been more effective at blunting the Russian propaganda machine than anything that has come out of the technology companies themselves.
On this week’s Kicker, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, speaks with Jane Lytvynenko, a senior research fellow in the Technology and Social Change Project at the Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. They discuss Ukrainian “prebunking” of Russian propaganda, and where Lytvynenko, a Ukranian-Canadian expert on Russian disinformation, gets her news.
In the five days since Russia declared war on Ukraine, invading troops have drawn ever closer and their attacks have grown more deadly. Domestic and foreign reporters on the ground are struggling to determine how much danger is too much, and where they can most effectively cover the conflict.
On this week’s Kicker, NPR’s Eleanor Beardsley and Igor Kossov, a journalist at The Kiev Independent, speak with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR. The two journalists, both attempting to leave the country as they speak, discuss the war they witnessed and their decision to leave.
While Sarah Palin may have lost her defamation lawsuit against The New York Times, the legal climate for journalists nevertheless seems to be getting worse.
Stuart Karle is a media lawyer who has served as chief operating officer of Reuters News and as general counsel of The Wall Street Journal. On this week’s Kicker, he and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, discuss the Palin case and why privacy law may prove to be the next frontier in the war against the press.
The Biden administration on Friday warned that a Russian invasion of Ukraine could happen within days, and again advised Americans to leave Ukraine “now.” The advice is strangely at odds with what day-to-day life feels like in the country. How do Putin and Biden’s age—and Cold War experience—shape the current crisis?
Eleanor Beardsley, Paris correspondent for NPR, recently traveled to Ukraine. On this week’s Kicker, she joins Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, to discuss her recent reporting, and how different the Russian threat looks on the ground.
As last summer’s efforts to aid evacuations from Afghanistan grew desperate, media debated who was to blame for the crisis. In his landmark piece “The Betrayal” for the Atlantic, George Packer reframes how to think about te fall of Kabul.
On this week’s Kicker, Packer joins Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, to discuss the impact of Biden’s experience with Vietnam, and how the media should approach moral questions in a divided, partisan era.
Typical disaster journalism follows a transactional track. Survivors give the press their stories to package and sell. In turn, the media validates the horror and solicits aid. But when Tonga faced a volcanic eruption and tsunami earlier this month, the island nation neither wanted nor needed Western coverage. In fact, our intrusion presented more of a threat than the crisis itself.
On this week’s Kicker, Damien Cave, the New York Times bureau chief in Sydney, Australia, and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, discuss the island’s dismissal of the global press, and the Western media’s boundless assumption that we can help.
Despite Ukraine’s efforts to downplay the threat, hybrid warfare between Russia and the west has already begun. Christo Grozev is the lead Russia investigator with Bellingcat, focusing on security threats, extraterritorial clandestine operations, and the weaponization of information. On this week’s Kicker, he and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, discuss how the press should cover a conflict that will put information warfare at the forefront.
Education reporters cover one of the most emotional facets of the Covid-19 pandemic. The political obsession with keeping public schools open during the latest Covid-19 surge does not match the desires of parents. In fact a recent poll shows that the less income a child’s household has, the more caution the parents express about in-person schooling.
On this week’s Kicker, Tracy Swartz, who covers Chicago Public Schools for the Chicago Tribune, and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, discuss how so many districts failed to create better safety measures and a plan for temporary remote learning this winter.
The Ghislaine Maxwell trial has highlighted the court system’s bullying of sexual assault victims—those who take the stand, those who come to bear witness, and even those who sit on the jury.
On this week’s Kicker, Julie K. Brown, an investigative reporter with the Miami Herald whose work led to Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein’s arrests, and Lucia Osborne-Crowley, a lawyer and a reporter for Law360 who broke the story that a Maxwell juror was a victim of sexual assault, join Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR. They discuss how the press can hold the court system to account.
Journalists on Twitter are faced with an impossible task, a choice between building their following or avoiding harassment. More often than not, they face those risks without the support of their editors and newsrooms.
On this week’s Kicker, Jacob L. Nelson, an assistant professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, discuss Nelson’s latest report, published by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, on journalists’ experiences with and views of newsroom social media policies.
As Ian Urbina’s investigative work uncovered human rights abuses and climate destruction across the world’s oceans, he realized he needed to diversify his audience—beyond even the reach of legacy outlets like the New York Times.
On this week’s Kicker, Urbina and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, discuss this week’s story on Libya’s migrant prisons, and the journalism model Urbina built to change the rules of global engagement.
On this week’s Kicker, Marcy Wheeler, an independent journalist, and Erik Wemple, a media critic at the Washington Post, speak with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, about media accountability and where press discussion of the Steele dossier fell short.
Most reporters in the developing world can’t afford to attend high stakes climate conferences like the COP26 held in Glasgow this month. Neither can most climate activists. What is lost?
Jon Allsop, author of CJR’s newsletter “The Media Today,” spent the past week at COP26. On this week’s Kicker, he sits down with two conference attendees, Disha Shetty, a public health journalist from India, and Mark Hertsgaard, co-founder and executive director of Covering Climate Now and the environment correspondent for The Nation, to discuss how global north editors dismiss important reporting from the developing world.
As journalists struggle to cover the latest revelations in the Facebook story, they also endeavor to write stories that land with the general public. How much context is sacrificed for the sensation of something new?
On this week’s Kicker, Renee DiResta, who is the technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory and an ideas contributor at Wired and The Atlantic, and Mathew Ingram, our chief digital writer, speak with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, on how to connect the dots when the story gets this big.
The network of websites that pose as local news outlets but aren’t has grown exponentially in the run up to next year’s midterm elections. Who funds the sites, and how can we track them? And why are they called “pink slime”?
On this week’s Kicker, Priyanjana Bengani, a senior research fellow at Columbia Journalism School's Tow Center for Digital Journalism, sits down with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, to discuss her study of these op-up sites, how to find and follow them, and what the phenomenon means in the face of ever-dwindling local news.
This week, the most conservative Supreme Court since the Great Depression convened. The 6-3 “super-majority” is poised to roll back decades of law.
On our latest episode of the Kicker, Jay Willis, the editor in chief of Balls and Strikes, a site that launched last month promising “progressive, bullshit-free commentary” about the legal system, joins Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR. They discuss vital rulings that missed the news cycle, and why conservative justices have been so critical of the media.
Medhi Hasan has built a global reputation on devastating interviews. Now on MSNBC and Peacock, is he a corrective to the equivocal tendencies of the American press?
Jon Allsop profiled Hasan for our latest issue. On this week’s Kicker, he sits down with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, to detail how Hasan’s approach can be seen as “an explicit rebuke to outdated journalistic norms."
Adam Piore spoke to 50 current and former staffers at the Wall Street Journal on how the paper’s editors limit subject matter and political coverage in an effort to hold on to their traditional audience.
On this week’s Kicker, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, and Piore discuss his findings, the Journal’s obsession with the New York Times, and what it all means for the journalists who work there.
In his five-plus decades of photographing performative wealth and celebrity at events like the Vanity Fair Oscar Party and the Met Gala, Larry Fink perfected the art of taking “candid pictures of very non-candid people.”
On this week’s Kicker, Fink joins Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, to discuss coverage of last week’s Met Gala, how journalism can learn from his ability to capture the space between posed photo ops, and why now, against the backdrop of a global pandemic and extreme economic inequality, the time for risk-free activism and the fetishization of wealth is over.
For CJR, Jon Allsop followed the weekend’s deluge of September 11 anniversary coverage—where it excelled, and when it lacked self-awareness. On today’s Kicker, he joins Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, on what the media got right and what it didn’t.
Gender and sexuality can feel natural and even immutable, but science and the lived experience of numerous humans tell us that these categories are far more variable than they may seem. At a time when dozens of states around the US have passed or are considering legislation to enforce rigid definitions of gender, queer theorist Jack Halberstam and journalist Zach Stafford discuss the fallaciousness of what scholars call the “gender binary.” Bringing an intersectional perspective, and looking at examples from women’s sports, they invite journalists to speak truth to the power that is exercised, often violently, through an insistence on “normative” ideas of gender and sexuality.
Guests: Zach Stafford & Jack Halberstam
The American Dream is often portrayed as the hook that pulls people to the United States. What is usually left out of the story is the hell many flee, sometimes a hell fed by the very country in which they seek refuge. The story of U.S. involvement in Central America is a classic example of wars inflicted on people by U.S. financed repressive regimes and later by gangs grown in the U.S. and deported wholesale to vulnerable nations. In this episode, a scholar sheds light on the invention of the “illegal alien,” its use and manipulation for the past 140 years (and counting) to exclude and exploit people of color and more recent notions of who and who is not deserving of legal admission into the United States.
Guest: Mae Ngai
Steel produced in Youngstown, Ohio, helped America win World War II, and it was used to build the bridges that we cross and the buildings in which we live. But in the 1970s, the mills began closing. Some 50,000 well-paid jobs were gone. There was a concurrent rise in anger as the workers and their children struggled to survive with minimum-wage jobs or in the gig economy. Youngstown represents the widening chasm of class division in the United States. Journalists need to understand how class informs politics and culture. In this episode we talk with a labor studies expert about how to cover the working class. Guest: Sherry Linkon
There is a long tradition of imperial denial in the United States. After all, Americans fought the British Empire and have always thought of themselves as different from European colonialists. They are Empire Slayers — why else would “Star Wars” and its fight against the Galactic Empire have such a hold on the popular imagination? In this episode, two scholars explain how, from the nation’s birth, imperial expansion — first westward into Indian Country and later, overseas —was a defining character of these United States. The echoes of empire can be heard in today’s news. It’s impossible to talk about immigration, drone strikes, the attacks on Asian Americans, the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, etc., without understanding the history and projection of American power. What would journalism informed by the history of empire look like?
Guests: Daniel Immerwahr & Vernadette Vicuna Gonzalez
Whiteness in America isn’t just the neutral norm against which racial minorities, particularly Black people, are measured. Whiteness in America means having the privilege and power that go along with being part of that supposed norm. And becoming white – not in terms of pigment but of social status – is a choice that nearly every immigrant or refugee group in America has had to embrace or reject. We talk with two scholars in the field of Whiteness Studies about how understanding the construction of white identity in this polyglot country gives us keen insights into its troubled racial history.
The issue of police violence and racism is a familiar one. It’s been present in the United States since the Republic's beginnings. And the stories of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tamir Rice and others cannot be understood if we do not know and comprehend that history. In this episode, we discuss race, crime, criminal justice, violence and the kind of cyclical dynamic that we have seen repeatedly over the decades with Harvard historian Dr. Khalil Muhammad. The conversation gives greater context and an insight into the shattering events of today by illuminating the roots of injustice and violence against Black Americans by those in authority.
How We Got Here is a podcast for journalists about how history and identity shape narrative. As journalists, we like to say we’re writing the first draft of history. But if we don’t know our own history, we run the risk of misinterpreting what we see and what we hear. Of failing to connect the dots. George Floyd’s murder, the Black Lives Matter movement, the election, the attempted coup - they’ve all brought America to a reckoning with its national character. Six professors from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism take a step back to examine the historical context of today’s news. They look at how race, gender, class, immigration and American empire impact the stories we cover and how we tell them. How We Got Here is a production of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in partnership with Columbia Journalism Review.
When Samuel Getachew was a sixth grader in the Oakland public school system, Akintunde Ahmad was a “hometown hero,” headed to Yale. On this week’s Kicker, Ahmad, now a CJR contributor and Ida B. Wells fellow, and Getachew, a rising first year at Yale, discuss the media’s misuse of successful Black students.
How do we report and contextualize the January 6 insurrection, or the largest efforts to suppress the vote since the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, or the way political power is wielded in the US without understanding the racial history of our country?
On this week’s Kicker, Hannah-Jones, the new Knight chair in race and reporting at Howard University, and a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for the New York Times Magazine, joins Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, to talk about her decision to decline tenure at the University of North Carolina, and her plan to turn Howard’s journalism program into a “firewall for democracy.”
The pandemic’s limits on primary candidates and the journalists who cover them; a drastically shorter campaign season; and all but absent public polling thanks to the new ranked choice voting. This has been a New York City primary season like no other.
On this week’s Kicker, Errol Louis, who is the anchor of NY1’s “Inside City Hall,” the host of the podcast “You Decide with Errol Louis,” and a professor of urban reporting at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, joins Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR. They discuss the ability of the city’s already fragile local news ecosystem to cover a high-stakes election season, and what Eric Adams’ treatment of the press so far means if he becomes the next mayor of New York City.
At the start of the pandemic, the UK government’s suppression of data prompted Carole Cadwalladr and her colleagues at All the Citizens to found Independent SAGE, a group of scientists who shadow official government scientists. Now, as the UK hurtles towards a June 21 reopening that now looks unlikely to happen, the group’s findings are more concerning than ever.
On this week’s Kicker, Cadwalladr, a feature writer for The Observer, and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, discuss what US journalists can learn from the UK’s Covid fight, and how misleading euphoric Covid-19 coverage in the US has become.
With over ten thousand athletes from more than two hundred countries, the Olympics are typically a sports writer’s dream. But with Covid protocols in Tokyo this summer, and heightened awareness that players no longer need the press to connect with their fans, is spontaneous sports access also obsolete?
On this week’s Kicker, Andrew Keh, a sports reporter for the New York Times, and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, the shift of power from press to athletes.
About half of daily local newspaper circulation in the US is now controlled by hedge funds. On this week’s Kicker, Rebecca Lurye, a reporter for the Hartford Courant and unit chair for the Hartford Courant Guild, and Danielle Ohl, a reporter for the Capital Gazette and chair of the Chesapeake News Guild, join Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR. They discuss what comes next after Alden Global Capital bought Tribune Publishing, and how reporters and their communities can advocate for journalism.
As the Supreme Court prepares to hear Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a Mississippi case that outlaws abortion after 15 weeks gestation, the media’s coverage of abortion, and the language used to describe it, will be back in the spotlight.
On this week’s Kicker, Maria Clark, a Louisiana-based healthcare reporter with USA Today’s American South team, and Jessica Mason Pieklo, senior vice president and executive editor at Rewire News Group, join Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR. They discuss how to cover legislation around abortion as a medical procedure rather than simply a political issue, and the importance of centering patients and providers in abortion reporting.
Ruth Margalit is an Israeli journalist living in Tel Aviv. By day, she covers the crisis there for the New Yorker. By night, her young family shelters in their building’s stairwell.
On this week’s Kicker, how American framing of this week’s violence conflicts with the rest of the world’s; how Israeli military censors lost control of the narrative; and why Netanyahu’s downfall could be related to his obsession with the media. Margalit in conversation with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR.
Recently, Maria Bustillos had the opportunity to discuss “post truth,” press manipulation, and right-wing media lies with Joan Donovan, the research director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy, and Claire Wardle, the cofounder and director of First Draft, a nonprofit focused on addressing mis- and disinformation. Both scholars spend a lot of time in the muck with Fox News and its feeder conspiracies. “There’s a lot to be angry about,” Wardle said. Donovan: “This job is hell.”
“Nomadland,” a film inspired by and featuring non-actor sources from journalist Jessica Bruder’s 2017 nonfiction book of the same name, just swept the Academy Awards. Both book and film explore the life of America’s “new nomads,” who live without traditional housing since losing their savings in the Great Recession.
On this week’s Kicker, Bruder joins Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, to discuss the process of shepherding a story from magazine to book to film, and the future of American “houselessness” in the wake of the Covid pandemic.
A discussion on algorithmic design, data discrimination, social media manipulation, and how racism is baked in. The conversation is led by Nehal El-Hadi, a science and environmental journalist whose work explores the connections between body, place, and technology, with guests Chris Gilliard, a writer and professor whose scholarship centers on digital privacy, surveillance, and the nexus of race, class, and technology, and Marcus Gilroy-Ware, a writer and researcher at the intersection of media and politics.
Special Report: In 2018, David Goren, a radio producer and audio archivist, created the Brooklyn Pirate Radio Sound Map to collect the sounds of dozens of pirated broadcasts from across the borough. Pirate stations earn their name by hitching a ride on already licensed radio frequencies that typically cost commercial stations millions of dollars to acquire and set up. Nowhere in the country are there more pirate radio stations than in New York, where they provide a vital service to immigrant populations.
Goren estimates that New York has about a hundred pirate stations, transmitting from rooftops and attics to listeners seeking news from around the city and back home, as well as entertainment and religious programming. The broadcasts bypass socioeconomic barriers and provide a means to seize control of the flow of information. But they are now at risk of extinction: Before Donald Trump left the White House, he signed the Pirate Act, which increased the authority of the Federal Communications Commission to fight pirate operations through mandatory sweeps in cities with high concentrations of pirate radio use. Pirate stations today face fines of up to two million dollars. “The people running these stations, they don’t have two million dollars,” Goren said. Broadcasters that don’t make it onto his sound map could be lost forever.
In 2019, in an effort to combat climate silence, CJR and The Nation, in partnership with The Guardian, founded Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaborative aimed at strengthening coverage of the climate emergency. Two years later, Covering Climate Now partners publish coverage of the climate crisis to 2 billion readers.
On this week’s Kicker, Mark Hertsgaard, the executive director of Covering Climate Now and the environment correspondent for The Nation, and Katrina vanden Heuvel, editorial director and publisher of The Nation, join Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR. They discuss what they’ve learned about how to tell climate crisis stories that land with impact, how the scientific weight of COVID-19 coverage can further climate coverage, and why covering the climate crisis is journalism, not advocacy.
In the wake of the Derek Chauvin verdict, Mel Reeves, the editor of the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder, and a 30-year member of the community where George Floyd was murdered, tells Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, how he watched police and city authorities depict his home as inherently violent for the national press.
Reporters were in Minneapolis covering the trial of Derek Chauvin when news broke about the police shooting of Daunte Wright.
On this week’s Kicker, Jelani Cobb, a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of “The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress,” joins Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, to discuss his work in Minneapolis over the past week, the ways reporters can contextualize so many deaths, and how he will approach next week’s expected verdict.
Joaquin Oliver was murdered in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting. His parents, Manuel and Patricia Oliver, recognize a pattern, both in how the US media covers mass shootings by rote, and in how Americans are able to look away once the news cycle ends.
On this week’s Kicker, the Olivers, who founded Change The Ref, a nonprofit that works to raise awareness about mass shootings through reducing the influence of the NRA at the federal level, and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, discuss how the media can drive urgency in the fight for gun control.
Please visit inevitablenews.com to sign up for our virtual Gun Violence News Summit, which takes place on Tuesday, April 6. Join Kyle, the Olivers, and industry leaders from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Trace, The Guardian, and others to determine a path forward in the face of never-ending gun violence and mass shootings.
In August 2019, days after 32 people died in the El Paso and Dayton mass shootings, our host Kyle Pope spoke with John Temple. Temple was the editor of Denver’s Rocky Mountain News when the Columbine massacre changed America’s perception of safety forever.
Temple told us about the photos he decided not to run that day in 1999, and the one he did, which confirmed a child’s death before police spoke with the mother. In the wake of the horror in El Paso and Dayton, Temple’s thoughts were on the Civil Rights movement, on the fight for abolition—the times in our history when journalists have taken a moral stand.
As we take stock of the devastation in Atlanta and Boulder, and of the ways in which the news cycle failed, especially Atlanta’s victims, here again are John Temple and Kyle Pope.
In the wake of the shootings in Atlanta this week, the media has focused on the killer’s story and struggled to explain why the attacks were racist. The process has dehumanized the victims.
On this week’s Kicker, Diana Lu, who writes about Asian American culture and coverage, and Kent Ono, a scholar of Media and Asian American Studies at the University of Utah, where he studies racial representation and Asian Americans in the media, join Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR. They discuss the coverage of the horror in Atlanta so far, and the origins of anti-Asian racism and sexism in the American press.
Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, most media coverage has focused on the ongoing physical health disaster and the need to convince readers and elected officials to take action. But the coverage is also a chronic source of trauma. Now that there is some good news interspersed with the tragedy, we struggle to find a balance.
Dr. Alison Holman is a health psychologist and professor at the University of California Irvine’s Sue & Bill Gross School of Nursing, whose work focuses on exposure to traumatic events such as Ebola outbreaks, the Boston Marathon bombing, and, most recently, Covid-19. On this week’s Kicker, Holman joins Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, to discuss journalism’s impact on readers’ mental health, and why traumatic coverage can fail to motivate change.
Refusing to learn female reporters’ names, to speak on the record, to refrain from embarrassing comments. The Andrew Cuomo that political reporters know is entirely different from the pandemic persona during the worst moments of the coronavirus crisis.
On this week’s Kicker, Josefa Velásquez, the Albany reporter for THE CITY, who has covered Cuomo for a decade, and Michael Powell, a New York Times national reporter who covered the collapse of both Rudy Giuliani and Elliot Spitzer, join Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, to describe the Cuomo persona that has been an open secret.
Last year, Michael Tubbs was the focus of an HBO documentary, "Stockton On My Mind," that followed his experience trying to reinvent Stockton, California as the city’s first African-American mayor. Within a few months, however, with his campaign for re-election coming up, Tubbs was subjected to a targeted disinformation campaign, by a fake news website called the 209 Times. Named for the area code of Stockton, the 209 Times claims to be "an independent community driven grassroots news source." In reality, it functions as a misinformation machine, trading on the relatively high levels of trust in local press outlets to spread lies about Tubbs and play on voters' racist biases. Come November, Tubbs was unseated. He joins us today on The Kicker, speaking with CJR contributor Akintunde Ahmad about disinformation, news deserts, racism, and what he's up to now.
Burmese journalist Swe Win has survived an assasination attempt and detention by his own government. Now he leads his Yangon-based news outlet Myanmar Now from exile, and his newsroom is in hiding.
On this week’s Kicker, reporter and essayist E. Tammy Kim, and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, speak with Swe Win about journalism under threat in Myanmar, and why he so desperately wants to return despite the threat.
On this week’s Kicker, Kathleen Belew, a historian at the University of Chicago and author of Bring The War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (2018), joins Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, to discuss how the events of January 6th are already being misrepresented in press coverage and how reporters should be framing the ongoing threat.
Shirish Dáte had a front row seat to the chaos of Trump’s presidency and famously asked Trump whether he regretted having lied so many times to the American people. Dáte was also in attendance at the first, radically different press briefing on inauguration day.
On this week’s Kicker, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, and Dáte, HuffPost’s senior White House correspondent, discuss what needs to change in the way the press corps covers a presidency, and why the destruction of the Republican party is a major political story of our time.
In the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, journalists struggled to cover the devastation in a way that resonated, much as they do with the Covid-19 pandemic today. In “Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter who Revealed it to the World,” Lesley Blume tells the story of how New Yorker journalist John Hersey cracked the code.
On this week’s Kicker, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, and Blume discuss the problem with coverage that focuses too much on numbers, science, and policy, at a time when Covid deaths in the US continue to surge.
When Trump gave the go-ahead for his mob to storm the Capitol last week, it manifested more as a media event than an organized political coup. As Trump loses power, his followers doubtless will fight harder for relevance and air time.
On this week’s Kicker, Davey Alba, a New York Times technology reporter covering online disinformation and its global harms, and Alexander Reid Ross, a doctoral fellow at the Center for Analysis of the Radical Right and an adjunct professor at Portland State University, join Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, to discuss what journalists should look for online as Trump leaves office.
Lisa Edmiston, a middle school principal in Queens who is sick for the second time this year, talks to CJR Editor Kyle Pope about urgent inequities within the city’s public schools. The media has devoted its energy to the debate over whether to keep schools open. But that obscures an even bigger story that Edmiston says isn’t getting the attention it deserves.
The media’s diversity efforts have been underway for decades, but very little has changed, and diversity rhetoric often becomes dehumanizing.
As new union negotiations press the issue, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, speaks with Maya Binyam, a senior editor of Triple Canopy, an editor of the New Inquiry, and a lecturer in the New School’s Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism program, and Betsy Morais, managing editor of CJR.
The media did better work covering Trump than in 2016, but did that reporting have any impact on the real world?
On this week’s Kicker, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, sits down with CJR’s public editors—Ariana Pekary for CNN, Maria Bustillos for MSNBC, Gabriel Snyder for the New York Times, and Hamilton Nolan for the Washington Post—to discuss what it would take to rebuild the influence of good journalism.
Trump told us, ahead of time, he would claim victory in the election regardless of how America voted. On this week's Kicker, Masha Gessen, a New Yorker columnist and author of "Surviving Autocracy," talks with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, on the continuing dangers of autocracy in the US.
In 2016, Donald Trump told rally attendees that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing voters. Since then, disqualifying pieces of investigative journalism have glanced off without impact on him or his base.
On this week’s Kicker, David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, assess how the media has navigated through all of this, less than a week before election day.
Jon Allsop and Pete Vernon have written the CJR newsletter, “The Media Today,” since its inception in the wake of the 2016 election. On this week’s Kicker, they speak with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, on what journalism should become when the torrent of Trump news is gone.
Most sexual assault coverage in America is told from the attacker’s perspective. Survivors’ physical appearance is described in detail, and the actual assault is sexualized. But in E Jean Carroll’s masterly series for The Atlantic, “I Moved on Her Very Heavily,” Trump’s survivors remain firmly in charge of their own stories, focusing their conversation on his crimes and his impact on their lives.
On this week’s Kicker, journalist and author E Jean Carroll speaks with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, on how our coverage of sexual assault makes it easier for voters to slough off and why she knew coming forward to tell how Trump raped her in the mid-nineties would rouse his base.
The president has COVID-19, but the White House has failed to provide reliable information about his condition. To fill the gap, journalists have turned to doctors.
On this week’s Kicker, Dr. Christopher Tedeschi, an emergency medicine specialist and professor at NewYork-Presbyterian / Columbia University Irving Medical Center, and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, track how our framing can change a medical question into a political question and ask where we should draw the line.
As a result of an aggressive disinformation campaign, about half of Republicans believe voter fraud is a major problem. Now that Trump has tested positive for COVID-19, what will the impact be on his party’s push to question the validity of the election?
On this week’s Kicker, Yochai Benkler a professor at Harvard Law School and co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, discuss Benkler’s study of online media stories and social media posts that referred to the risk of voter fraud, all posted between March 1 and August 31 this year. His team found that Trump is central to the dissemination process, and that, in the media’s effort to remain neutral, we adopt and amplify his framing.
How did Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg view the press? And how far did the mythology we built around the “Great Dissenter” stray from reality?
On this week’s Kicker, Betsy West, co-director of the Academy Award-nominated documentary ”RBG,” joins Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR to discuss what it was like to work with Ginsburg, the hagiography around her, and her legacy of optimism.
The forcible sterilizations of female detainees at an immigration detention center in Georgia comprise a new level of cruelty. But ICE health care systems are known to replicate those of American prisons, where reproduction injustice is an enduring problem.
On this week’s Kicker, Tina Vasquez, a senior reporter at Prism who has covered the Georgia case, and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, discuss Vasquez’s interviews with ICE detainees and her work to put the latest outrage in context.
Editor Sheila Rayam and reporter Georgie Silvarole both grew up in Rochester, New York. So did the city’s former Police Chief La'Ron Singletary and Mayor Lovely Warren. When Rochester’s Democrat & Chronicle published a letter from its editorial board calling for Singletary’s resignation following a cover up of Daniel Prude’s murder, it channeled the community’s shock and pain.
On this week’s Kicker, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, speaks with Rayam and Silvarole about how they have covered the protests so far, the experience of watching disinformation evolve in real time, and what their newspaper’s role can be in the fight against police brutality.
As long-time middle school principal and COVID survivor Lisa Edmiston prepares to reopen her middle school in Astoria, she has worked to manage the fear shared by her staff and students. She has also made arrangements for herself at a local funeral home.
On this week’s Kicker, Edmiston, and Michael Elsen-Rooney, an education reporter for the Daily News, speak with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, on how to assess what city education officials say, New York Mayor Bill De Blasio’s dismissive attitude towards education unions, and the pandemic’s effect on the culture of the Department of Education.
On this week’s Kicker, Professor Richard R. John, a historian and author of “Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse,” speaks with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, on the intersection between the Postal Service and politics. For decades, the Postal Service -- the internet of its age -- was entwined in electoral politics. That ended, but now Donald Trump has restarted the fight. This episode of The Kicker looks at how reporters should cover the battle.
Radio rallies in church parking lots, candidates in their basements, and voters stuck in hibernation. When all that’s left to cover are the talking points, how should local and national political reporters adapt?
This week, the national press missed the heartland’s biggest story, a series of storms that devastated the center of the country. On this week’s Kicker, Art Cullen, editor and co-owner of the Storm Lake Times in Iowa, and Ayesha Rascoe, a White House reporter for NPR, join Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, to discuss journalism’s struggle to avoid the mistakes of 2016 while in the midst of a pandemic.
The uprising to abolish the police asks our country, and the press, to envision a new world. But the news business is not built to accommodate ideas that would transform society. On this week’s Kicker, three longtime writers and speakers on anti-Black racism and policing—Mychal Denzel Smith, Josie Duffy Rice, and Alex Vitale—discuss media coverage of recent protests, trace our use of the word crime, and urge us to focus on local activism.
When Nicholson Baker first fell in love with YouTube, it was for its “outpouring of human miscellany” and “first person journalism.” But when CJR asked him to write about YouTube as a purveyor of political information, he stumbled upon a different world—one that, in spite of recent algorithmic adjustments, makes radicalization a frictionless experience.
On this week’s Kicker, Baker and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, discuss Baker’s YouTube experience, as well as the extraordinary discoveries he made for his new book, Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act.
On this week’s Kicker, journalist Jack Herrera and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, discuss the gaps in newsroom’s coverage of the defunding debate, and the blind spots journalists still have as a result of the lack of newsroom diversity.
People with untreated mental illnesses are 16 times more likely to be killed by police. Studies show they make up close to half of all police shooting victims. Young black men with mental illness are the most vulnerable group of all, so why won’t the press tell their stories?
On this week’s Kicker, Meg Kissinger, an investigative reporter and professor of reporting on the mental health system at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, and Dr. Stephanie Le Melle, the Director of Public Psychiatry Education at Columbia University Department of Psychiatry and New York State Psychiatric Institute, speak with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, about how to report on police violence against black sufferers of serious mental illness.
As journalists cover the intersection of racist police riots, our president’s instability, and the coronavirus pandemic, we struggle to break the old mold of objective reporting. Wesley Morris, a critic-at-large for the New York Times, recently wrote about the terrifying detachment of white police violence, the inequalities the pandemic has underlined, and how Patti LaBelle’s 1985 cover of “If You Don’t Know Me by Now” depicts four hundred years of Black suffering.
On this week’s Kicker, Morris joins Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, to discuss his piece and how to cover the heartbreak and rage sparked by the murder of George Floyd.
Police murders of Black Americans, and the resulting protests, are once more at the forefront of the news cycle. The focus constitutes an important opportunity, but journalists who don’t have a nuanced understanding of our country’s systemic, state-sponsored violence against Black people, wrongly report the latest police crimes as a symptom of the Trump regime.
On this week’s Kicker, Danielle Belton, editor in chief of The Root, and Alexandria Neason, staff writer at CJR, speak with Kyle Pope, our editor and publisher, about the history of protest in America, how coverage of the latest murders ties into the COVID-19 pandemic, and why this is not just a story about Trump’s attempts to incite violence.
When Adam Piore set out to profile MSNBC, he discovered a community of viewers who feel that, just by watching cable news, they are participating in our democracy.
On this week’s Kicker, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, speaks with Piore and Betsy Morais, our managing editor, to ask why cable networks abandoned their “just the news” stance to emphasize opinion and commentary, and how they will struggle to cover 2020 in the midst of a public health crisis.
As COVID-19 death rates in some native communities soar, and federal care package payments to Indigenous tribes lag behind those to state and municipal governments, why does the US trail so far behind other colonizing countries in its news coverage of its first peoples?
On this week’s Kicker, Kyle Hopkins, special projects editor of the Anchorage Daily News and recent recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for public service, and Jenni Monet, an independent journalist and a tribal citizen of the Pueblo of Laguna, who writes about Indigenous rights and injustice, join Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR. They discuss the difficulty of pitching stories on native communities to editors, and the harm we do when we report on our 574 Indian nations as a monolith.
Investigative journalist Giancarlo Fiorella was watching when the Associated Press reported a plot to overthrow Nicolás Maduro, the president of Venezuela. What Fiorella could not believe was that, after the planned coup was revealed, Jordan Goudreau, a former green beret and sometime security guard to President Trump, decided to go through with it anyway. Equating himself to Alexander the Great, Goudreau sent his men across hundreds of miles of open sea, towards certain failure.
On this week’s Kicker, Fiorella, an investigator and trainer with Bellingcat, speaks with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, about what he has learned about Goudreau, Mike Pompeo’s statement that the US government had “no direct involvement” in the mission, and the dilemma faced by Venezuelan media as it considers the tragic legacy of Goudreau’s hubris.
As tens of thousands of Americans die of COVID-19, fear and uncertainty devolve into paranoid tribalism. At our most extreme, one side believes science is sacrosanct, and the other claims the pandemic is a plot to destabilize the president.
Political commentator Charlie Sykes was once at the center of the American conservative movement. Now he opposes Donald Trump and the right-wing media that enable his cult of personality. On this week’s Kicker, Sykes, founder and editor-at-large of The Bulwark, and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, discuss the legitimate argument to be made for civil liberties, and the origins of anti-science sentiment among conservative voters.
The intersection of conflict, climate, and disease has never been more apparent, and neither has public need for “journalistic rigor and urgency.”
On this week’s Kicker, E. Tammy Kim, a freelance reporter and essayist, and Mark Hertsgaard, the environmental correspondent for The Nation, speak with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, on what COVID-19 and the climate crisis reveal about the problem of social systems that are exclusionary by design.
Religion is difficult for journalists to cover, in part because it lies beyond observation and resists narrative. On this week’s Kicker, Elizabeth Bruenig, an opinion writer for the New York Times, speaks with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, on how, as we live in a time of enormous loss, we can report on spirituality and death.
Punished for wearing masks, or for asking to have their temperatures taken, our aging prison population is denied basic social distancing, hygiene, and cleaning supplies they need to defend themselves against COVID-19. Governor Andrew Cuomo has not responded to letters from advocates for the inmates, and he claims, falsely, that he lacks the authority to fix the issues.
Journalist Rosa Goldensohn, of The City, reports on inmates still forced to congregate, or to sleep in beds 16 inches apart. Stefen Short, a staff attorney for the Prisoners' Rights Project at the Legal Aid Society, fights for the safety of those trapped in prison on technicalities, or for whom COVID-19 constitutes a death sentence. On this week’s Kicker, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, speaks with Goldensohn and Short on the importance of reporting beyond Cuomo’s daily briefings to tell the stories of individual inmates and the fight for their basic rights.
Governor Andrew Cuomo’s COVID-19 press conferences rely heavily on data, as does press coverage of the pandemic. But when CJR’s Amanda Darrach got sick, she learned how misleading those numbers are. On this week’s Kicker, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, speaks with Darrach about how we should cover the trauma of COVID-19.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Kim Bui, director of audience innovation at the Arizona Republic, has looked to her readers to help guide the paper’s coverage. Bui says she texts with her readers and works in real time to find the answers they need.
On this week’s Kicker, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, speaks with Bui and Mathew Ingram, CJR’s chief digital writer, on how newsrooms have struggled to create a two-way conversation with their readers in the past. Without time for cautious planning, papers may learn how to serve their communities best.
When an outbreak like the Covid-19 pandemic hits, local journalists serve as first responders for global surveillance efforts. Elisabeth Rosenthal was a young physician when the AIDS epidemic hit New York City; she later covered the SARS crisis in China for the New York Times. Samantha Pak is senior editor at the Kirkland Reporter, the local paper covering Life Care Center nursing home, where 19 residents have died from the coronavirus.
On this week’s Kicker, Rosenthal, who is editor-in-chief of Kaiser Health News, and Pak speak with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, about the advantage of the local news template and what happens when we substitute politics for science.
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump didn’t visit towns like Storm Lake, Iowa in 2016. This election cycle, things are much different. Art Cullen, editor and co-owner of the Storm Lake Times, and winner of the 2017 Pulitzer for Editorial Writing, has interviewed 15 presidential candidates, including Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, and Pete Buttigieg. On this week’s Kicker, he talks to Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, about what national political reporters get wrong and what they should be focused on instead.
Cullen is the author of “Storm Lake: Change, Resilience, and Hope in America’s Heartland” (Penguin, 2018)
Kadir van Lohuizen reports on the climate crisis with the same techniques he brought to his work as a war correspondent. His photography, video, and written work focus on the point of conflict between the crisis and human life. This week, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, speaks with van Lohuizen about what kind of climate disaster coverage inspires real action.
Jess Brammar is the new editor in chief of HuffPost UK. She is also 7 months pregnant. When it comes to family leave policy, American news outlets lag behind their European counterparts. On this week’s Kicker, Brammar joins Kyle Pope, the editor and publisher of CJR, to discuss that difference and how family leave might just give newsrooms the diversity they need to survive.
In China, journalists are conditioned to keep their online activity apolitical. But the coronavirus outbreak took censors by surprise. In the panic, editors were temporarily emboldened. Han Zhang, who is on the editorial staff at the New Yorker, sat down with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, to discuss the flow of outbreak information in the Chinese media, how many coronavirus fatalities may go unreported, and her last interview with citizen journalist Chen Quishi, before he disappeared.
What do we miss when we obsess about Trump? The answer, it turns out, includes some of the most important stories of our time. On this week’s Kicker, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, speaks with David Begnaud, lead national correspondent for “CBS This Morning” and anchor of CBS News Radio's “Reporter's Notebook,” Steven Greenhouse, a veteran New York Times labor and workplace reporter, and Tali Woodward, deputy editor of The Trace, to ask what stories we left untold in 2019, and how we can avoid making the same mistakes this election year.
In 2013, Dexter Filkins wrote the definitive profile of Major General Qassem Soleimani, the architect of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance,” whom the US assassinated last week. On this week’s Kicker, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, speaks with Filkins about the nuances of Iranian public opinion that the Western press has missed, and why Iran’s response may be far from over.
Facebook, Google, and Twitter are going to be used to facilitate disinformation and racism in the 2020 US presidential election, and Carole Cadwalladr says we need to tell that story better. At the recent “Disinfo 2020: Prepping the Press” conference, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, and Cadwalladr, a feature writer for the Observer who helped expose the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal in 2018, discussed her work and the connection between the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump.
Democracy is reliant on facts, but fact-checking no longer seem to dispel misleading information. As a prelude to next week’s Disinfo 2020: Prepping the Press conference, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, discusses disinformation and the failings of the fact-checking industry with Emily Bell, the director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia, and media literacy expert Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor at Syracuse University.
The Kayopo, an indiginous tribe in the Brazilian rainforest, have lost over 200,000 acres of their preserve to the illegal gold mining encouraged by Jair Bolsonnaro. On this week’s Kicker, Jon Lee Anderson, a staff writer at the New Yorker, tells Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, how he embedded with the Kayopo, who had no regular contact with the outside world until the 1950s. Anderson describes the tactics used by gold prospectors to sow discord among the Kayopo, and tells of the heartbreak some feel as they accept work that they know will destroy the environment.
Rodney Reed is scheduled for execution on November 20, and the first federal executions in 16 years begin December 9. On this week’s Kicker, Robert Dunham, executive director at the Death Penalty Information Center, and Kyle Pope, editor and pulisher of CJR, discuss the mistakes national and local reporters make in their coverage of the death penalty. Dunham explains the culture of fear that sustained American execution at its peak, and the importance of reporting policy over politics.
Anna Wintour says Vogue magazine is the world’s greatest influencer, though the numbers don’t agree. A job at Condé Nast used to mean a magazine journalist had arrived. but in the wake of S.I. Newhouse’s death, it’s hard to imagine who might have the passion to save his magazines. For New York Magazine, journalist Reeves Wiedeman profiled Condé Nast, Wintour, and new CEO, Roger Lynch. This week, CJR’s Editor and Publisher Kyle Pope sits down with Wiedeman to discuss Condé Nast’s new strategy, and whether its newsstand presence could become disposable.
Jon Allsop, who writes CJR’s daily newsletter “The Media Today” from his flat in London, talks to Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, about Boris Johnson’s obsession with the American presidency, Trump’s impeachment strategy, and how the instinct to oversimplify stories like Ukraine and Brexit opens the door to misinformation.
Carlotta Gall, Istanbul bureau chief for the New York Times, spent her summer reporting on whether Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s president, would invade Syria. This week, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, talks to Gall about how she and her colleagues have covered Turkey and Syria as the conflict has unfolded. The Turks bombed a convoy with journalists in northern Syria; ISIS fighters are escaping and threaten to regroup; new Syrian checkpoints arrest American journalists; and the PKK offers only propaganda and a cult of personality. Gall, one of the most experienced war correspondents working today, explains what likely comes next.
When longtime residents of Washington State’s Long Beach Peninsula began to disappear, journalist McKenzie Funk set out to reverse-engineer ICE officers’ use of domestic-surveillance data. Last week, he published his findings in the New York Times Magazine. Kyle Pope, the editor and publisher of CJR, speaks with Funk to learn why the more American an immigrant’s life is, the more vulnerable they become, and why ICE blames that vulnerability on sanctuary policy.
Joe Lockhart was named White House press secretary in 1998, three days before the House voted to impeach President Clinton. This week, Lockhart speaks with Kyle Pope, the editor and publisher of CJR, about the argument to end live coverage of the White House, and why he thinks this is the golden age of journalism.
Among readers, the demand for climate crisis coverage is high. Until recently, however, financial reporters have stayed largely silent on the subject. On this week’s episode, Kyle Pope, the editor and publisher of CJR, speaks with Gillian Tett, editor-at-large for the Financial Times, on how her doctoral work in cultural anthropology and her years as a war reporter have lead her to start a newsletter on the climate crisis, “Moral Money.”
There is a climate angle to every beat, no matter how small the newsroom; collaboration pays; and climate coverage is no more political than failure to cover the climate crisis. On this week’s episode, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, speaks with Mark Hertsgaard, the environmental correspondent for The Nation, on what they’ve learned so far from their Covering Climate Now initiative with The Guardian.
Public housing is one of the most undercovered stories in New York. But every day, Monica Morales of PIX11 News answers calls from residents of city-owned buildings and fixes their problems. Kyle Pope, the editor and publisher of CJR, speaks with Morales and Emma Whitford, who profiled her this week. They discuss the difference a dedicated reporter makes and how her beat bridges the divide between city officials and the public housing system’s 400,000 residents.
Two days before Hurricane Dorian hit, Eugene Duffy, the managing editor of The Tribune in Nassau, sent a reporter and a photographer to Marsh Harbour in the Abacos. As the town endured the largest storm on modern record, Duffy lost touch with his team. On this week’s episode, CJR Editor and Publisher Kyle Pope hears how social media has changed coverage of natural disasters and how vital local headlines can be in driving sustained relief efforts from NGOs and wealthier countries.
Swe Win, the editor of Myanmar Now, a bilingual investigative-news website, was sued for defamation in Mandalay two years ago. His crime? Posting on Facebook about his site’s coverage of an extremist monk’s support of an assasination. This week, Kyle Pope, CJR’s editor and publisher, and E. Tammy Kim, a freelance reporter and essayist, discuss the effect of the high-profile imprisonment of Reuters journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo on cases like Swe Win’s.
“Slippery,” but “charming.” “Magnetic,” but “useless.” And “utterly unapologetic.” Convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein invited New York Times columnist James Stewart to his Manhattan home last August. Following Epstein’s apparent suicide last week, as he awaited trial for sex trafficking and conspiracy to traffic minors for sex, Stewart and the Times made the decision to publish details of their interview, though Epstein spoke with Stewart on background. Here CJR Editor and Publisher Kyle Pope and Stewart discuss the ethical questions behind that decision, and the moral imperative to publish facts quickly.
John Temple was the editor of the Rocky Mountain News when the Columbine massacre changed America’s perception of safety forever. CJR Editor and Publisher Kyle Pope speaks with Temple about the media’s sanitation of mass shootings, Temple’s disbelief that more did not change after Columbine, and why the way we cover the violence has not worked.
On this week’s episode, CJR Editor and Publisher Kyle Pope speaks with Marie J. French and Danielle Muoio, the authors of POLITICO’S “New York Energy” newsletter. They report from the intersection of politics, policy, and the climate crisis, and discuss why it’s time for newsrooms everywhere to embrace the energy beat.
On this week’s episode, CJR Editor and Publisher Kyle Pope speaks with Bob Garfield, the co-host of WNYC’s “On the Media” and co-founder of the Purple Project for Democracy, on his plan to rebuild American faith in its press and in democracy. They discuss the fragmentation of the media and the loss of civic education, as well as Garfield’s blueprint for November 2019, when he urges outlets to feature non-partisan, apolitical reports on democracy.
On this week’s episode, CJR Editor and Publisher Kyle Pope speaks with Lauren Villagran and Aaron Montes, both reporters at the El Paso Times, about their paper’s recent collaboration with The New York Times. They discuss their discovery of the Border Patrol station in Clint, Texas and the climate of fear in El Paso after the Trump administration’s unique decision to announce raids ahead of time.
On this week’s episode, CJR Editor and Publisher Kyle Pope speaks with Maria Bustillo, CJR’s public editor for MSNBC, on the first round of Democratic debates. They discuss Kamala Harris’s small-screen evolution into a challenger for Joe Biden, why one weak debate won’t finish him, and how Bustillo plans to cover MSNBC in the run-up to 2020.
On this week’s episode, CJR Editor and Publisher Kyle Pope speaks with Azeen Ghorayshi and Rachel Sanders, members of the Buzzfeed News union organizing committee. BuzzFeed’s newsroom voted to unionize in February, a month after a devastating round of layoffs that left some 200 employees out of work. Ghorayshi, an investigative reporter, and Sanders, the deputy culture editor, describe life in the newsroom as negotiations with management drag on, and why unionizing should not have to be an adversarial process.
On this week’s episode, CJR Editor and Publisher Kyle Pope speaks with Emily Tamkin, our CNN public editor, about CJR’s new public editor initiative. Tamkin asks why CNN’s Cuomo Prime Time continues to invite supposed experts who aren’t in the administration, can’t be held accountable to anyone, don’t have relevant expertise, and refuse to answer a host’s questions.
On this week’s episode, CJR Editor and Publisher Kyle Pope and Delacorte fellow Amanda Darrach speak with with Ed Kosner, the former editor of Newsweek, New York magazine, Esquire, and the New York Daily News. Kosner tells how he moved Watergate transcripts from Washington, DC to New York by “pigeon,” how reporters navigated the old news magazine system, and how journalism has changed since the days before cable news and the internet, when weekly news magazines broke national news.
On this week’s episode, CJR Editor and Publisher Kyle Pope speaks with Corey Hutchins, CJR’s correspondent based in Colorado, where he is also a journalist for The Colorado Independent. They discuss the ‘orphan county’ phenomenon, where, because of the whim of Nielsen market designations set decades ago, residents “receive no news coverage and political advertising for their own statewide races, irrelevant information pertaining to candidates in the neighboring state who will not appear on their ballots, or both.” An estimated 10 percent of the US electorate lives in ‘orphan counties.” Their chance for change rests in how Congress, the FCC, and news producers decide to define community.
On this week’s episode, CJR Editor and Publisher Kyle Pope speaks with Nick Pinto, a journalist who covers the New York City Police Department, about the notorious opacity of that institution. Pinto describes the impossibility of covering the trial of Officer Joseph Pantaleo, the NYPD officer charged with killing Eric Garner, without public transcripts, recordings, or documents.
On this week’s episode, CJR Editor and Publisher Kyle Pope speaks with Israeli journalist Anat Kamm. She supplied the newspaper Haaretz with secret documents, and has accused it of giving her up to the authorities under questioning. Israeli courts sentenced her to years in prison for leaking classified documents. She has just won a lawsuit which she says will help other sources in Israel in the future.
On this week’s episode, CJR Editor and Publisher Kyle Pope speaks with Nick Paton Walsh, senior international correspondent for CNN. Paton Walsh has reported extensively from Venezuela in recent months amid the country’s ongoing political crisis. Last week, in Caracas, he investigated the aftermath of the violence that resulted from the opposition’s attempted uprising against the government of President Nicolás Maduro. Broadcasted images of the violence--including a scene in which military vehicles plowed down opposition protesters--caused the government to block feeds to CNN and the BBC on Venezuela’s cable television carriers.
THIS WEEK, CJR and The Nation gathered some of the world’s top journalists, scientists, and climate experts for a conference to explore how the press can do a better job covering climate change.
The second panel of the day, :A TV Case Study Covering the Green New Deal” was moderated by CJR Editor and Publisher Kyle Pope and featured Chris Hayes, MSNBC; Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation; Naomi Klein, author and activist; Carlos Maza, Vox; Justin Worland, Time.
On this week’s episode, CJR Editor and Publisher Kyle Pope speaks with freelance cartoonist Darrin Bell, who won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning for his “beautiful and daring editorial cartoons that took on issues affecting disenfranchised communities, calling out lies, hypocrisy and fraud in the political turmoil surrounding the Trump administration.” Bell, who is the first African American artist to win the prize, discusses the importance of editorial cartoons in a political crisis.
ON THIS WEEK’S EPISODE, CJR Editor and Publisher Kyle Pope speaks with Susanne Craig, an investigative reporter for The New York Times, about her work in the Pulitzer Prize–winning investigation that questioned Trump’s claim that he is a self-made billionaire. The investigative piece, which is 15,000 words long and took 18 months to complete, is the work of Craig, David Barstow, and Russ Buettner.
On this week’s episode, CJR Editor and Publisher Kyle Pope speaks with Aliya Iftikhar, Asia research associate for the Committee to Protect Journalists. As elections in India begin, Iftikhar discusses her investigation of Rising Kashmir Editor Shujaat Bukhari’s unsolved assassination. Amid the rise of Hindu nationalism and the recent erosion of democratic values in India, the media has been left to fend for itself.
ON THIS WEEK’S EPISODE, CJR Editor and Publisher Kyle Pope speaks with Susan Smith Richardson who has been appointed as the new chief executive of Center for Public Integrity. She will be the first African American to head the nonprofit investigative journalism outlet. They talked about diversifying newsrooms, covering the 2020 elections, and the historic mayoral win in Chicago.
ON THIS WEEK’S EPISODE, Managing Editor Betsy Morais and Digital Editor Nausicaa Renner discuss the backlash against journalism in the wake of the Mueller report’s delivery to Attorney General William Barr, and why justice in journalism fills the void between our judicial system and the court of public opinion.
Podcast: Clerk who took over for racist Ala. editor speaks by Columbia Journalism Review
ON THIS WEEK’S EPISODE, outgoing Editor in Chief of New York Adam Moss and his successor David Haskell interview one another. They talk pitches, the art of the edit, and how they find the balance between magazine and newsroom. They were speaking at the Delacorte Lecture Series at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.
ON THIS WEEK’S EPISODE, CJR Editor and Publisher Kyle Pope and Seamus Hughes of George Washington University's Program on Extremism talk about who gets to be a reporter and what counts as journalism, especially when done by institutions that aren’t traditionally journalistic.
ON THIS WEEK’S EPISODE, CJR Editor and Publisher Kyle Pope speaks with Susan Bro, whose daughter Heather Heyer died in the 2017 Charlottesville attack, and Contributing Editor Camille Bromley, who profiled Bro’s dealings with the press for our latest print edition. Bro discusses shifting the “white savior” narrative around her daughter’s death towards a focus on taking action against racism.
ON THIS WEEK’S EPISODE, CJR Editor and Publisher Kyle Pope and Mathew Ingram, CJR’s chief digital writer discuss The Cairncross Review, a report published in the UK, and the role of tech companies like Google and Facebook on news. They are joined by Josh Young, creator of our trust-based engagement platform, Galley by CJR, who spoke about the idea behind Galley and how it is helping journalists engage in meaningful discussions.
This week our Editor and Publisher Kyle Pope speaks with CJR’s Lyz Lenz about the work we put in in to legitimizing this presidency and whether we are right to make Trump’s narrative coherent.
ON THIS WEEK’S EPISODE, CJR Editor and Publisher Kyle Pope speaks with Joel Simon, executive director of Committee to Protect Journalists about his latest book We Want to Negotiate: The Secret World of Kidnapping, Hostages and Ransom. They were joined by Janine di Giovanni, a human rights reporter in conflict zones and a senior fellow at Yale University, as they discussed hostage policy and the ethical and legal concerns behind it.
ON THIS WEEK’S EPISODE, CJR Editor and Publisher Kyle Pope speaks with Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, to assess recent digital layoffs and consider a new civic model for journalism.
Podcast: In conversation with Jill Abramson on her new book, Merchants of Truth by Columbia Journalism Review
ON THIS WEEK’S EPISODE, CJR Editor and Publisher Kyle Pope speaks with David Uberti, on Slate’s survival strategy—in part as an audio production company.
ON THIS WEEK’S EPISODE, CJR Editor and Publisher Kyle Pope speaks with staff writer Jon Allsop about how the media handled Trump’s address from the Oval Office. They also discuss the mistakes journalists can avoid as they prepare to cover the 2020 presidential race.
The Washington Post starts a daily news podcast in a saturated market by Columbia Journalism Review
ON THIS WEEK'S EPISODE, CJR EDITOR AND PUBLISHER KYLE POPE talks to Mathew Ingram, CJR’s chief digital writer about Mic’s shutdown and layoffs, and the future of digital media websites.
ON THIS WEEK’S EPISODE, CJR Editor and Publisher Kyle Pope speaks with David Little, editor of the Chico Enterprise-Record about running his newsroom during the Camp Fire disaster.
ON THIS WEEK’S EPISODE, Jelani Cobb of The New Yorker and guest editor of CJR’s issue on race, speaks with Lydia Polgreen, editor in chief of HuffPost, on racism in the press and why we aren’t doing a better job of diversifying newsrooms.
ON THIS WEEK’S EPISODE, CJR Editor and Publisher Kyle Pope speaks with Todd Gitlin and Michael Schudson, journalism professors at the Columbia Journalism School, about Trump’s attacks on the press and what it means for democracy in the US.
ON THIS WEEK’S EPISODE, CJR Editor and Publisher Kyle Pope speaks with Zainab Sultan, a Delacorte Fellow at CJR, about what Jamal Khashoggi’s murder means for Saudi journalists living outside the kingdom.
ON THIS WEEK’S EPISODE, CJR Editor and Publisher Kyle Pope speaks with Sarah Maslin, the Brazil correspondent for The Economist, about the country’s upcoming October 28 run-off election. Lead candidate Jair Bolsonaro of the conservative Social Liberal party is running a campaign that challenges reporters there much as Trump’s 2016 run did the US press.
On this week’s episode, Pete speaks with CJR’s Nausicaa Renner and Alexandria Neason about one year of #MeToo reporting, discussing its successes and its shortcomings. Then, CJR Delacorte Fellow Amanda Darrach joins the pod to talk about her reporting on one California city’s struggle with the increasing polarization in local media.
On this week’s episode, Pete talks with Pulitzer-winning investigative reporter David Cay Johnston, who has spent decades covering Donald Trump’s business dealings, about The New York Times’s investigation into how the president got rich. Then, CJR’s Nausicaa Renner and Alexandria Neason join the pod to discuss media ethics questions raised by reporting on Christine Blasey Ford.
On this week’s episode, Pete talks with CJR Editor and Publisher Kyle Pope about the deluge of news regarding Brett Kavanaugh and Rod Rosenstein that dominated the beginning of the week. (Note: The podcast was recorded before Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford testified on Thursday.) Then CJR’s Matthew Ingram calls in to discuss whether the podcast bubble is bursting.
On this week’s episode, Pete talks with CJR Digital Editor Nausicaa Renner about the recent decision by both Harper’s and The New York Review of Books to publish first-person accounts written by men accused of sexual assault and harassment. (Note: The podcast was recorded before news broke that Ian Buruma was out at NYRB.) Then Lyz Lenz, author of “The mystery of Tucker Carlson,” calls in from Iowa to talk about her profile of the Fox News anchor.
On this week’s episode, Pete talks with CJR Tow Editor Sam Thielman about the coverage of Bob Woodward’s blockbuster book, Fear: Trump in the White House. In taking the Trump presidency as his subject, Woodward had to assemble a reliable book from unreliable sources. Then, Sam shares what he learned about media in Iraq during his recent trip to the country. After tight controls of the press under Saddam Hussein, journalists are trying to build a vibrant media ecosystem while battling fake news.
On this week’s episode, Pete talks with Joel Simon, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, about the conviction of Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo. The two Reuters reporters were sentenced to seven year in prison after helping expose atrocities in Myanmar. Then, CJR Editor and Publisher Kyle Pope joins to discuss the reaction to Bob Woodward’s upcoming book, "Fear: Trump in the White House." They discuss why books do a better job of capturing Trump’s Washington than daily political reporting, and what we can expect from the reactions to Woodward’s work.
Managing Editor Betsy Morais and Senior Staff Writer Alexandria Neason join Pete to talk about the deluge of coverage following John McCain’s death. Why was the Arizona senator beloved by much of the press, and did that change in recent years? Then, they turn to the departure of Jemele Hill from ESPN. The veteran journalist became the face of the network’s struggle to navigate the political waters of the Trump era. Her exit raises the question: Is it possible to be apolitical in 2018?
On this week’s episode, Pete is joined by Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia, to discuss the reaction to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s ban on reporters at two recent campaign events. Then, Emily weighs in on Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s recent media tour. Is Twitter really ready to change? And what do necessary changes even look like?
On this week’s episode, Pete is joined by CJR Editor and Publisher Kyle Pope to discuss the flood of editorials celebrating journalism in the face of attacks by the president. Were they a worthy defense or a misguided effort? Then, CJR senior staff writer Alexandria Neason stops by to dive into the controversy surrounding a Washington Post feature that has been accused of racial insensitivity.
On this week’s episode, Pete is joined by former CJR staff writer and The Kicker’s founding host David Uberti to discuss the removal of Infowars’s content from tech platforms. Why did it take so long, and where do Facebook, Apple, and Google go from here? Then, they dive into the controversy surrounding The New York Times’s newest hire. The reaction from the Times demonstrates the difference between journalists who have grown up on the internet, and media companies still struggling to adapt.
CJR Digital Editor Nausicaa Renner and CJR Chief Digital Writer Mathew Ingram join Pete to discuss Facebook’s fight to control the narrative. The social media giant shut down more than 30 pages and accounts that it said were part of a political influence campaign potentially built to sow discord ahead of the midterm elections. But are the very public efforts too little, too late? Then, Nausicaa sticks around to talk about the vitriol toward the press at President Trump’s rally in Tampa.
On this week’s episode, Pete talks with CJR Delacorte Fellow Amanda Darrach about scenes from the New York Daily News’s black Monday. Then, CJR Editor and Publisher Kyle Pope joins to place the severe cuts at the News in the larger context of a crisis in local news. What’s the case journalists need to make in order to show how vital their jobs are? Finally, Pete and Kyle discuss CNN’s coverage of the Michael Cohen–Donald Trump tapes, and whether cable news has a problem with overselling its stories.
On this week’s episode, Pete talks with CJR Editor and Publisher Kyle Pope about the coverage of the Trump-Putin summit. Pope believes the president’s disastrous showing will be remembered as a turning point in the way the media covers the Russia story. Then, CJR Senior Staff Writer Alexandria Neason comes on to discuss the redemption narrative of the #MeToo men.
On this episode of The Kicker, Pete and Nausicaa talk about coverage of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s surprise primary victory and how certain media outlets missed the story. Then, we dive into the idea of “civility” in journalism, and the continued debate over coverage of Trump voters. Finally, we discuss Sarah Sanders’s absence from the White House Briefing Room. Is the daily televised back-and-forth even worth it?
The public outrage that forced President Trump to sign an executive order attempting to end the crisis that he created wouldn’t have happened without sustained media coverage. What caused that reporting to break through? And what do journalists need to do as the story continues?
On this week’s episode, we’re returning to one of our favorite topics—the relationship between platforms and publishers. Pete sat down with Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia, to better understand what Facebook and other platforms are up to. Emily recently presented at the Global Editors Network Summit in Portugal, speaking to world leaders in digital publishing about the Tow Center’s research into how the relationship between platforms and publishers is affecting the news business.
Journalism has a class problem. If you aren’t independently wealthy, the path into the industry isn’t easy, especially if your professional aspirations are national in scope. Yet conversations about class and journalism are largely absent from newsrooms. On this week’s episode, we talk to Sarah Jones, staff writer at The New Republic, about this taboo topic. She wrote about class for the latest issue of the Columbia Journalism Review.
On this week’s episode, Peter Corbett gives a firsthand account of an experience that’s become commonplace among journalists over the past decade. The former Arizona Republic reporter spent 23 years at the regional powerhouse before taking a buyout in 2016. He’s one of several journalists in a story by Monica Potts in our new Jobs issue. On The Kicker, he tells the story of his struggle to come to terms with the decision to leave the profession to which he’s dedicated his life.
On this week’s episode, CJR board member and founder of The Information Jessica Lessin interviews Facebook executive Adam Mosseri. Their conversation was recorded at a May 17 conference co-hosted by CJR and The Information in San Francisco. Lessin presses Mosseri on Lessin presses him on Facebook’s responsibility to publishers and whether the marriage between journalism and the social media platform can be saved.
Rukmini Callimachi’s husband unfriended her on Facebook. She doesn’t tell her New York Times colleagues where she lives. Those are just a few of the precautions she’s taken since she started reporting on terrorism and the Islamic State. On this week’s episode, Meg spoke with Callimachi about the dangerous beat and how her new podcast, Caliphate, came to be. In Caliphate, Callimachi expands on her NYT reporting and dives deeper into the mind of ISIS with help from producer Andy Mills. Then Pete joins CJR colleagues Jon Allsop and Alexandria Neason to unpack two of this week’s biggest stories: Robert Mueller’s list of questions and the latest Kanye West controversy.
CNN’s Nima Elbagir on her investigation into Libya's slave trade by Columbia Journalism Review
Paul Ford on the intersection of blockchain and journalism by Columbia Journalism Review
Kim Masters on #MeToo coverage; Susan Orlean on finding stories by Columbia Journalism Review
This week on The Kicker, Meg talks with Jezebel Editor in Chief Koa Beck about her plans for the feminist website, as well as the site’s influence on recent media coverage of sexual harassment. Then CJR’s Christie Chisholm joins Meg and Pete to discuss WNYC’s handling of sexual harassment allegations against some of its biggest names, the issues surrounding ABC News’s erroneous report on Michael Flynn, and the mainstream media’s continuing problem dealing with its new-media antagonists. [Note: This conversation was recorded before MSNBC reversed its decision to fire contributor Sam Seder.]
A dive into the swamp with Politico Playbook’s Anna Palmer and Jake Sherman by Columbia Journalism Review
This week on The Kicker, Meg talks with John Biewen, audio program director at Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies, about how his podcast Seeing White examines America's deep history of white supremacy. Then Pete is joined by CJR’s Christie Chisholm and Jon Allsop to discuss the right-wing media response to Roy Moore, some good journalism from Fox News, and how to fix the way we cover mass shootings.
This week, Pete speaks with Jelani Cobb, staff writer at The New Yorker and professor at Columbia Journalism School, about the year following the election of President Donald Trump. Then Meg Dalton and Jon Allsop join Pete to discuss the media news of the week, including the narratives surrounding statewide election results, the question of giving airtime to Kellyanne Conway, and Ronan Farrow’s latest Harvey Weinstein bombshell.
The evolution of audio, Facebook’s political reckoning, and civil war at the WSJ by Columbia Journalism Review
Harvey Weinstein and the media's complicated relationship by Columbia Journalism Review
This week on The Kicker, we present a special episode recorded live from Atlanta. CJR Managing Editor Vanessa Gezari talks with The New York Times’s Glenn Thrush and The Guardian’s Ben Jacobs about covering the Trump White House. They discuss the emotional toll of the breakneck news cycle, what’s different about the new administration, and how to avoid getting caught up in a reality-TV presidency.
On a special episode of The Kicker, we present clips from a panel CJR convened this week in Charlottesville, Virginia. Titled “Race, Racism, and the News,” the event featured several journalists with personal ties to the Charlottesville area, and touched on issues of language, representation, and white supremacy. Associate Editor Brendan Fitzgerald, who directs CJR’s United States Project, leads the conversation, and we hear from Slate’s Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times Magazine’s Jenna Wortham, and The Nation Institute’s Collier Meyerson.
Special thanks to With Good Reason, a great podcast based in Virginia, for providing the audio excerpts.
On the latest episode of The Kicker, Pete talks to retired marine sergeant Thomas Brennan and veteran conflict photographer Finbarr O’Reilly, who have written a joint memoir, Shooting Ghosts, about their time in Afghanistan and their struggles to deal with what they experienced there. Then, Pete, Meg, and Karen discuss the White House’s call for the firing of ESPN anchor Jemele Hill, and the issue of how journalists present themselves on social media. Finally, we get to some of our favorite light-hearted stories of the week.
On the latest episode of The Kicker, Meg talks to John Pope, an award-winning journalist known for his Hurricane Katrina coverage, about how newsrooms can prepare for disaster, including what to do before, during, and after the storm hits. Then, new CJR Delacorte Fellow Karen K. Ho joins Meg and Pete to discuss how newsrooms like Univision are preparing for Hurricane Irma, trust issues with Facebook, and the fall preview for what to expect in Washington.
On the latest episode of The Kicker, Meg talks to the Dart Center’s Bruce Shapiro about the media’s coverage of Hurricane Harvey. Then we discuss harmful narratives in disaster reporting, the question of when journalists should or shouldn’t intervene, and the latest hiccup on the New York Times editorial page.
On the latest episode of The Kicker, Pete talks to CJR contributor Christiana Mbakwe about need for a white supremacy beat post-Charlottesville. Then we discuss the Village Voice shutting down its print publication, the shakeup at the Los Angeles Times, and the tragic death of freelance journalist (and Columbia J-School grad) Kim Wall.
On the latest episode of The Kicker, we dedicate the entire episode to the media’s response to Charlottesville. Meg talks to CJR Associate Editor Brendan Fitzgerald about how local news covered the events last weekend. Plus, his personal experience working as a reporter in the city. We also discuss the language journalists should be using in their coverage with CJR contributor Shaya Tayefe Mohajer. You can read all of our Charlottesville coverage on CJR.org. Then we wrap up the episode with a conversation about Vice News Tonight’s gripping documentary following white supremacists in Charlottesville.
On the latest episode of The Kicker, Meg interviews New York Times reporter Nick Casey about his experience following the economic-turned-political crisis in Venezuela. Casey covered the country for 10 months before the government barred him from returning in October. Then, we run through the week’s biggest media stories: the latest Fox News controversy, Israel’s ban of Al-Jazeera, and the narrative surrounding North Korea.
On the latest episode of The Kicker, Meg has an interview with journalist and novelist Julia Dahl. They discuss her experience working at the New York Post and how tabloids shaped the early years of Donald Trump. Then, we run through the week’s biggest stories: the narrative surrounding new White House chief of staff John Kelly, and buyouts at the New York Times. Plus, a short conversation with Peter Sterne, a senior reporter at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, about the new US Press Freedom Tracker.
On the latest episode of The Kicker, Meg has an interview with Leah Finnegan, features editor for The Outline. They discuss what journalists get wrong when reporting on drug addiction and how they can do better. Then, we run through the week’s biggest stories: how a health-care vote went down in cinematic style, a White House communications chief who doesn’t understand the basic rules of talking to the press, and progress in how journalists cover the president’s tweets.
On the latest episode of The Kicker, we run through some of the week’s biggest stories: what media mergers mean for both journalists and consumers, how to parse all of those anonymously sourced stories, and why Donald Trump keeps sitting down with reporters from The New York Times. Then, Pete Vernon talks with CJR Editor and Publisher Kyle Pope about the press’s coverage of the Trump White House, and why it’s time for a new approach.
On the latest episode of The Kicker, we run through some of the week’s biggest media stories, including how the White House’s response to Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer demonstrates a press shop in crisis, why net neutrality matters for journalists, and how to make environmental reporting connect with audiences. Then, Pete talks with Jesse Thorn, host of The Turnaround, about the art of the interview and what Thorn has learned from talking with people like Ira Glass, Terry Gross, and Jerry Springer.
(1:11) Communication issues from the White House (4:00) Net neutrality in the news (6:50) Making climate reporting matter (12:27) Interview with Jesse Thorn
On the latest episode of The Kicker, we run through some of the week’s biggest media stories, including Al Jazeera getting caught in an international diplomatic crisis, Fox Sports’s embrace of “pivot to video,” and the legwork that went into capturing Chris Christie’s day at the beach. Then, we move on to CNN’s controversial decision to identify, but not name, the creator of a video that President Donald Trump tweeted out over the holiday weekend. The article in question stirred up lots of chatter over what stories are newsworthy and whether CNN was implicitly threatening a private citizen with exposure. Finally, Dave talks with Dave Mistich, digital managing editor of 100 Days in Appalachia, about covering Trump country without stereotypes or tokenism.
(0:56) News Rundown (9:36) CNN’s controversy (19:45) Interview with Dave Mistich (30:22) #PersonalNews
We critique The Washington Post's new product targeting Millennial women, The Lily, and debate what, if anything, makes a good "women's publication." Then, Dave chats with CJR correspondent Trudy Lieberman about media coverage of the secretive Republican push to overhaul the US healthcare system.
This week, we analyze the push for unionization at digital media properties and break down a new effort by NPR to reach younger audiences. Then, Dave talks to CJR Managing Editor Vanessa Gezari about how a Wall Street Journal correspondent cozied up to an Iranian-born arms dealer, exposing the dark underbelly of national security reporting.
We run through some of the week’s biggest media stories, including layoffs across the industry, New York Times stories in search of a public editor, and how a single erroneous tweet can spark a fake news cycle. Then, we move on to Megyn Kelly’s upcoming interview with Infowars’s Alex Jones. How should mainstream journalists report on trolls? Finally, Dave talks with RealClearPolitics’s James Arkin about what it’s like to cover Congress in the Trump era and how Capitol Hill reacted to this week’s shooting.
(1:15) News rundown (11:11) Alex Jones and Megyn Kelly (22:27)Covering Congress
On the latest episode of The Kicker, Dave and Pete run through some of the week’s biggest media stories, including tech giants’ domination of the digital ad market, Breitbart’s Trump-era slump, and the lack of attention toward Scott Pelley’s departure from CBS Evening News. Then, we move on to Reality Winner and the first leak prosecution of the Trump administration. Finally, we talk with Brendan Fitzgerald, editor of CJR’s United States Project, about the way local newspapers around the country have—or haven’t—covered the Trump-Russia story.
(1:06): News rundown (12:14): Trump's first leak prosecution (22:03): The Trump-Russia story
On the latest episode of The Kicker, we run through some of the week’s biggest media stories, including a look at the future of The Chicago Sun-Times, the troubling trend of press norms being violated in the Trump era, and Twitter ethics for journalists. Then, we move on to the news of the day: The New York Times’s decision to eliminate the public editor position. Finally, CJR’s David Uberti interviews Simon Van Zuylen-Wood, author of an excellent piece in CJR’s spring print issue about why local TV news never changes.
(1:12): News rundown (11:50): New York Times eliminates public editor position (19:08): Interview with Simon Van Zuylen-Wood on local TV news
Dave, Pete, and Christie run through some of the week’s biggest media stories, including a ratings leaderboard shakeup for cable news, a spurious conspiracy that consumed the right-wing media universe, and a new study that says--surprise--journalists drink too much caffeine and alcohol. Then, we move on to the media coverage of the terrorist attack in Manchester, and tackle why we think the industry’s model for covering terror attacks is broken. Finally, Dave interviews Clara Jeffery, editor in chief of Mother Jones. They discuss the magazine’s novel approach to funding its political coverage as well as the role Mother Jones played in breaking the Trump-Russia story.
(1:45): News rundown (8:20): How the media covered the Manchester attack (16:50): Interview with Clara Jeffery of Mother Jones
Pete and Dave run through the top media news of the week, from the scoop war in Washington, to the state of press freedom globally, to Roger Ailes's legacy. We then take you inside the counter-narratives offered by pro-Trump media this week. Finally, Dave interviews Glenn Burkins, editor and publisher of Q City Metro, about the fate of the black press in the digital age.
We introduce our new print issue, which is dedicated to exploring the future of local news. Then, Dave interviews Ben Smith, editor in chief of BuzzFeed News. They talk truth and lies on the social web, BuzzFeed's plans for global expansion, and whether there's any hope for local media online.
Follow The Kicker on Twitter @KickerCJR and email any suggestions for future topics or guests to TheKicker@CJR.org.
On the latest episode of The Kicker, we run through some of the week’s biggest media stories, including counterprogramming to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, conservative perspective on the layoffs at ESPN, and continued subscriber additions by The New York Times. Then, we move on to the fallout from Bret Stephens’s first column in the Times. Finally, CJR’s David Uberti talks with Ashley Codianni, director of social publishing at CNN. They discuss just what a social publisher does, as well as the ways CNN is working to become a leader in the digital sphere.
(1:06) We run through the biggest stories of the week.
(9:39) Bret Stephens's first column for The New York Times cause an uproar. We discuss whether the outrage was warranted.
(23:43) CNN Director of Social Publishing Ashley Codianni joins the pod to discuss her job, as well as the ways CNN is trying to reach out to younger audiences on multiple platforms.
CJR staffers run through some of the week's biggest media stories, including Trump's 100-day milestone, what didn't make it into The New York Times' James Comey profile, and the coverage narratives emanating from France. Then, we discuss whether a new, fictionalized portrayal of El Chapo can speak to larger journalistic truths. And finally, we ponder where a new-look Fox News might sit within a fast-changing conservative media.
Follow us on Twitter @KickerCJR and please email us any suggestions for future topics or guests at TheKicker@cjr.org.
On The Kicker, we run through the week's three biggest stories, including Bill O’Reilly, White House transparency, and the special election in Georgia’s sixth district. Then, staff writer David Uberti is joined by CJR correspondent Corey Hutchins to discuss the recent layoffs at Berkshire Hathaway-owned papers and what it means for local news.
Finally, Dave is joined by Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia, and Nausicaa Renner, CJR’s Tow editor, to discuss the problems facing Facebook in the wake of a man in Cleveland uploading video of himself shooting and killing a 74-year-old grandfather on Sunday.
(0:55) Dave and CJR Delacorte Fellow Pete Vernon break down the week's biggest stories.
(7:38) Corey Hutchins joins the show to discuss the recent cutbacks at newspapers owned by Warren Buffet.
(15:37) Dave, Emily Bell, and Nausicaa Renner unpack the implications of the Cleveland murder uploaded to Facebook. What responsibilities does the platform have?
On The Kicker this week, we discuss White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s job performance to date. Spicer’s gaffe in comparing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to Adolf Hitler was only the latest in a string of controversies emerging from behind the lectern in the Brady Briefing Room.
Then, we have some fun imagining the life of a journalist in 2027. The impetus for the conversation was a recently published Associated Press report on the impact of artificial intelligence on journalism.
Finally, Todd Gitlin, author and Columbia Journalism School professor, talks with Dave about the media’s love affair with war. Gitlin is a fierce critic of the manner in which journalists—both in print and especially on television—report on events like last week’s missile strike in Syria. He and Dave discuss the historical context for this concern, and how the media could better cover military action.
On The Kicker this week, CJR’s Dave Uberti, Nausicaa Renner, and Pete Vernon discuss the role of platforms like Facebook and Google in the journalism landscape. Nausicaa guides us through a new Tow Center report, “The Platform Press: How Silicon Valley reengineered journalism.” What responsibility do platforms have to promote and provide for good journalism? What should publishers do to adapt to the platform-dominated reality?
Then, Dave talks with Tanzina Vega, CNN’s national reporter for race and inequality. Vega speaks about increased national attention on the topics she covers, the state of diversity in newsrooms, and what the media gets wrong when it reports on race and class.
Follow The Kicker on Twitter @KickerCJR and send any ideas for discussion topics or guests to TheKicker@CJR.org.
CJR's David Uberti, Pete Vernon, and Christie Chisholm discuss the podcast boom, from Serial to S-Town. What form does journalism take on the medium? And what, if anything, is lost?
Then, Ernst-Jan Pfauth, publisher of the Dutch news organization De Correspondent, joins to talk about its attempt to break into the competitive American market. Can the outlet's membership model and unique philosophy of journalism provide an antidote to the daily news grind?
Follow The Kicker on Twitter @KickerCJR and email suggestions for future guests or discussion topics to TheKicker@CJR.org.
CJR’s David Uberti, Nausicaa Renner, Pete Vernon, and Carlett Spike discuss The Wall Street Journal's scathing editorial attacking President Trump's credibility. We also cover the divide between newsrooms and editorials, and question whether readers understand the distinction.
Then, we turn to homepages, where algorithms are taking over. Finally, we welcome on Jeff Kelly Lowenstein to discuss his book "The Chilean Chronicles," which explores the unprecedented eruption of memory surrounding the 40th anniversary of the coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power.
This week on a special edition of The Kicker, CJR and the BBC World Service have teamed up to produce an audio documentary. Editor and Publisher Kyle Pope narrates an exploration of two issues vital for journalism in America: How should the media respond to an administration that labels it “the enemy of the people,” and, perhaps more importantly, how can the media build trust with a public that sees it as hopelessly biased?
CJR’s David Uberti, Christie Chisholm, Pete Vernon, and Shelley Hepworth discuss some criticism we received for inviting Breitbart economics editor John Carney to our conference on covering Trump. Did he bring a valuable perspective? Or did we play a role in legitimizing a website that has trafficked in racism, misogyny, and white nationalism?
Then, we turn to Hollywood, where a new movie about the Pentagon Papers—directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks—has just been announced. We talk about the depiction of women journalists on screen, as well as the checkered history of movies about the media industry.
CJR's David Uberti, Nausicaa Renner, and Pete Vernon discuss a wild week in White House-media relations. Then, we turn to MisinfoCon, a weekend gathering of journalists and technologists trying to solve the fake news problem. Freelance writer Lyz Lenz calls in to chat about the Texas Monthly and its legendary writer, Pamela Colloff.
Dave and Pete discuss why it matters that White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer allows friendly outlets to ask questions at press briefings. CJR correspondent Corey Hutchins calls in to discuss fake news at the local level. And freelance journalist Jenni Monet, who was arrested while reporting at Standing Rock, joins to discuss coverage of the Dakota Access Pipeline protests.
Thanks for kicking it with us as we worked through technical difficulties this week. Like Sean Spicer, we're learning on the job.
Why are so many news organizations expanding into Australia? What is the state of health journalism as Obamacare hangs in the balance? Why were so many journalists talking about CNN anchor Jake Tapper's interview with Kellyanne Conway?
We discuss that and more this week on The Kicker, where David Uberti is joined by CJR Editor and Publisher Kyle Pope, health correspondent Trudy Lieberman, and Delacorte Fellows Pete Vernon and Shelley Hepworth.
How has Breitbart used memes to build a huge audience on Facebook? Should journalists' notion of objectivity change in the face of immoral or un-American acts? What aspects of press freedom may change under the Trump Administration?
We discuss that and more this week on The Kicker, where CJR's David Uberti is joined by Nausicaa Renner and Pete Vernon. Special guest Jonathan Peters, a media law professor and correspondent for CJR's United States Project, gives us the scoop on press freedom under Trump.
Is the Trump Administration trying to bait aggressive reporters when it offers up "alternative facts"? What does a recent New York Times report tell us about the way its business model and editorial strategy are changing? How should journalists respond to charges of a liberal media conspiracy?
We discuss that and more this week on The Kicker, where CJR's David Uberti is joined by Nausicaa Renner, Pete Vernon, and Christie Chisholm.
Did BuzzFeed make the right call by publishing unverified memos detailing Russian efforts to compromise Donald Trump? How is The Undefeated, a new publication by ESPN, tackling this moment in race and politics? What did Trump's first press conference as president-elect tell us about how he'll treat the media going forward?
We discuss that and more this week on The Kicker, where CJR's David Uberti is joined by Pete Vernon, Carlett Spike, and Vanessa Gezari.
What does Fox News' primetime lineup say about its direction under the Trump Administration? Why should we care about the fate of the publishing platform Medium? What's the deal with all these misreported stories about Russia?
We discuss that and more this week on The Kicker, where CJR's David Uberti, Nausicaa Renner, and Pete Vernon discuss the week in journalism.
What media trends from 2016 were the most alarming? The most encouraging? We discuss that and more this week on The Kicker, where CJR's David Uberti, Nausicaa Renner, and Pete Vernon break down the good, the bad, and the ugly from a tumultuous year in journalism.
How does the atrophy of local media affect the way we understand sports? Are professional athletes getting more political, or are we just noticing it more? How is ESPN changing its business model?
We discuss that and more this week on The Kicker, where CJR's David Uberti and Pete Vernon are joined by Richard Deitsch, a media writer for Sports Illustrated.
Should a bad tweet be a fireable offense for reporters? What can the history of fake news tell us about the challenge facing journalism today? Who are the biggest media names to switch jobs in the post-election shuffle?
We discuss that and more this week on The Kicker, where David Uberti is joined by Nausicaa Renner and Pete Vernon.
Should mainstream journalists be engaging more with the right-wing press? Was print media too quick to jump on the digital bandwagon? Why do foreign news outlets seem to be getting all the scoops about the Trump transition?
We discuss all that and more on The Kicker, which is guest-hosted this week by CJR Managing Editor Vanessa Gezari. Vanessa is joined by CJR Tow Editor Nausicaa Renner and CJR Delacorte Fellow Shelley Hepworth, along with special guest Michael Rosenwald, a reporter for The Washington Post.
Does Facebook need to clean up its act? Can newsrooms overcome the culture clash between tech and editorial? And what about coverage of those Trump tweets?
We discuss that and more on The Kicker, where David Uberti is joined this week by CJR Associate Editor Nausicaa Renner and special guest Emily Bell, director for The Tow Center for Digital Journalism.
David Uberti is joined by CJR's Nausicaa Renner and Pete Vernon to discuss internet trolls, CJR's massive new oral history of campaign coverage, and what we're thankful for in journalism this Thanksgiving.
CJR's Kyle Pope, David Uberti, and Nausicaa Renner discuss what publications' post-election subscription surge means for journalism, Donald Trump's unwillingness to establish a protective press pool, and Facebook's inability to police fake news.